Identity politics once aimed to link race, gender, and class into a shared struggle for material change. Today, it often plays out as symbolic performance and competitive victimhood.
What happened to the politics in identity politics? Let me begin with a small social experiment I stumbled into, though it was billed as an art event.
A friend of mine, a visual artist, invited me to the debut of her latest piece. The venue was a familiar Helsinki art space that often hosts activist-leaning exhibitions. The theme this time was “resistance and emancipation” and the walls were hung with works that made their stance clear: slogans, symbolism, visual homages to liberation struggles from Palestine to Central Africa.
Alongside the art, there were “safer space” posters posted everywhere, including, inexplicably, the inside of the toilet doors. The assumption seemed to be that “political danger” could lurk anywhere, even at the urinal!
The crowd, no more than twenty people, consisted mostly of local artists and activists. You could tell from the tote bags and the bios on their social media, which often carry the word “activist” in three languages. Everyone knew everyone, or thought they did. The mood was gentle, respectful, almost reverent. That is, until someone said “third world”.
One of the invited artists (non-white, immigrant), was explaining the layers of meaning in her work. She mentioned being inspired by travels across “the third world,” and gave an example: the many names for camels in Arabic, depending on their color, gait, pregnancy, or the way they drank water. It was a poetic moment, light and thoughtful. Then came the interruption.
“I’m sorry, but I have to stop you,” said one of the event organizers (white, Finnish). “This is a safe space. Some people might feel offended with the term ‘third world.’ Please use ‘Global South’ or ‘developing countries’ instead.”
That did it. The group responded like clockwork: muttering from one corner, visible agreement from another, and a couple of eyerolls that no one was supposed to notice. Another participant stepped in, accusing the interrupter of hypocrisy: “You used the E-word in an Instagram story once,” they said, meaning Eskimo. “I’ve been to Canada, I know the context. You need to reflect on that.”
Someone else began to cry. Another person said the situation had become too violent for them to stay. On their way out, a small group of four said the space was no longer safe for BIPOC attendees. The speaker never got to finish her point about camels.
It became clear that it was not what was said, but who was saying it, that mattered. By the end, the topic of resistance was nowhere in sight. Instead, the group had managed to stage a sort of zero-budget morality play in which the script kept changing. Everyone was both accused and accuser, and the resolution was collective exhaustion.
As I watched the whole thing unfold, two thoughts came to mind. The first was: these people could not even manage a peaceful conversation among friends, yet they had gathered to talk about how to organize resistance.
The second was a flicker of those who came before: Steve Biko beaten to death in custody, Ruth First opening a letter bomb in her university office, Bobby Sands in his cell, Ai Weiwei under surveillance, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha walking calmly to the gallows.
Not one of them stormed out of a room because someone misused a label or because two people got passionate arguing. Needless to say that I did not expect anyone in that room to face the kind of risks these activists had endured. But the gap between the stakes (ongoing famine, burning children, ethnic cleansing) and the emotional sensitivities felt dizzying.
Something has happened to identity politics. The phrase “identity politics” was coined by the Combahee River Collective, a group of radical Black feminists and socialist organizers active in the 1970s. What they meant by it was almost the opposite of what it has come to mean. For them, identity was not a personal brand, an exclusive boundary or zero-sum game, but was a political position formed by overlapping systems of oppression.
As Black women, they had learned that white feminists often ignored racism, while Black liberation spaces sidelined sexism and homophobia. They fought both at once, refusing to rank or isolate these struggles. “We do not separate race from class,” they wrote, “because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”
Identity was the starting point, not the destination. They refused to reduce politics to separate camps. Their vision was unapologetically anti-capitalist and universalist in every sense.
Do you want to know what the founders of identity politics might think of what it has become? Barbara Smith, one of the Combahee River Collective’s original members, has already weighed in:
“People are introduced to the concept in academic settings, and the people who are introducing them to it don’t have any political practice. They don’t have familiarity with how people mobilize and come together in order to make actual material change, not ideas, but material change in the real world; change that affects real people. It’s like they embrace identity, but they leave the politics on the floor.”
What I saw in that art space was just a slice-of-life version of a bigger complaint heard even in the left’s own power circles, from people who have been around leftist politics long enough to remember when the fight was about changing how power and resources were organized, not just how they were described.
For example, In Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht broke from Die Linke (the Left Party) accusing her former comrades of turning into a “lifestyle left” and forgetting the bread-and-butter fights. Across the water, sharing the same frustration, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana (who was suspended from Labour for voting against the Labour government to end the two-child benefit cap in July 2024) launched a new party promising to put “mass redistribution of wealth and power” back at the center. In what follows, I look at how losing sight of material change has helped the right weaponize identity while leaving the left atomized.
Victimhood as Political Capital: Progressive in Form, Conservative in Logic
Identity politics runs on a set of scripts. These days, it is common to hear people begin their opinions with lines like “As a [member of X group]…” or “Coming from a background of…” These are not just introductions. They function as credentials, as shortcuts to authority. The speaker’s identity is supposed to shield their words from challenge. “Lived experience” has become untouchable, placed on a pedestal where disagreement is treated as offense.
But there is nothing “progressive” about the idea that “I’ve suffered, therefore I cannot be questioned.” It historically mirrors authoritarian populism, where claiming victimhood means you are always right. Not to mention it is deeply hypocritical.
It is hypocritical because not all lived experience is treated equally. Who gets heard, whose story is sanctified, and whose is ignored depends on whether the narrative fits our ideological filters. A blissfully apolitical Moomin character can be immediately erased from a Brooklyn library wall because one individual decides it carries racist undertones, and little Gaza children’s drawings can be stripped from a London hospital because some Jewish visitors say they feel “vulnerable, harassed and victimised” being around these childish crayon-bright scenes of home and sky.
In both cases, the feeling of offence (when backed by the right badge of identity) is taken as unchallengeable truth, the complainant’s emotions accepted as fact, yet this courtesy is never universal. If we really believe lived experience is untouchable, then why do we not accept the accounts of police officers who shoot unarmed civilians (most frequently Black men) and claim “I feared for my life”? These officers may not necessarily be lying, but where does our political reasoning and judgment start?
The politics of recognition also demands that lived experience align with Western moral expectations: trauma, powerlessness, and gratitude for rescue. When it does not, it is likely to be suppressed, as in the United Nation’s attempts to silence the Rohingya who disrupted the official script.
Lived experience can also be used for reactionary ends. During the Vietnam War, officials used the lived suffering of a certain group of veterans to justify their actions, while anti-war voices like Ron Kovic (himself a wounded veteran) were vilified. This is why politics must not end with pain. Placing lived experience above argument shuts down debate. It turns every disagreement into a threat and every challenge into a violation of a “safe space”.
Who gets heard, whose story is sanctified, and whose is ignored depends on whether the narrative fits our ideological filters.
In early 2025, the American-Soviet historian Izabella Tabarovsky had her planned talks at Turku’s Åbo Akademi and the University of Helsinki cancelled. In response, she published a self-important and visibly aggrieved article in Tablet Magazine.
Much of it is spent straining, in a roundabout way, to frame the cancellations as a case of antisemitism, relying on a handful of obscure historical references and incidents that barely register in Finnish public memory. Then, sensing the argument’s thinness, she abruptly shifts her identity politics front near the end: this, she declares, was really about institutional patriarchy, that is, powerful male administrators silencing their female subordinates.
It is a clumsy switch, but also a revealing one. Tabarovsky knows perfectly well why and in what political context her talks were cancelled; her own deleted posts make that clear. But like many others across the political spectrum, she understands the rules of the current game. Victimhood has become a form of political capital. In today’s attention economy, it does not matter where you stand (left, right, elite, marginal) or what privileges you enjoy. What matters is whether you can position yourself as the one being wronged, if only for some airtime.
Another problem with identity politics that makes it inherently conservative is its accidental loyalty to essentialism. As American anarchist essayist and activist Lawrence Jarach discusses, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are maintained through essentialist ideologies, that is, by assigning fixed, unchanging characteristics to groups based on attributes like race or gender, which leads to hierarchy and discrimination.
In trying to reverse these hierarchies, identity politics often adopts the same logic. It inverts the categories but keeps them intact, reinforcing the very framework it claims to challenge.
Sociologists like Norbert Elias instead emphasize the fluid, relational, and historical nature of identity, and that the relationship between a group and its members could change. For example, sociologist Samaneh Naseri’s study of LGBT refugees in Germany shows how people rework their sexual and gender identities in relation to cultural expectations, asylum systems, and politics of visibility. Defining politics through essential traits reproduces the very hierarchies it claims to oppose. Every time politics has relied on essentialist identity, it has ended up reinforcing exclusion, not undoing it.
One Identity per Struggle, Please…
Identity politics in its current form (particularly in New Left spaces, meaning contemporary progressive activism) makes solidarity difficult. Rather than bringing people together to fight shared conditions of oppression or push for material change, it tends to atomize them. Groups are treated as separate and competing, rather than interlinked and co-struggling.
Recently, this became clear at my own workplace. A colleague sent out an internal message about organizing aid for Palestine. Shortly after, an Ukrainian colleague responded by questioning why no such emails had been sent about Ukraine, and asking whether people were ignoring the suffering there.
It sounded like a clarification, but it worked like a boundary being drawn. It exposed the zero-sum logic identity politics breeds: when attention is a scarce resource, even the oppressed feel they must compete for it. This logic frames groups as if their experiences are so irreducibly different that they cannot share the same space, let alone a common cause. Each group is nudged toward fighting its own isolated battle.
This fracturing has not only weakened the left but has also been absorbed by the right. Reactionary politics today operates on the same identity logic it claims to oppose. The white working class is now packaged as a victimized group pitted against everyone else, especially immigrants. But instead of addressing the material causes that shape working-class life (precarity, housing, wages) right-wing discourse frames it as an identity category in need of protection.
Worse still, this logic echoes in even more toxic forms like the manosphere and so-called anti-woke school boards. It is all the same script: take “what feels like” social pain, strip it of class content, repackage it as identity-based entitlement and call it politics. Let us see how right-wing politics now stands tall on the very rug it spent decades pulling out from under the white working class.
The hypocrisy behind this shift is blatant. To understand where the white working class became an identity category rather than a class position, we need to start where the script was written: Britain. One of the earliest right-wing attempts to politicize white working-class identity came in Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, where he claimed a white working man warned that “in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. But despite this start, the working class was long handed over to the left like an unwanted inheritance.
Rather than bringing people together to fight shared conditions of oppression or push for material change, it tends to atomize them. Groups are treated as separate and competing, rather than interlinked and co-struggling.
At least since the late 1990s, the white working class in Britain was routinely mocked and demonized under the term Chavs (a slur used to reduce them to vulgar, ignorant, and criminal). Comedy shows (like Little Britain), media pundits, and politicians leaned into it, selling the working poor as “scroungers” undeserving of support. This image was useful (and remains so in rightwing vocabularies world-wide with labels like suckers, dole bludgers, welfare queens and losers) for conservatives looking to justify cuts to public services and welfare.
The great rebranding happened. Chav disappeared from the respectable right’s vocabulary and was replaced with “white working class” as a fragile identity in need of rescue. The same group once ridiculed for being poor and uneducated was suddenly framed as under threat by multiculturalism, immigration, and liberal elites. In 2011, following the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a Black man, and the riots that broke out across England, the conservative British historian David Starkey made a racist statement on national television. He claimed that “a substantial section of the chavs… have become Black…the Whites have become Black” blaming what he described as a “violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture.”
By “turning Black,” Starkey was not referring to economic shifts or political alignment, but to an alleged cultural and identity transformation. For him, it was a double insult: first, for being white and working class (chavs) and second, for supposedly adopting what his racist worldview cast as an inferior Black culture. This is how people like him saw (still secretly do) the working class: as degenerate when poor, and contaminated when not properly white. Today, no right-wing politician uses the term chav. It has been replaced by a sanitized, weaponized identity politics engineered for nationalist ends.
Identity Politics™: Now with Corporate Sponsorship
Identity politics, as practiced in much of the contemporary left, has flung open the gates of something close to hell. Politics has been flattened into language policing and performance, where moral authority is earned through personal suffering and the public display of it. It has been hollowed out into a cult of “I” and a war of individual righteousness where nobody, absolutely nobody, gets to win.
Structural issues tend to become depoliticized, with energy redirected toward surface-level fixes like diversity optics rather than systemic change. Activists or influencers build followings by curating their trauma, identities, and politics into online personas. The left, atomized and weakened, seems better at issuing (ever-changing) moral verdicts and callouts than effective mobilization for material change. Meanwhile, the right has taken detailed notes. Reactionary politics has been rebranded by surfing the same identity currents the left amplified.
The absurd irony speaks for itself. A political camp that spent decades gutting public services and mocking the poor is now posing as the voice of the betrayed working class, thanks in part to the identity-driven scripts it borrowed from the left. Meanwhile, identity politics has become the fluent language of neoliberal policies. Identity has turned into currency, branding, and tokenism.
Structural issues tend to become depoliticized, with energy redirected toward surface-level fixes like diversity optics rather than systemic change.
Some of the most exploitative corporations on the planet like Coca-cola with long records of racial discrimination, pollution, and community harm have proudly become champions of identity politics. While draining and poisoning the water of poor communities in countries like India and Mexico, giant corporations fly in Robin DiAngelo to talk about whiteness. She accepts these gigs and charges up to $20,000 to hold “anti-racism” workshops. She apparently still has not noticed the irony, nor have the people who think White Fragility is a radical, emancipatory text.
Now, if you are reading this with your cynical monocle polished and your finger counting every time I have said the word “material,” you might be ready to accuse me of launching into some tired class-first tract. But NO! This is not a call to class reductionism. This is not an orthodox communist pamphlet, and this article is not here to erase race, gender, or sexuality. These forms of oppression do not neatly collapse into class. They cut across and reshape it. Class itself is not neutral. It is lived differently depending on your race, gender, and cultural identity.
In many contexts, the “working class” is still imagined as white and male, erasing the labor of women, migrants, and racialized workers. In others, entire groups are excluded from even entering formal labor markets. Even in so-called universal welfare states symbolic and institutional hierarchies remain intact. (See, for example, the overpolicing and systemic discrimination faced by Somali communities in Finland.)
The way forward, in this case, is looking back. It starts with re-reading the statement of those who coined the term identity politics and understanding their refusal of campist thinking, which still haunts the left. That means rejecting what historian Victoria Wolcott calls the “false choice” between class and race, or other forms of identity. We can learn a great deal from civil rights unionism in the 1930s, especially its Southern version, which brought together Black and white workers, feminists, socialists, and New Deal reformers in a shared fight.
There was a time when solidarity meant more than a theater for personal therapy and branding. Recovering that tradition is not nostalgia, it is survival for those whose lives are ground down by inequality and for any politics that aims to change the material conditions of life.
Erfan Fatehi is a doctoral researcher in sociology at the University of Helsinki.
Article image: Luke Heibert / Unsplash
