Members of Steel Pulse, The Clash, and the Sex Pistols demonstrating outside National Front Leader Martin Webster's house in 1977. Twitter. Fair use.
Mistaken Identity: race and class in an age of Trump (Verso, 2018) is a remarkably well argued, theoretically sophisticated critique of identity politics. And by critique I don’t mean abstract negation or dismissal but rather a form of determinate negation which is at once a cancelling and a preserving of aspects of the object at hand.
Haider takes us from a key statement of identity politics in the militant Black lesbian formation, the Combahee River Collective, in which identity politics is internally articulated to a "revolutionary socialist politics", through the appropriation of its language by Hillary Clinton against the so-called ‘Bernie Bros’ during the Democratic presidential nomination race, through to discussions of the use and abuse of identity. The latter are understood as “the neutralization of movements against racial oppression” (p.12), in which identity becomes the basis for bourgeois elites to claim inclusion within the existing order precisely by exercising social control over the members of their racialized group.
