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| Landon Lauder Class of 2017 |
Recent events in
both my public and private life have increased the amount of attention to the
concept of monoliths. Monoliths are single structures, large and uniform. From
rocks to race, we have a tendency to portray our lives in a series of
monoliths. We saw this phenomenon with the election where just about every
identity was put into single categories with their voting behavior
predicted—supposedly. This is also occurring in my research, where I am
examining gentrification and the monolithic portrayal of its effects.
Monoliths, while striking in their natural rock form, are quite ugly when we
adopt it as a philosophy.
Once we establish
identities, we seem to make a habit of portraying them as singular, without any
flexibility. When an individual or a group of individuals do not behave in the
boxes in which we have put them, we cry out. This has become quite evident with
the recent election. Certain groups did not particularly vote in the way “we”
thought they would. Yet, this was not the first instance of such a phenomenon.
We have been placing severe restrictions on identities since identities were
first created.
Intersectionality
is important. Yet, many people stop at the particular identities within
intersectionality and do not delve into the reasons why such identities exist.
It is one thing to state someone’s race, sex, gender identity, class, etc. It
is an entirely different thing to understand why these identities exist and thus why these identities are
important. The question remains, as it has aptly been described by Dr. Adolph
Reed as “Who says?”
When I came across
Dr. Reed’s article “From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much,” I was at first taken aback at his claims of identity politics, but
realized there is a deeper argument. This is not the first publication in which
Dr. Reed has undertaken the daunting and lonely path of criticizing the popular
identity politics plaguing contemporary academia and life. Yet, it is the one
publication that perhaps for me places his critique into a context of race,
class, sexuality, and gender identity that I study.
Using as examples
Caitlyn Jenner (referred to as “Republican Jenner”) and Rachel Dolezal (the
individual who was the president of the Spokane NAACP), Dr. Reed exposes the
hypocrisy of what he terms “identitarians,” or those who insist there are ways
in which a particular identity can be—in other words, as a monolith. Those who
were quick to vilify Dolezal and her identity reinforce what it means to be a particular race, as if there is a
checklist held in ivory towers where identitarians check off boxes until they
meet criteria. In criticizing her racial identity, these very people work to
strengthen ascriptive and arbitrary differences in identities.
However, deeper
than just an understanding of identity is what has actually produced these identities, what Dr. Reed
sees neoliberalism—a topic too large to delve into in this post:
“race politics is not an alternative to
class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of left-wing
neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and
moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable
nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique
of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally
naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups
supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do.”
Returning to the
monolith, the essentialist and ascriptive view many take towards identity
necessarily constructs identity as a monolith, a rock that cannot be broken. A
rock, that once established, cannot be changed. This is extremely problematic
when trying to examine oppressive institutions and structures, namely that of
the inherent divisiveness of capitalism and competition manifesting with other
elements in modern neoliberalism. If we truly want to understand why we are so
divided and behave differently towards those who are naturally equal, we must
recognize what transcends all of these identities.
Landon Lauder, of Russell, Ky., is a senior McConnell Scholar studying political science, psychology, and social change.
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