Samantha Bee Doesn’t Understand the Left’s Objection to Identity Politics

I ran across a Samantha Bee clip in which Bee attacks Bernie Sanders and others members of the left who believe the Democratic Party needs to get away from “identity politics”:

In the clip, Bee explains left-wing opposition to identity politics by having a right-wing Fox news presenter misexplain the term. She then asserts that identity politics is synonymous with civil rights, claims that “white men” are an identity, and accuses the left of abandoning its principles. This is a reductive straw man argument. It collapses important distinctions in the way the left and the right criticize identity politics.

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The False Dichotomy Between Economics and Racism

In the wake of the Trump victory, some pundits have written pieces arguing that Trump’s win was not down to economic distress, but instead due to hostility to immigration, diversity, and social change. In some cases these pundits explicitly call the election result a “whitelash” and accuse Trump supporters of racism and xenophobia. Unfortunately the dichotomy they are drawing between economic explanations and racial explanations is deeply misleading, and stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the ways class and race intersect, both in America and throughout the western world.

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