Screw identity politics. I want lived-experience politics

Social justice culture often confuses these two concepts, lived experience and identity, as though they are the same thing — and for good reason: Before industrial capitalism fully colonized everywhere, one's lived experience was one's identity, and vice versa. There was no sense of choice in the matter: You were what you came from, and you came from what you were.

This is no longer the case. Starting in the second half of the 20th Century, the concept of identity has acquired a more and more fluid character. No longer is one’s identity a fixed, unchangeable, just-so attribute; nowadays, individuals choose their identities more than ever.

This fluidity in identity is an outgrowth of late capitalism’s compulsion to get people to commodify, package, and sell themselves in order to live with any peace of mind. However, I think the idea that we have some choice in our identities is overall a good thing: It means we are normalizing the idea that people might critically think about whom they want to be, rather than just passively drifting through life according to what was drilled into them.

There are still limits to identity choice. Changing one's race is widely frowned upon, and most of our societies still are not particularly comfortable with gender fluidity, to give a couple of examples. These socially-defined limitations are part of what primes us to continue equating identity with the set-in-stoneness of lived experience — a confusion that is hobbling our ability to address social inequalities skillfully.

The deeper meaning of "lived experience"

Lived experience encompasses so much more than just one's identity. I take a shower every evening, for example; this is my lived experience, but it's not part of my identity. I don't go around identifying myself as an evening-showerer, either to myself or to others.

Every individual lives millions of such events that are relatively unremarkable on a conscious level. But just because one's consciousness isn't primed to identify with these events in doesn't mean that they somehow count less as lived experience.

One example of this that is seared into my mind comes from a 2019 interview with Eve Ensler on the Reckonings podcast (transcript here), in which Ensler speaks of a lived experience with family violence that she had previously had no conscious sense of identity about:

The first time I ever talked about it, I was drunk with my two roommates and everyone was laughing and talking about things and, and I was talking, I was just, you know, when you grow up in, in a violent situation, you have no context to understand that that’s weird or abnormal. So you’d just think everybody’s family does that. So I had these two fabulous roommates and I was making a joke and I went, "and then my father said to my mother, 'Chris, get the kitchen knife'." And everyone paused and said, "what?" And I said, "yeah, he told my mother to get the kitchen knife so he could stab me." And they were like, "that is not normal."

Ensler is quite vocal now about how her identity as a survivor of multiple ordeals has shaped her life and work. But even before that identity developed, this lived experience growing up with family violence was still every bit as important. Furthermore, Ensler’s experience would be every bit as important now even if she still did not claim a specific identity because of it.

It is nobody’s business to dictate to an individual what they must make of their lived experience and how they must identify or not with it. When we privilege narrow, identity-based models of lived experience over other kinds of lived experience, we are cherry-picking the parts of people’s humanity that we’re willing to accept. That attitude will only reproduce the traumas we are fighting so hard to heal from.

Identity politics are not innately progressive

Progressive movements have historically used identity as a valuable strategy. However, reactionary interests are arguably even more dependent on identity politics, since they work against the interests of the vast majority. How else does a ruling elite sell a narrative pitting one race or ethnicity against another, for example, than by endowing that race or ethnicity with attractive identitarian characteristics?

Think also about the identitarian background of “traditional values” embedded in patriarchal and Christian concepts of normative gender and sexuality. Through these long-held norms and traditions, men, heterosexuals, and cisgender people get recruited into trampling the rights and self-determination of women, LGBQ+ and trans people.

None of the bigotry that plagues our societies gets fertile ground to fester unless it is surreptitiously delivered through the attractive Trojan horse of reactionary identity politics. There is no other reason so many people would dependably and continuously collaborate in maligning others without the background of a collective “identity” to “defend” that unites them in the first place.

Where we go from here

I’m not advocating giving up all identity. I’m merely asking us to see the dangers of a politics that leans too heavily on identity when what we’re really trying to discern is lived experience. And just so we’re clear: Lived experience based on identity is still lived experience. Switching the locus of our political focus doesn’t change that.

But while we hold both of these related but distinct concepts, let’s remember something key: Some of the greatest examples of solidarity have hit their stride when people of different, often opposed identities are finally able to see the commonalities of their lived experiences and come together on that basis. We need more of these “they’re just like me” moments! Our very ability to work together to save this planet is going to depend on our ability to level up our politics in this way.