In this way, Identity Politics as it’s understood today is utterly individualist, as the writer Asad Haider points out in his book Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. This is a departure from “its initial form as a theorization of a revolutionary political practice” — by which Haider is referring to the original concept of identity politics coined by the Combahee River Collective (C.R.C.) in a 1977 statement. The C.R.C., composed of Black feminist lesbian socialists, was born of disillusionment with other liberation movements that they found to be neither sufficiently anti-racist (white feminism) nor anti-sexist and anti-homophobic (the predominantly male Black nationalist and white leftist movements) for their intersection of identities. The group’s conceptualization of identity politics was, more or less, the belief that “Black women — and all oppressed people — had the right to form their own political agendas,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, speaking with C.R.C. cofounder Barbara Smith, writes in the New Yorker.

This was a radical notion at the time, especially in its focus on Black women’s struggles at the bottom of the social hierarchy, ground down by interlocked systems of oppression. But asserting a marginalized person’s crucial right to articulate their own political agenda did not mean siloing disparate groups by identity or ruling that “only those who suffered a particular oppression could fight against it or even comment on it,” per Taylor. The C.R.C. was, above all, a solidarity coalition that aimed to bring together those who suffered under capitalism, imperialism, and the patriarchy: an alliance of race, class, gender, and sexuality. What made the C.R.C.’s conception so revolutionary half a century ago was its focus on those at the bottom of the pecking order — poor, Black women with little socioeconomic mobility — rather than those who sat atop the pyramid of representation. Identity politics as it is commonly understood today — individualist, tied to shallow ideas of representation and authenticity — is far from the radical imagination of the past.

That is partly what is so aggravating and even noxious about how contemporary identity politics is wielded: in practice, the concept has been overtaken by a fetishization of optics at the expense of the tangible interests of the most marginalized. Táíwò calls this “elite capture”: “the control over political agendas and resources by a group’s most advantaged people.” How much oxygen is taken up by calls for inclusion in big-budget movies, high-society events, and (forgive me) federal spy agencies? How much of this is mere distraction from the prospect of breaking free from those elite ideals, or efforts to materially improve the lives of people — many, many of them “of color” — who have inadequate healthcare, are exploited by their employers, are deported in precarious conditions, or otherwise suffer under the apparatuses that are fundamentally contingent upon continued division and hierarchization?