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242 Epilogue • Poverty, Coalition, and Identity Politics The Gary and El Paso conventions became potent symbols of what later would be called the era’s “identity politics.” First coined by black feminists in the Combahee River Collective in 1977, the term most often referred to the racial and cultural politics of African Americans. “Focusing on our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics,” they declared in the Combahee River Collective Statement. “We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics comes directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.”¹ Yet such a statement could have been articulated by any number of the era’s movements, from gay men to white working-class ethnics. And the term did come to define any politics rooted in the societal cleavages of ethnicity, religion, class, gender, region, age, and sexual orientation. Practitioners of such politics identified first and foremost with their subgroup and used it as a base to forward their specific policy agendas. This approach certainly embodied the beliefs that many African American and Mexican American activists had held for years, and that culminated in the political conventions of 1972. They declared that they can assist others only by empowering and seeking justice in their own communities first. Not surprisingly, many social and political commentators—especially whites—found this perceived fragmentation in the body politic threatening . Critics left, right, and center demonized identity politics, characterizing it as destructive to both liberal democracy and the Marxist dream of class unity. Such criticism came to a head in the 1990s but pointed to the “rights revolution” of two decades before to explain the phenomenon. “The ethnic upsurge . . . began as a gesture of protest against the Anglocentric culture,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a liberal consensus historian and former aide to President Kennedy, in 1991. But epitomized by the 1974 passage of the Ethnic Heritage Studies Program Act, Schlesinger argued, the upsurge “became a cult, and today it threatens to become a •243 Epilogue counterrevolution against the original theory of America as ‘one people,’ a common culture, a single nation.”² Schlesinger’s protest sounded nearly identical to those of more traditional conservatives. “What is happening in this country,” exclaimed William Simon, conservative foundation president and former Treasury Secretary under two Republican presidents, “is a fundamental assault on America’s culture and its historic identity.”³ Some on the left, such as scholar and former SDS activist Todd Gitlin, offered a more nuanced yet still damning critique. “An imbalance has developed between the politics of group assertion and the politics of commonality,” wrote Gitlin, drawing on his multiracial organizing experiences with Chicago’s JOIN in the mid-1960s. “It is much too easy to lose sight of the . . . risk of narrowness, and of the gains that minorities have won when broad-based movements—in particular labor—have been strongest.”4 Many other commentators also lamented the decline of classbased politics in the 1970s.5 Although on the surface the era’s identity politics may have seemed antithetical to multiracial antipoverty coalitions, the examples from Chicago , Denver, and the Southwest demonstrate a more complex, inextricably linked reality. And, therefore, the negative assessment of identity politics proves problematic in a number of ways. First, it suggests that whites had not employed their own version of identity politics throughout the American experience, in which they sought autonomous political, social, and economic influence over their communities—and eventually the nation—starting in seventeenth-century British North America. The “public and psychological wage” of being white, to quote W. E. B. Du Bois, remained one of the most valuable commodities one could have in the United States. Whites “were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white,” Du Bois wrote in his seminal work on Reconstruction. “They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situations, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them.”6 In other words, whites—even those on the bottom of the economic order—enjoyed a system in which they had all of the legal, social, and economic advantages relative to blacks and pursued an aggressive and violent politics to...

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