The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, and welcome to our national conversation about conversations about race.

The weekly podcast where we discuss race, culture, the post-post-racial era, and identity in spite of the fact that some people would rather read, didn't.

You could say all that or just call this show about race.

I'm Anna Holmes, and joining me from the Panoply Studios in New York are MTV News, Senior National Correspondent, Jamil Smith.

Welcome back, Jamil.

Hey!

Also, some of my best friends are black author, Tanner Colby. Hey, Tanner. Hello, Anna. And joining us from D.C., Adam Serwer,

senior editor at the Atlantic. Hey, Adam. Hey. Okay, so today, or rather over the past week or so,

there've been a bunch of articles, mostly think pieces, op-ed, et cetera, arguing for and against the abandonment of identity politics, which is to say appealing specifically to women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, anybody who is not white or straight.

I want to clarify that identity politics is not the same as political correctness. I think Michelle Goldberg in Slate recently put it quite well. She said

identity politics and political correctness aren't the same thing but they are interrelated.

One situates political claims in a person's racial and

sexual status. The other tries to force a surface consensus on racial and sexual equality through

taboos and speech codes. So we wanted to dig into this a lot, and Tanner is taking point on it,

so Tanner, take it away. Okay, so I found this debate fascinating and the eighth, ninth, tenth, twelfth iteration of the debate that just keep going back and forth.

One side saying that clearly, or diagnosing this election as a failure of identity politics, saying clearly this coalition or the emphasis of race and gender and sexual orientation

and all these identity groups failed because it alienated these white working class voter and we need

a new strategy and we need to double down on core economic messaging a la Bernie Sanders,

a la Bill Clinton in the 90s. And then you have the opposing side of the debate from people of

color, from people of color,

from women saying, no, because what that basically means is that we once again subsume our

...