Today on the breakdown, I want to wade into a difficult conversation that

me and most of my friends work very hard to avoid.

I want to talk about some of the very real limitations of what we call identity politics.

That is the support, backing and endorsement of someone because of some factor of their identity.

Most often it's their racial identity but people can be identified in many different ways.

They're religion, their nationality.

But I want to talk about it particularly as it relates to politics in New York City.

And even if you're not from New York, I'm going to use New York as an example to kind of unpack some of the very real challenges with identity politics and tell you why I kind of come down in the middle on the issue.

Mr. Sean Kane and you are listening to The Breakdown.

I don't know if you're familiar with the phrase identity politics. It is it's normally used to critique building a staff or an administration or supporting a political candidate because of their race.

I don't know anybody who actually does identity politics who calls it identity politics.

What I mean by that is I don't know anybody who works really hard to elect for instance African American candidates or those particular African American candidates themselves.

I've never heard that group of people call this thing that we're about to talk about identity politics.

It's normally the phrase that's used from the outside looking in to describe placing the identity, the category that that person belongs to a woman for instance.

The category that that person belongs to using that as your primary reason of supporting them either you voice this thing out loud or it's just inferred that that's why you're supporting them.

And before I'd ever heard of the phrase identity politics many, many years ago it's 2022 God I'm getting old but all the way back in the early 2000s which is now literally decades ago all the way back in the early 2000s.

I would say I was very supportive. I don't think the phrase identity politics was being used very regularly back then but I was very supportive of the idea of getting black people in power in huge part because they were black.

And it was almost political positions second race first and you shouldn't be shocked about this but this really came out of hundreds of years of American politics completely freezing out African Americans.

And African Americans just fighting to have a seat at the table any African American to to be a governor a senator a Congress person a mayor and and appointed to a presidential administration for hundreds of years in this country.

African Americans were frozen out of these positions women were frozen out of these positions Asian Americans people who identify as LGBTQ different identity categories of people were frozen out of most positions for a long time if you weren't a white man for generations if you were not a white man you were not really available if you were not.

And openly heterosexual white man.

And then you were identifying even as a Christian a heterosexual white male landowner like if you didn't fit this narrow sliver of identity you were not going to have a seat at any table in politics.

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