Al Jazeera Podcasts.

Today, identity politics reimagined.

You don't ask people to only fight for some of their rights.

You give people a vehicle for fighting for all of them.

How the idea went astray and why it's an idea worth reclaiming.

I'm Kevin Horton, and this is The Take.

Our guest today says most people are getting identity politics wrong.

For him, elites have destroyed the idea.

But he says restoring identity politics could be an important step in charting a new political future.

Nowadays, when people talk about identity politics, they mean one of two things.

Either one, they mean that people should organize around their particular social position,

what kind of person they are, and use that to find

political affinities and allies. Or they mean that someone should refer to the issues that might

face a particular demographic or a particular identity to build power. I'm Olifemi Taiwo. I teach

philosophy at Georgetown University, and I'm in Washington, D.C. So Olofemi, as we sit here at the

very end of the Joe Biden presidency and the return of Donald Trump, you know, we're reading a lot

of election post-mortems, right? One common criticism is that Kamala Harris lost because the Democrats weren't focused enough on

bread and butter issues.

Instead, they were too, you know, woke or that they're too focused on so-called identity

politics.

We were not able to talk about crime because the woke police would not allow that in one of the great accomplishments

of the Biden-Harris administration.

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