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Hello and welcome to Street White America Jesus. I am your host Dan Miller, associate professor of religion and social thought at landmark college.

And we are hosted in partnership with the cap center at UCSB, that is University of California at Santa Barbara.

And I want to welcome people who are listening to this next session of You're Not Welcome here.

Special series that looks at issues of identity and politics, culture, what identity is, how it works, criticisms, so-called identity politics, and so on.

In our last session we took a look and said, okay, people decry identity politics and that this cuts across the political spectrum.

That politicians as different as Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, what unites them all is they are critical of something that we could call identity politics or the role of identity in politics.

And I said what also unites them is that they appeal to identity in politics even as they are critical of it.

In today's session I want to carry that just a little bit further. There's an old saying and I will clean it up a little bit or for the purposes of the podcast here that says opinions are like elbows and a-holes, everybody has one, everybody has an identity.

And in fact one of the things we'll be doing is we go along in this series is just sort of adding some complexity and detail to the things that we talk about as we move along.

And one of the issues to which we'll return is this notion that we all have multiple identities, but for now let's just stay with this.

Everybody has an identity and that includes Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Why does that matter? It matters because it means that this notion that you could somehow have any kind of politics.

In fact I would say any kind of social order apart from identity is nonsensical. Identity is fundamental to the construction of our social world.

And so what I want to look at in this session is start taking a look at okay what exactly do we mean by identity?

We use this term all the time we say we identify as this or that or that person identifies as so and so or maybe we can identify something or we decry about identity politics or the role of identity in politics.

What exactly is identity and what does it do right these are really fundamental questions before we can get into substantive arguments or discussions about what identity politics might or might not be.

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