Token equality.

• Author: Reed, Adolph, Jr.
• Position: Class politics - Class Notes - Column

For Bill Clinton, egalitarianism is a token issue. From Janet Reno, Henry Cisneros, and Ron Brown in the first Cabinet, through Madeleine Albright, Rodney Slater, and Alexis Herman in the second (with Federico Pena a telling holdover), Clinton has played photo-op politics. He's maintained his egalitarian bona fides with the identity-politics crowd by constructing a Cabinet to "look like America."

But what difference does it make what it looks like? All his appointees are centrist insiders, committed to his neo-imperialist foreign policy and his "bipartisan," pro-corporate retreat from a program of democratic redistribution.

Still, feminists actively lobbied for Albright's nomination as Secretary of State, and civil-rights groups threw their weight behind Herman as Labor Secretary, despite the fact that she is a longtime Democratic Party and White House functionary and hardly likely to be a forceful or independent advocate of labor's interests.

Clinton points up the limit of identity politics. The term refers most generally to a political approach that gives priority to advancing the perspectives and interests of specific groups defined in ethnic, racial, or cultural terms--that is, as explicit alternatives to class. And it implies a belief that asserting and demanding recognition of the distinctiveness and independent cultural legitimacy of one's group is a crucial political objective in its own right.

Identity politics is sometimes a term of scorn, suggesting a parochial, maybe even frivolous politics that either distracts from some more substantive focus or undermines the idea of common purpose. This perspective has adherents on both left and right.

Todd Gitlin is prominent among those on the left who complain that the turn to identity politics undermines possibilities for building broadly based progressive coalitions and diverts attention from fundamental class concerns in favor of demands for symbolic statements of group worth. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who apparently still thinks of himself as a centrist liberal, and a host of rightwing pundits kvetch about the threat that identity politics poses to our "common culture"; they sound the tocsin against it as a harbinger of the new barbarism.

Others defend identity politics as an expression of the concerns of populations whose interests are otherwise submerged or ignored. From this perspective, the focus on identity is a necessary response to a long-standing tendency on the left to subordinate struggles against sexism and racism to a narrow, idealized...