one thing that happened to academic identity politics is that it just kept fragmenting, in reflection to some extent of the movements it was associated with. so you were a friedan-type feminist, but then black feminism arose to some extent as a critique of that. like are you worried about the problems of the bourgeois housewife when you're working as a maid for that very woman? ok so then also you are alienated from the radical civil rights movement, because malcolm x or stokely carmichael are raving sexists. you need your own movement. well, say you are a black lesbian woman. then you're in tension with hetero black feminists and also the gay rights movement, dominated by men. but then say your mom's white and your dad's black, or your mom's brazilian and your dad's japanese? it's an infinitely divisible space.

then, when identity politics segued into social constructionism or postmodernism, each of the categories was analyzed as a social production, not nothing, but contingent, malleable, something that could even...disappear, like judith butler on gender. that happened with race and gender and sexual orientation: continua not dichotomies. people started speaking for the border-crosser or the creole; trying to organize various groups across lines because they all lived near lines.

i feel like this kind of discourse started dying by the mid-nineties, and has had difficulty in recent years really getting any traction or any resistance. there is a younger generation of scholars with somewhat different categories. my own contribution was act like you know, but it was hard to know that it was already obsolete in say 1995 when the book was written. or else on the other hand, identity politics was merely ramified and realized more fully.

identity politics really is necessary, but it is also self-consuming. it tries to reproduce that amazing feeling that you get when you hear someone speak your experience, as in the consciousness-raising of second-wave feminism. the best analogy i can draw in my own experience is listening to alchies and addicts at 12-step meetings, where you go: you are me. it is mobilizing, absolutely essential to stake any sort of claim against the dominant class or motivate resistance. but this experience can be over-rated, and an ecstasy of identification can be delusory: there are more differences and division than one initially recognizes. also, though, it's real: you do inherit chunks of your white or black or regional membership-class.

i do think it really fetches you up in individualism, where each person is an incomparable, incongruous congeries. but it remains imposrtant as a way for people to describe at least some of the ingredients in their personal soup. it made contributions to understanding the content of those elements, while people also keep re-asserting the dichotomies; we're still not at the point where we don't try to figure out whether you're black or white, straight or gay, etc., and adjust our responses accordingly.

but that's obama's approach to identity politics: he's interested in it but not invested in it. he tried to "explore his black identity," but almost as a matter of choice or a game. sotomayor, on the other hand is a wise latina woman. as i say, the division is generational, and arises right at the gap between them, as well as from the details of their biographies.