Before I came to America, I was a full person — not a brown person, not a woman of color, not an “international student.” I was just one person, perhaps pushed into expectations of stricter gender performance and heteronormativity a lot more, and definitely a beneficiary of class privilege, but I was not “the other” as opposed to “the norm” that is based on a hierarchy of racial categorization. This categorization of individuals based on their race, sexual identity and gender performance is something that is imposed upon people by the hegemonic white capitalist America, but more and more, it has also become self-imposed, which is what we need to be extremely cautious with.
Identity politics is crucial to highlight the deeply oppressive factors for which a given power structure would need to be dismantled. However, when we, as citizens rather than active politicians, begin to self-categorize ourselves and our peers based on a perceived identity, we are employing essentialism as the basis for forming that identity group.
An example of how essentialism can be problematic is to understand it through the lens of essentialist gender ideologies, like assuming that the category of “women” is composed exclusively of people whose sex assigned at birth is female, and that there is a “global sisterhood” based on one unifying identity of a woman. Such a trans-exclusionary, silencing, colonialist and oppressive identity-based group formation is the result of essentialism; that your identity is something that you innately have, how you look is who you are and how you should be, not allowing you the space within your own community of similar looking people to express your actual self.
Essentialism as the core of identity formation perpetuates the same kind of policing, scrutiny and ostracization within the in-group that the in-group had the intent of dismantling. Essentialism assumes homogeneity among its members; that anyone who disagrees or has a perspective that is different from the most accepted one is no longer worthy of being in that identity group. To ostracize someone from your identity based in-group for having a different perspective or exhibiting behavior that you’ve been also socialized to perceive as deviant results in their complete isolation: they still are structurally disadvantaged because of their identity, and also now pushed out of the identity group for expressed their individuality in a way that is not deemed appropriate by the group’s majority.
What I’m getting at is that there is no one way to belong to a minority group. There isn’t a “right way” to act as a woman of color, to act as a good Indian person, to act as a brown or black person worthy of respect in America and so forth. Women of color as an identity exists in America as an “other” to the norm of the white woman, who benefit from the system more so than the rest. When people say women of color, they often forget that most of us (including myself) lack the tools to deal with a united group of people who are from a multitude of different countries. People of color can be racist, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic and misogynist towards other people of color. People of color are people too, and we can’t keep putting each other on a pedestal, only to violently shove each other off of it at the first slip-up someone has.
Without tolerance and dialogue, by choosing to ostracize someone for being a “different type” of person/woman of color, we become more divided than ever. We don’t listen and we don’t let women of color express their individuality. We expect them to perform morality the way we have been socialized to think women should. We don’t dismantle anything but just recreate another stifling societal structure. Without the ability to listen to each other, without learning to respect each other regardless of personal choices, without the inability to refrain from scrutinizing and judging women of color despite saying that you don’t, we become hypocrites who are too complacent to practice self-reflection.
Identity politics is important, but don’t let it allow you to forget that learning is a constant process. Saying, “I respect them as a person of color but do not approve of the choices they make in their personal life,” and consequently treating them like an utter disgrace is quite contradictory, and very much defeats the purpose of the identity group. Lip service does not automatically translate into behavior.
Maansi Kumar, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at MKumar17@wooster.edu.