#clash of cultures
I’ve been thinking about identity politics a lot these days, and perhaps in denial about how much it actually affects me. In a common struggle for representation for example, I am very aware of how necessary it is to highlight particular identities, because each groups has different needs. This is why multiculturalism didn’t exactly work in the early 2000s, because cultures couldn’t just “play nice” with one another, united in a shared struggle for representation.
But that’s not the layer of identity politics I’m referring to, that’s really only the surface. I’m thinking about what is at play when it comes to gatekeeping, safeguarding one’s culture.
Recently, in consulting job postings for academic positions, I’ve been observing an interesting pattern in which many schools call for francophone specialists of Africa or the Caribbean, without explicitly including Asia, as if France didn’t colonize Vietnam for almost a hundred years. At first put off because this precisely what I work on, I started to wonder about the ulterior motives of search committees, my suspicious nature fueled by years and years of being on the lookout for myself in this line of work. Then someone I know tells me others find his work unviable because he is not studying the culture of his own kind, but that of another oppressed people. I found this to be unfair and discriminatory, especially coming from a white professor who is basically saying you need to study your own culture. Here in this example, people are calling out identity politics as if it’s a bad thing. A later, unrelated moment, I think about how defensive I get when I see “Vietnamese” on food networks and magazines, simply because they add peanuts or fish sauce to their dish. I think if they’re going to do it, they should do it right.
And then I pause to wonder: have we taken it too far, this politics of identity? How contradictory it is for me to be upset about job postings who disguise their need to hire Black candidates through the language of “diversity” which they mean to exclude an Asian like me, or to find the professor’s observations discriminatory when I hold on so dearly to what I know of my culture, and feel so protective of it that I don’t want others, especially those from an historically oppressive community to label or title my food in a certain way? Is that hypocritical?
But maybe there isn’t a wholesale version of identity politics that we can just pocket and use to our advantage. Maybe my protection of my culture and my memory of it is different from a White man’s perspective of how he sees identity politics evolving, because it is likely threatening for him. Or maybe they are related - why do I feel possessive and protective, if not an inheritance of colonial trauma? Perhaps gatekeeping isn’t fair if it’s a way for me to justify and claim the Truth of my very flawed, subjective memories of a certain culture, and perhaps we don’t go anywhere by holding on to the past. And yet it’s hard to let go when that is the only thing you can claim as your own in this world.
