Only We Can Save Us

Identity politics has proven contentious and prescriptive in the United States over the decades. Depending on who wields it, it can be a pivotal tool for building and destroying interest blocs. It can act as a potential indicator of a person’s interests, opinions, and political leanings, for better or worse. Theorists can describe it as distracting but essential for developing special interest groups within parties and community organizing.

Amartya Sen wrote about the necessity of understanding plurality when considering identity politics. Without it, he says, it can pigeonhole our perceptions of ourselves and others, limiting our behaviors and impact. The reality of the United States is that it holds little space for this intersectional way of thinking. Sen wrote urgently about seeing the world through a plural lens and warned about the dangers to democracy and freedom should we fail to do so as a society. Almost prophetically, he tells us how easily manipulatable people become when they only allow themselves to vote according to a single relatable identity. He urges us to realize how important every aspect of our positionality and lived experience is to determine the best course of action socially and politically.

Our culture must accept this lesson, lest we continue to be victims of homogeneous thought and prejudice.

I turned eighteen in October of 2008. I cast my first vote for Barack Obama. I canvassed for him, phone banked, and talked to friends and family–I worked hard to get that man elected. It was the summer before and during my time at Western Michigan University, a trying time for me and many other teenagers coming of age. I was muddling through a general education program and inconsistently attending various writing and theater classes, hoping for inspiration or direction to manifest in my life. Gridlocked between doubt and existential dread, I attempted to navigate a new city and new friends. The social aspect proved no issue for me, but the city itself? I struggled to feel like it was home.

Kalamazoo is an interesting place to be, especially without a vehicle. The urban sprawl lends itself to isolation when you’re an anxious, small-town kid who has never used public transportation. My experience with buses had consisted of calling the Dial-A-Ride in Big Rapids and paying a dollar to be taken to the local pool. It was a bus-sized taxi–very simple to utilize. Unless my friends took me out to play that first year, I stayed inside, making YouTube videos in my dorm room. By the time I dropped out, I was on academic probation.

I lived in the valleys at Western, a particularly lively section of dormitories for anyone unfamiliar with the area. It commonly houses general education students and serves as a catch-all for those who didn’t submit their housing preferences on time. I checked both of those boxes.

The fire on campus for Barack Obama to become president was palpable, but the energy in the valleys was unmatched. The cheers, laughter, music, and fireworks that filled the night air as the media announced Obama as the projected winner became a permanent log in my mental Rolodex. That card is one of the many joyful reminders of the kinship found in community. Although my opinions have evolved since then, I still consider the time fondly.

I have always been interested in politics. Although I could not vote until I was eighteen, I had been obnoxiously telling people how to vote since I was ten. Thank goodness I’ve dropped that habit, but I once, for example, firmly believed that George W. Bush would make a good president “because his dad was president.”

This is sound reasoning from a ten-year-old. My parents, proud Democrats, were mortified but never sought to change my mind. Bless them for that.

The attack on September 11th, 2001, was a pivotal moment for many of my generation in the United States. Sixth grade had been a relatively forgettable year until that moment, but that afternoon changed everything for me. My interests, obsessions, dreams, and sensibilities altered, and I became transfixed on knowing answers.

I couldn’t understand how or why something like that could happen. I wanted to believe that it was something as simple as evil in the world acting evil. The friends and adults in my life seemed to think so or tell me they thought so, but it didn’t sit right with me.

My neurodiversity is apparent when I honestly reflect on myself, even through the masking. In my childhood, though, it was striking. One benign way this presented itself was in my “special interests.” I would hyper-fixate on a single interest until I absorbed as much knowledge about it as possible: sharks, yo-yos, swimming pool maintenance, human bones, and Pokémon. Mostly sharks, though—until 9/11.

After that harrowing day, the fixation became entirely committed to the attacks. I learned about the Persian Gulf War, the oil reserves in Kuwait, and the “complicated relationship” between the U.S. and Saddam Hussein. I didn’t understand it all then–I still don’t, not wholly, but it sowed the first seed of doubt I reap today. A doubt that the American experiment is little more than the colonial project in a new democratizing disguise.

Barack Obama helped sow the following kernel of suspicion. Although I didn’t initially align expectations with reality, I believed the message of hope he campaigned heavily on.

Why? Naivete? Cultivated by the sense that identity impacts a person’s politics more than money. Or a lack of understanding of the mechanisms by which we are the “bad guy” and how the system supports that role, no matter who is in office? The unwitting and selfish attempt to virtue signal? Whatever it was, I ate up the clever quips, spontaneous basketball games, and effortless cool that Obama brought to the table and spent several months “rocking the vote” for the “change we need.”

Five hundred and sixty-three drone strikes later, and my sensibilities changed again. I turned my attention toward the local. The thought that change begins incrementally at this micro level was floated to me by my high school history teacher after I had dropped out of Western and moved back to Big Rapids. He strongly felt I could do good work for the man running for Michigan Senate in 2012. The candidate was attempting to unseat Carl Levin, a career politician who famously received a protest pie to the face at a campaign stop in my hometown. I met the challenger and decided to research policy for this person I felt was worthy of the role. He hired me to advise on LGBTQIA+ policy, but due to "interest," he switched me to education, infrastructure, and judicial reform.

I lost faith as I learned more about this process of “advising” and “policy research.” It seemed to be a matter of finding the most popular opinion among the most mobilized voters and pandering the platform to them. I brought a handful of agenda items to his table, including significant reforms that just weren’t popular enough, no matter how good they were for the most marginalized among us. I quit. He lost. So it goes.

I didn’t give up entirely. The mayor of Ypsilanti just before and during the height of Covid-19, an openly queer woman running on platforms focused on housing affordability and public safety, gave me someone to feel inspired by again. She resigned shortly into her term after a week or more of protests outside her office and home regarding her racist comments live-streamed during a City Council meeting. I eagerly attended the protests as eagerly as I attended the polls to vote for her.

Hot on the heels of another mayoral scandal involving bribes for a new housing development, this did not bode well for my feelings on politics, no matter the level of operation. I swallowed the mighty pill that representation in politics means jack, and we need to live the way we want the world to be. We, the people, need to be our representation. We must provide for each other, advocate for each other, and protect each other.

I learned that if I wanted a powerful, kind, and compassionate queer who holds my values to impact change, I needed to find other people like me and work to create the influence necessary for substantive cultural evolution. I am the powerful, kind, and compassionate queer that seeks to do good and bring good, and I am not alone. None of us are.

May the coming years bring us closer together and help us understand the multitudes within us and the roles they intersect in our lives.