When browsing through an opposition research document on Bernie Sanders, I came across a Twitter thread by M. Mendoza Ferrer meant to demonstrate a failure of his to sufficiently support women. She references an interview from ’86 that includes a question about Sanders not hiring enough women. He clarifies he’s a part of the women’s movement, makes an imperfect appeal to meritocracy, and then lays out an interesting argument. He suggests that women are not only being discriminated against because they’re women, but more so because they are members of a disposable class that includes people of all races and genders. Ferrer sees this as dismissive to the struggles of women, but I disagree. I think many of the struggles of individual women, just like the struggles of individual black people and the struggles of individual LGBTQ people, are more often directly derivative of our economic system than they are derivative of being a woman or a minority.

This is extremely difficult to write, because I do not want to downplay the inequalities and horrors faced by minorities in this country today. It is a fact that black people are disproportionately murdered by cops. It is a fact that women are underrepresented in most areas of corporate and political America. It is a fact that LGBTQ people are shamefully overrepresented among homeless youth. The point I hope to make is that the fight to correct these injustices will be won by a holistic approach that brings together all of the working class, rather than a siloed one that encourages each group to worry primarily for themselves.

Identity is something that otherwise despotic corporations embrace to appear more progressive. When the political tides started to shift in the direction of equal marriage, every war hawk and corporation came out in support of the LGBTQ community. In those same 3 or so years, corporations were able to totally compromise pride parades and center themselves. Anything that was politically subversive about pride has been totally undermined by overwhelming corporate inclusion. A group called Reclaim Pride has pointed out “NYC’s pride parade has become a meaningless corporate circus.” It is not hard to imagine what leads a corporation like Walmart to loudly exclaim support for the LGBTQ community while simultaneously denying thousands of LGBTQ people a living wage; one action is a PR stunt, while the other action would materially affect their profit margins.

How many commercials have come out in 2019 that exploit entry-level woke politics to sell a product? Is Gillette truly concerned about toxic masculinity? Is Burger King worried about the pink tax? The optics of Nike picking up Colin Kaepernick as a spokesperson after his NFL protest were super progressive, but it’s awkward to remember that Nike still uses sweatshop labor in Asia. Appeals to elements of identity are designed to make the consumer feel supported without doing anything to materially support them.

Identity is something exploited to convince you that you have more in common with soulless public figures than you actually do. It would not be hard to convince most democrats that a gay man like Milo Yiannopolous does not represent the average gay man. It was not uncommon in 2016, though, to suggest that Hillary Clinton being a woman was somehow politically relevant, and sometimes even more important than her record. While the first female president would be a marker of progress in the same way the first black president was, those achievements belong entirely to the voters. In 2008, voters came to the conclusion that race should not be a barrier to entry. In focusing on this, though, voters failed to create a new barrier to entry that would have prevented the first black president from succumbing to the same corporate interests as every other politician, and business went on as usual. Obama, our first black president, set records for deportations and Middle Eastern drone killings.

The idea that being anything other than a straight white male makes you inherently virtuous or incompatible with the political hegemony is not correct. While one’s experience in many areas may be more similar to those of people that share their gender or race, I do not believe a woman like Hillary Clinton has more in common with any of my female friends than she does with Henry Kissinger.

Identity is something used to divide the working class when it has shared interests. A prime example of this is the current conversation surrounding reparations for descendants of slaves. Some politicians think it’s a ridiculous idea, while others argue that it’s a good step in addressing the modern inequity that stems from the United States’ awful legacy of slavery and segregation. Something that often does not get brought up in this context, though, is that social policies like Medicare for All and free college inherently benefit the average black person more than the average white person, because black people are statistically more likely to live in low-income situations.

Medicare for All wouldn’t benefit every single black person equally, as black people do not live in economic uniformity, but is anyone worried about the wallets of Kevin Hart or Barack Obama? If our primary goal is to help poor people, a solution that distributes based on race would help many of them, but a solution that distributes based on economic status is more effective.

Another example of a focus on race dividing the working class on a common interest can be observed through discussions surrounding police militarization. Let me be clear: Unarmed black people are murdered by police at a far higher rate than their white counterparts, and it is correct to suggest that police militarization is a problem that disproportionately affects black people. In my mind, though, there are two problems with basing a national movement to stop police brutality around race.

The first problem is that there are racists. As much as we are correct to dislike racists, it is important to remember that they exist, and their votes count the same as ours. It would likely be easier to convince rural white people that police brutality is a real problem if they were not constantly being told it does not affect them, especially when we consider that it does. Without taking population sizes into account, almost twice as many white people were murdered by cops in 2015 than black people.

Second, I cannot imagine a policy proposal to confront the problem of police brutality that can be specifically focused on helping black people. Perhaps you can implement bias training, but you can’t enforce a law that says to be extra careful when handling one specific racial group. You can, however, pass laws to unilaterally de-escalate police militarization, and once again, these laws would disproportionately benefit black people.

I feel the need to reiterate that I do not believe we live in a post-race world, or a post-gender world, or a post-sexuality world. I simply believe that far too often, elements of our identity are exploited to distract us from the things we should unite around. When someone is deciding whether to support a politician, the politician is doing everything they can to get that support. It is important that we filter out the emotionally manipulative elements of a politician’s platform, and focus on their policy.

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