Countee Cullen, “one of the most representative voices of the Harlem Renaissance,” tells a brief story in his widely read poem, “Incident.” The speaker of the poem was visiting Baltimore as a child. He saw a boy his own age and smiled. The boy, whom we infer to be white, responded with a racist slur. The speaker concludes the poem by explaining that, “Of all the things that happened there [in Baltimore]/That’s all that I remember.” This incident is one point in the social dissemination of racist ideology. It is underwritten by a form of (white or, more generally, hegemonic) identity politics and at least appears to demand a response in the form of (black or, more generally, subaltern) identity politics. However, that apparent necessity should be analyzed and evaluated in relation to the cognitive and affective processes of identity politics, as well as some related features of narrative organization.
Identity politics are, roughly, political programs focused on improving the social position of some group defined by an identity category (sometimes termed a “social identity category”). An identity category is a label used to name a set of people who putatively share some definitive or essential characteristic. For example, in the United States, racial terms designate prominent identity categories, used by many people as if “white,” “black,” and so forth, were to refer to individuals who share some crucial, underlying sameness, despite their individual differences (i.e., differences in personalidentity). Thus, for example, black identity politics might seek to redress systemic unfairness in the distribution of social benefits or harms, such as poverty—or public denigration and shaming, in the case of “Incident”—insofar as that this unfairness disproportionately affects black people. Identity politics often incline us to interpret the world through the social identities they concern. They readily guide our understanding of causes and effects, and thus our explicit storytelling and implicit emplotment, both fictional and non-fictional. For example, suppose the youth in Cullen’s poem had called the speaker a “pig.” The speaker—presumably Cullen—might still have drawn on racial identity categorization and inferred that the insult was racially motivated. In that case, the emplotment is the same, though the events themselves are different.
Insofar as they rely on cognitive and affective processes, identity politics call out for analysis in relation to what we know about those processes through cognitive and affective science. Fundamentally, identity categorization appears to be a particularly consequential—and, in my view, a particularly misguided—type of ordinary, cognitive categorization, like the categorization of animals, tools, or foods (see chapter 1 of Hogan 2024). Labeling someone “white” is then, broadly speaking, the same kind of process as labeling something a tree or a bear. In keeping with this, Sapolsky sees identity categorization as “pseudo-speciation” (Sapolsky 2017: 372). We may fill in the parallel by noting that the folk biology underlying species and related forms of categorization serves the evolutionary function of alerting us to threats and opportunities. Such categorizations are associated with the arousal of (for threats) negatively valanced or (for opportunities) positively valanced emotion-motivation systems. If I see something on the path ahead and categorize it as a rabid dog, I will feel fear, and withdraw. However, if I categorize it as the neighbor’s pet, I may greet it warmly. Identity categories have the same broad function, though they bear on a wider range of emotions than most forms of categorization, crucially including “intergroup emotions” (see Smith and Mackie 2016). Inter-group emotions usually do not concern threats to and opportunities for the individual alone, but rather for members of some group who share a particular identity category. I do not believe identity categories name pre-existing threats and opportunities. Rather, they create such threats and opportunities by, for example, provoking hostility attribution bias against out-groups (see Lukianoff and Haidt 2018: 158).
In what follows, I wish to consider and respond to Walter Benn Michaels’ thought-provoking and influential criticism of identity politics. I will for the most part be drawing on research in affective and cognitive science along with related areas of social psychology to treat motivation and well-being as these bear on identity politics. However, the complexities of categorization in identity politics cannot be fully understood in relation to broad and abstract patterns. Such categorization almost invariably involves causal accounts of particular sequences of events. Moreover, these accounts are not evaluatively neutral. They manifest moral judgments, commonly in the form of praise and blame. In short, they appear as narratives, such as the story recounted in Cullen’s poem.
Michaels (along with Adolph Reed, Jr.) has attracted considerable attention due to his arguments against identity politics (Michaels/Reed 2023). Michaels’ broad contention is that identity politics, though valuable in some respects, do not serve people—even those within the relevant identity group (e.g., African Americans)—as fully or effectively as would class politics aimed at eliminating systemic unfairness in the economy. We may rephrase Michaels’ main argument as follows. First, identity politics work against specifically “horizontal inequality” (see Stewart). Horizontal inequality is the disproportionate representation of particular identity groups (e.g., blacks or whites) in population sets indicative of social success or well-being, such as level of education or income. For example, African Americans are 13.4 percent of the U.S. population, but make up more than 22.6 percent of the country’s poor (For these and subsequent data, seeCreamer, Shrider, Burns, and Chen 2022). Working against such disproportion—so that 13.4 percent of the poor are black, as well as 13.4 percent of the rich, and so on—is widely seen as a way of moving toward enhanced well-being for discriminated-against groups. Michaels’ first point is that this belief in enhanced well-being is mistaken. Most obviously, if enough white people became impoverished, horizontal equality would result even if there was no improvement in the economic condition of a single black person (or anyone else).
Michaels goes on to argue that political discourse has increasingly framed problems of equality in horizontal terms. In consequence, we tacitly reduce unfairness to identity-group bigotry, which is to say, we act on the tacit assumption that, if racism, sexism, and so forth, are eliminated, the remaining inequalities will be meritocratic, thus fair. But this is just capitalist ideology, functioning to underwrite a skewed distribution of wealth.
In my view, Michaels makes some very good points that are not widely recognized. But this is not to say that there are no reasonable arguments against his views. Some of these objections are intuitively obvious and would probably be resolved if Michaels more fully developed his positive program for fostering equality. Others, however, are less intuitive, deriving instead from research in cognitive science and related fields. These begin with the recognition that racism, however historically specific, is also an instance of in-group bias, sharing the cross-cultural and trans-historical properties of such bias. As Smith and Mackie explain, in a range of situations, people “perceive other members of the same group (the ‘ingroup’) as similar to themselves and as likable, and tend to treat them with justice and fairness, while withholding these benefits from members of outgroups” (Smith/Mackie 2016: 413). This is portrayed, in a very simple but emotionally consequential form, in Cullen’s poem.
One striking case of in-group bias concerns our attitude toward inequality. It may seem that people would question apparently non-meritocratic social hierarchies and disapprove of them. However, empirical research suggests that—when not faced with salient, emotionally engaging reasons to think otherwise—our default assumption is that such unfairness is exceptional and that, overall, the world is just (see Duckitt 1992: 153), even if it does not appear so initially. Thus, dominant ideology probably does not function by distracting us from conditions we would spontaneously recognize as unjust. It probably has the easier task of limiting challenges to our default presumption that existing inequalities are fair. One purpose of Cullen’s poem is to make the unfairness of the situation obtrusive, and thus to displace the reader’s unreflective assumption of a “just world.”
There is, however, one case in which such “just world thinking” (as it is commonly termed) is unlikely to be the default interpretation of inequality. That exception occurs when one—or what is more relevant here, one’s in-group—is dominated (as in Cullen’s poem) rather than dominant, hegemonic rather than subaltern (to use a more prestigious terminology). We seem more likely to recognize that “our” oppression is unjust than to see that “their” oppression is unjust. This is, of course, obvious. The (interesting) complication is that everyone falls under many identity categories, and one may feel identity-based resentment connected with an identity category that is less relevant to one’s oppression than some other (unconsidered) category and may even be wholly irrelevant. For example, a black person may suffer social disabilities due to both race and class but misinterpret his or her misfortune as due to racial identity alone; a white person may suffer disabilities due solely to class (thus not due to race at all) but misinterpret his or her misfortune as due to race. Moreover, these misinterpretations would guide causal analysis of one’s particular experiences and therefore the stories that one tells about those experiences. Why do such misinterpretations occur? In other work (see Hogan 2009), I have noted several characteristics, such as salience and durability, that tend to make one identity category more prominent than others. For example, in the U.S., class is not very salient in casual encounters, and it is widely believed to be changeable; race, in contrast, is often salient and, as usually defined (by ancestry), inalterable. Factors such as these make the race category more likely to be prominent in our understanding of social relations even if it is in fact less causally determinative (or actually irrelevant, as in the case of white, racial resentment).
A still more consequential component of identity-group psychology is the recurring subordination of individual self-interest to group success. For example, Michaels is surprised that poor blacks feel joy because some other black person has become rich (see Michaels and Reed 2023: 43). But this is a regular part of in-group identification, an instance of what is called “depersonalization.” As Smith and Mackie explain, in depersonalization, “people do not think of themselves as unique individuals, but rather as relatively interchangeable members of the group” (Smith/Mackie 2016: 412). Moreover, people in other identity groups do the same thing to us—hence the response of the white boy in Cullen’s narrative, a response that would presumably have been the same to any (for him) “interchangeable members of the group” (i.e., African Americans).
In connection with this, Michaels seems to assume that people’s well-being depends most crucially on their wealth and income, since those factors determine their security regarding the satisfaction of needs (e.g., food and shelter). But this may not be the case. In evolutionary terms, wealth is at best a mechanism that approximates an adaptive function. The function is need-satisfaction. Having a great deal of money serves as a way of satisfying needs in social conditions today. But these were not the conditions in the environment of evolutionary adaptation. At that time, nobody had money; need satisfaction was most obviously a function of social position, one’s standing and esteem as an individual or, more relevantly here, as a member of some group. Thus, we might expect that maintaining individual and group pride would be fundamental motivational goals, more so than wealth accumulation. For instance, the speaker of Cullen’s poem would have to lose quite a bit of money to give the reader a moment of empathic pain comparable to that produced by the (materially inconsequential, but shaming) slur.
The preceding points indicate that identity politics do not derive from capitalist ideology alone, but also from our (less ephemeral) cognitive and emotional capacities and dispositions. The research thus suggests the deep emotional and motivational importance of identity categories. Indeed, a case could be made that—leaving aside life-threatening or severely painful material deprivation—our sense of well-being is significantly more dependent on social esteem, thus individual and group pride (or shame), than on material abundance. This is more profoundly true and more justified for subaltern (e.g., black) identities, but it bears on hegemonic (e.g., white) identities also.
In each of these cases, narrative is important as well. Clearly, one of our aims in treating social inequality is to isolate causes, so that we can respond to harmful developments and, one hopes, mitigate them. The general principles defining such causes are more or less abstract. However, when people are embedded in events that are unfair and unjust, they are not, for the most part, thinking about the causes and effects abstractly. Rather, they are thinking, first, in terms of particular causal sequences, which is to say stories or narratives. The narratives commonly have heroes (identified by our emotional affiliation with, and thereby empathy for them) as well as villains (identified by our antipathy), and readers respond to the injustices suffered by the former and the outrages perpetrated by the latter. The particularity of the characters’ experiences and our feelings of, say, hope (for the hero) and fear (of the villain) are the crucial elements in our ongoing experience of the relevant events. Obviously, this sort of thing occurs when we read novels, or poems such as “Incident.” But what is even more important, it also occurs when we think about real cases of who has been treated unfairly and how. Such emplotment regularly concerns such issues as group pride (e.g., in heroic narratives of war).
In short, Michaels is undoubtedly right that class status is important, yet underappreciated today. At the same time, a great deal of work—from experimental research to personal narratives—make clear the perhaps pre-eminent importance of identity categories for people’s sense of well-being and thus the necessity of treating horizontal inequality and the related forms of injustice that identity politics are designed to overcome. This is true even as identity politics almost by necessity contribute to the problem by increasing the salience of identity categories, which underlie so much injustice to begin with.
Works Cited
“Countee Cullen: 1903-1946.” Poetry Foundation. Available at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/countee-cullen .
Creamer, John, Emily Shrider, Kalee Burns, and Frances Chen, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-277, Poverty in the United States: 2021, U.S. Government Publishing Office, Washington, DC, September 2022.
Cullen, Countee. “Incident.” Poetry Foundation. Available at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42618/incident-56d2213a45f36 .
Duckitt, John. 1992. The Social Psychology of Prejudice. New York: Praeger.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2009. Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Identity, and Cognitive Science. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2024. What is Colonialism? New York: Routledge.
Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt. 2018. The Coddling of the American Mind. New York: Penguin.
Michaels, Walter Benn and Adolph Reed, Jr. No Politics But Class Politics. Ed. Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora. London: Eris, 2023.
Sapolsky, Robert. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. New York: Penguin, 2017.
Smith, Eliot and Diane Mackie. 2016. “Intergroup Emotions.” In Handbook of Emotions, 412-423. 4th ed. Ed. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Michael Lewis, and Jeannette Haviland-Jones. New York: Guilford P.
Stewart, Frances. “Horizontal Inequalities.” UNESCO World Social Science Report 2016. Available online at https://en.unesco.org .
