In the guise of a critique of identity politics, it has become increasingly common, and widely acceptable, not simply to ignore these struggles or merely pay lip service to their importance, while ignoring them in practice, but to denounce them as "particularistic" and narrow, undertaken only to secure benefits and privileges for a minority of the population (exactly as the recent teacher strikes have been depicted as the "selfish" and even greedy actions of those unwilling to put the needs of students above their own). A quarantine is imposed on the fight against specific racist practices and their effects and after-effects through the application of the label of "identity politics," as if specifically anti-racist action were a kind of pathogen that, if left unchecked, could pose a serious risk to the class struggle. The unshakeable faith of those who believe that economic reforms will make racism disappear and who see the self-organization of the specially oppressed as divisive and an obstacle to achieving these reforms, is only part of the problem. A critical analysis of the anti-anti-racist tendency (and its enablers) requires a brief examination of the two histories at work here: the history of what we will call economism in the socialist and Communist movements and the history of the concept of identity politics.
