I think "political tool" is a better term, and I believe it's an incredibly effective tool for dividing people who might otherwise be united on certain issues.
I think that after the 2008 financial crisis and the following bailouts for the people who caused it, a lot of people got fed up, and occupy wall street was born. Occupy was a class based movement: the ultra-rich vs everyone else. And then something happened, and suddenly everyone had to be divided by every other attribute imaginable - race, sex, gender, disability - class just wasn't as important. Instead of the 1% vs the 99%, the 99% was divided by all those attributes and fought each other over whose issues were more important. Then it quietly fizzled out and nothing was accomplished.
The 1% must be so happy watching the 99% squabble amongst themselves over who's the most oppressed. I think that most, if not all, of the major political/social issues today should be viewed through a class-based lens _first_; everything else should come second. But the users of this tool cannot have that, and here we are: everything is about race/sex/gender and nothing is about class.
My guess is that the Occupy movement was one of the first things that got you into politics, otherwise I don't know how else to explain your opinion. Identity politics was around way before the Occupy movement and has been one of the greatest driving forces in progressive social change.
Yeah, but colbapar has a bit of a point: Identity was there, but it wasn't quite so all-consuming of an issue. But I think the timing is a bit off. I think Occupy had pretty much fizzled before identity exploded. I could be wrong - I'm not all that political, so I'm only a fringe observer of these things - but it seems to me that Occupy was pretty much over by 2013, and identity didn't really explode until 2016 or so.
I think that after the 2008 financial crisis and the following bailouts for the people who caused it, a lot of people got fed up, and occupy wall street was born. Occupy was a class based movement: the ultra-rich vs everyone else. And then something happened, and suddenly everyone had to be divided by every other attribute imaginable - race, sex, gender, disability - class just wasn't as important. Instead of the 1% vs the 99%, the 99% was divided by all those attributes and fought each other over whose issues were more important. Then it quietly fizzled out and nothing was accomplished.
The 1% must be so happy watching the 99% squabble amongst themselves over who's the most oppressed. I think that most, if not all, of the major political/social issues today should be viewed through a class-based lens _first_; everything else should come second. But the users of this tool cannot have that, and here we are: everything is about race/sex/gender and nothing is about class.