Capitalism is Killing the World’s Wildlife Populations, not ‘Humanity’

Capitalism is Killing the World’s Wildlife Populations, not ‘Humanity’

Featured image: Simon Eeman / shutterstock

     by Anna Pigott, Swansea UniversityThe Conversation

The latest Living Planet report from the WWF makes for grim reading: a 60% decline in wild animal populations since 1970, collapsing ecosystems, and a distinct possibility that the human species will not be far behind. The report repeatedly stresses that humanity’s consumption is to blame for this mass extinction, and journalists have been quick to amplify the message. The Guardian headline reads “Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations”, while the BBC runs with “Mass wildlife loss caused by human consumption”. No wonder: in the 148-page report, the word “humanity” appears 14 times, and “consumption” an impressive 54 times.

There is one word, however, that fails to make a single appearance: capitalism. It might seem, when 83% of the world’s freshwater ecosystems are collapsing (another horrifying statistic from the report), that this is no time to quibble over semantics. And yet, as the ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer has written, “finding the words is another step in learning to see”.

Although the WWF report comes close to finding the words by identifying culture, economics, and unsustainable production models as the key problems, it fails to name capitalism as the crucial (and often causal) link between these things. It therefore prevents us from seeing the true nature of the problem. If we don’t name it, we can’t tackle it: it’s like aiming at an invisible target.

Why capitalism?

The WWF report is right to highlight “exploding human consumption”, not population growth, as the main cause of mass extinction, and it goes to great lengths to illustrate the link between levels of consumption and biodiversity loss. But it stops short of pointing out that capitalism is what compels such reckless consumption. Capitalism – particularly in its neoliberal form – is an ideology founded on a principle of endless economic growth driven by consumption, a proposition that is simply impossible.

No extinction risk for ‘commodity species’. Baronb / shutterstock

Industrial agriculture, an activity that the report identifies as the biggest single contributor to species loss, is profoundly shaped by capitalism, not least because only a handful of “commodity” species are deemed to have any value, and because, in the sole pursuit of profit and growth, “externalities” such as pollution and biodiversity loss are ignored. And yet instead of calling the irrationality of capitalism out for the ways in which it renders most of life worthless, the WWF report actually extends a capitalist logic by using terms such as “natural assets” and “ecosystem services” to refer to the living world.

By obscuring capitalism with a term that is merely one of its symptoms – “consumption” – there is also a risk that blame and responsibility for species loss is disproportionately shifted onto individual lifestyle choices, while the larger and more powerful systems and institutions that are compelling individuals to consume are, worryingly, let off the hook.

Who is ‘humanity,’ anyway?

The WWF report chooses “humanity” as its unit of analysis, and this totalising language is eagerly picked up by the press. The Guardian, for example, reports that “the global population is destroying the web of life”. This is grossly misleading. The WWF report itself illustrates that it is far from all of humanity doing the consuming, but it does not go as far as revealing that only a small minority of the human population are causing the vast majority of the damage.

Global map of Ecological Footprint of consumption, 2014. Although the WWF report highlights disparity in consumption, it says nothing about the capitalism which produces this pattern. WWF Living Planet

From carbon emissions to ecological footprints, the richest 10% of people are having the greatest impact. Furthermore, there is no recognition that the effects of climate and biodiversity collapse are overwhelming felt by the poorest people first – the very people who are contributing least to the problem. Identifying these inequalities matters because it is this – not “humanity” per se – that is the problem, and because inequality is endemic to, you guessed it, capitalist systems (and particularly their racist and colonial legacies).

The catch-all word “humanity” papers over all of these cracks, preventing us from seeing the situation as it is. It also perpetuates a sense that humans are inherently “bad”, and that it is somehow “in our nature” to consume until there is nothing left. One tweet, posted in response to the WWF publication, retorted that “we are a virus with shoes”, an attitude that hints at growing public apathy.

But what would it mean to redirect such self-loathing towards capitalism? Not only would this be a more accurate target, but it might also empower us to see our humanity as a force for good.

Breaking the story

Words do so much more than simply assign blame to different causes. Words are makers and breakers of the deep stories that we construct about the world, and these stories are especially important for helping us to navigate environmental crises. Using generalised references to “humanity” and “consumption” as drivers of ecological loss is not only inaccurate, it also perpetuates a distorted view of who we are and what we are capable of becoming.

By naming capitalism as a root cause, on the other hand, we identify a particular set of practices and ideas that are by no means permanent nor inherent to the condition of being human. In doing so, we learn to see that things could be otherwise. There is a power to naming something in order to expose it. As the writer and environmentalist Rebecca Solnit puts it:

Calling things by their true names cuts through the lies that excuse, buffer, muddle, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness. It’s not all there is to changing the world, but it’s a key step.

The WWF report urges that a “collective voice is crucial if we are to reverse the trend of biodiversity loss”, but a collective voice is useless if it cannot find the right words. As long as we – and influential organisations such as the WWF, in particular – fail to name capitalism as a key cause of mass extinction, we will remain powerless to break its tragic story.The Conversation

Anna Pigott, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities, Swansea University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Apocalypto

Apocalypto

     by Boris Forkel / Deep Green Resistance Germany

 It is very difficult for me to live in this culture.

I just can’t psychologically survive in the high performance society, where everyone is passionately exploiting themselves, while all life on this planet is being destroyed.

I have severe depression and anxiety disorders, and I have to take good care of myself to be able to take care of my son.

It is very difficult for people who have never experienced poverty to understand what poverty means. The constant nagging fear. The permanent stress and psychological terror of state authorities on which you are dependent, that harass you and try to keep you small and oppressed.

Now they want me to work underpaid, shitty jobs again. I already had a stroke not long ago. I can’t do these jobs and I can‘t stand the pressure.

I live in the age of the greatest mass extinction in 65 million years. And the cause of this mass extinction is our glorious western civilization.

Empire.

Indeed, almost all imperial forces have joined into one: The West.

“In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier…The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear -armed bombers,” writes John Pilger.

Looks like the West is encircling the strongest probable future enemies, preparing for war.

Full spectrum dominance.

 The understanding of the fact that this culture is always at war, and will indeed kill all life on planet earth made me shift my loyalty and become an activist.

My loyalty does not belong to empire and industrial capitalism. My loyalty belongs to the suppressed, the poor, the dying planet.

Where are you when we need people to take responsibility for our fellow creatures, human and nonhuman, and defend them? Always working on your professional self-fulfillment, performing until you burn out.

Do you distract yourself so manically with your work, so you don’t have to see what is happening around us? That the insects disappear, the songbirds disappear, the masses impoverish?

That the West is already bombing the near and middle east to ashes and dust and prepares for more, while you try to overtake yourself, become faster and better, without even stopping once to understand the obvious fact that this system is heading for collapse?

Instead you wonder where all the refugees come from. (Of course they come for a share of the cake of our western wealth, they might even try to take your precious job! You better join one of the aspiring right-wing movements.)

Imperialism creates the illusion of wealth as far as the masses are concerned. It usually serves to hide the fact that the ruling classes are gobbling up the natural resources of the home territory in an improvident manner and are otherwise utilizing the national wealth largely for their own purposes. Eventually the general public is called upon to pay for all of this, frequently after the military machine can no longer maintain external aggression.

–Jack Forbes

Capitalism 2.0 comes with a like-button and a smiling emoji, and it will always tell you that everything is fine.

Capitalism is exploitation, but neoliberalism is the smart self-exploitation of the alienated and indoctrinated individual. Exploitation on steroids.

Indoctrination is cheaper and more efficient than violence. It is thus called “soft power.” It works with research-based psycho-politics, and the smart manipulation of human feelings and desires.

Capitalism creates an exploited class of workers that will probably organize and resist (as it did many times).

Neoliberalism creates a population of totally alienated and indoctrinated machine-like zombies, who suppress their own humanity. Each individual a perfect slave, with a software programmed in its brain. Owner Inside®.

Zombie apocalypse.

You might already be a zombie, living in your middle class-bubble or your digital hallucination, but I am still a human being, sensitive as a frightened child, with a healthy portion of empathy and love. I‘m trying to live awake and conscious in this real, physical world, and what I see is mass extinction, ecological catastrophe and imperialist wars. Trauma.

Facing the truth isn’t easy.

I carry a trauma with me from reading A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolome de Las Casas.

I carry a trauma with me from reading Jack Forbes’ Only Approved Indians. He writes: “If a creature learns to completely accept captivity or slavery, if they erase all thoughts of freedom, they can suppress the pain. But if one wants to be free, one has to face the pain; one has to agonize, to suffer, through all of the terror.”

That’s where you are. Completely accepting captivity and slavery, driving out the pain.

That‘s where I am. Going through all the terror. Trying to free myself (and the world) of this culture.

I carry a trauma with me from reading Derrick Jensen‘s Endgame.

And I carry a deep trauma with me from seeing that he is right, from seeing my fellow beings and relatives disappear, the insects, the birds, the amphibians, all of my beloved nature, in rapid decline.

I most certainly carry a lot of trauma with me from my parents and grandparents, since I was born only 34 years after World War II. I certainly carry a trauma from watching all the documentaries and from visiting the concentration camp in Dachau.

You do not understand my language. I can say what I want, but you don‘t understand. You do not even understand the language “stroke” (red alert; Individual doesn’t function anymore within this insane culture).

Government to medical complex: Repair individual and re-integrate into the machine.

Sorry, doesn’t work for me. I’m out.

I need a lot of quiet and peaceful time to deal with all the trauma. I can’t just rush through my life and work ever harder to help to accomplish the neoliberal agenda and make Europe more competitive for the global economy (that’s how the politicians sold it to us; in fact, the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, as always).

Mental illnesses such as depression or burnout are the expression of a deep crisis of freedom. They are a pathological sign that today freedom often turns into coercion. We think we are free today. But in reality we exploit ourselves passionately until we collapse…
Neoliberalism is even capable of exploiting freedom itself. The performance society creates more productivity than the disciplinary society, because it makes excessive use of freedom. It doesn’t exploit against freedom, but it exploits freedom itself. Everything that belongs to practices and expressions of freedom, such as emotion, play and communication, is now exploited. It is not efficient to exploit someone against his or her will. With the external exploitation, the yield is very small. Only self-exploitation, as the exploitation of freedom, produces the greatest yield. The first stage of burnout syndrome is, paradoxically, euphoria. Euphorically I plunge into the work. In the end I collapse and slide into depression.

Byung-Chul Han

What will you do when the next economic collapse hits?

What will you do when you loose your job and can‘t numb yourself anymore with your work?

Alcohol, drugs, suicide?

Better to face the truth, go through all the terror, declare your loyalty to justice and life on planet earth and become a revolutionary.

Tasmania: Transgender Law Reform – Women Speak the Truth

Tasmania: Transgender Law Reform – Women Speak the Truth

Featured image: Girl Guide boycott goes to Hobart’s iconic Salamanca Market on 13th of October

    by Women Speak Tasmania

While several groups and individuals are lobbying for extended transgender rights at law, Women Speak Tasmania is working on a comprehensive series of policies to address changes in the law that have promoted the rights of transgender persons ahead of the sex-based rights of women.

“We have drafted two policy position papers, initially, that consider transgender rights and women’s rights in anti-discrimination law, and in the law regarding changes to sex markers on birth certificates,” said spokesperson, Bronwyn Williams.  “These policies have been forwarded to all members of the Tasmanian Parliament for comment.

“Under our proposals, the terms ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity’ will be removed from the relevant legislation, and ‘gender identity’ will be replaced with ‘social identity’ as a protected characteristic under the Anti-discrimination Act 1998 (Tas).  ‘Biological sex’ will become a protected characteristic under the Act.

“‘Gender’ and ‘gender identity’ are confusing concepts that are not adequately defined in the current law.  ‘Social identity’ more accurately describes the incongruence with biological sex that characterises transgenderism.

“We want to end the confusion,” said Miss Williams.  “We also believe there should be no changes to sex markers on birth certificates.  Birth certificates are historical records that serve a number of demographic functions and inform both government policy and legislation in a wide range of areas.

“We propose, instead, a process of application for a Recognition Certificate, to be issued after consideration by a dedicated, properly constituted Board.

“It’s time we take stock and re-assess laws that have given us the ultimate legal fiction – where biological males can be declared legally female.  This fiction has already eroded the rights of women and girls to female-only spaces and services.  If male-bodied people are permitted to be legally recognised as female on the basis of self-identification alone, as proposed by groups like Transforming Tasmania, women’s sex-based rights will be a thing of the past.”

Trump Administration Waives Environmental Laws to Build Texas Border Wall in Protected Nature Areas

Trump Administration Waives Environmental Laws to Build Texas Border Wall in Protected Nature Areas

Bulldozers Aimed at Wildlife Refuge, State Park, Historic Chapel, Family Farms.  Featured image: by Kara Clauser, Center for Biological Diversity.

     by Center for Biological Diversity

RIO GRANDE VALLEY, Texas— The Trump administration announced today that it will waive dozens of environmental laws to speed border-wall construction through protected Rio Grande Valley property, including a national wildlife refuge and famed butterfly center.

Border walls in Hidalgo County, Texas, would cut through the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife RefugeNational Butterfly CenterBentsen-Rio Grande State Park, and the grounds of the historic La Lomita Chapel, as well as hundreds of family farms and other private property.

“The Trump administration is ignoring thousands of people in Hidalgo County who don’t want these disastrous border walls,” said Laiken Jordahl, borderlands campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Rio Grande Valley is one of the most spectacular and biologically important landscapes in the country. Every acre is irreplaceable. We’ll do everything in our power to stop this destruction.”

The waiver, to take effect Thursday, is intended to speed about 18 miles of border-wall construction by sweeping aside 28 bedrock environmental and public-health laws that protect clean air, clean water, public lands and endangered wildlife. This is the fifth time the Trump administration has used the REAL ID waiver. The Center is considering whether to challenge the waiver in court.

The waiver is being issued during a comment period for border-wall construction in Hidalgo County, where so far more than 8,500 people say they oppose the plan. U.S. Customs and Border Protection opened the comment periodin September after the Center and 42 groups requested public input. Comments remain open until Nov. 6.

“It’s appalling that the Trump administration is willing to seize family farms by eminent domain and bulldoze beautiful nature reserves that support the local economy,” Jordahl said. “Trump is ripping the Rio Grande Valley in two for political sport. His despicable disregard for the law and the borderlands must be stopped.”

A 2017 study by the Center identified more than 90 endangered or threatened species that would be threatened by wall construction along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. Endangered and threatened species in the area include the ocelot, jaguarundi and aplomado falcon, as well as a host of migratory birds.

The Center is suing the Trump administration over its use of the long-expired waiver for border-wall construction at the Santa Teresa Port of Entry in New Mexico. The Center is also appealing a federal court ruling in its lawsuit to stop the border wall replacement project near San Diego.

Beyond jeopardizing wildlife, endangered species and public lands, the U.S.-Mexico border wall is part of a larger strategy of ongoing border militarization that damages human rights, civil liberties, native lands, local businesses and international relations. The border wall impedes the natural migrations of people and wildlife that are essential to healthy diversity.

The proposal seeks to waive these laws:

  1. The National Environmental Policy Act
  2. The Endangered Species Act
  3. The Clean Water Act
  4. The National Historic Preservation Act
  5. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act
  6. The Migratory Bird Conservation Act
  7. The Clean Air Act
  8. The Archeological Resources Protection Act
  9. The Paleontological Resources Preservation Act
  10. The Federal Cave Resources Protection Act
  11. The Safe Drinking Water Act
  12. The Noise Control Act
  13. The Solid Waste Disposal Act
  14. The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act
  15. The Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act
  16. The Antiquities Act
  17. The Historic Sites, Buildings, and Antiquities Act
  18. The Farmland Protection Policy Act
  19. The Coastal Zone Management Act
  20. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act
  21. The National Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act
  22. The National Fish and Wildlife Act
  23. The Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act
  24. The Administrative Procedure Act
  25. The River and Harbors Act
  26. The Eagle Protection Act
  27. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
  28. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act
There are Hundreds of Thousands of Indigenous Children in Residential Schools Around the World Today

There are Hundreds of Thousands of Indigenous Children in Residential Schools Around the World Today

     by  and  / Intercontinental Cry

On September 30, communities across Canada will be commemorating ‘Orange Shirt Day’, an annual event that is helping Canadians remember the thousands of Indigenous children who died in Residential Schools, and to reflect on the intergenerational trauma that was caused by the Residential school system. Similar school systems were also run in the US, New Zealand and Australia with terrible consequences for Indigenous children and communities.

Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation elder Phyllis Jack Webstad founded Orange Shirt Day in 2013, after she shared her childhood experience at the St. Joseph’s Mission residential school in William’s lake, British Columbia.

Residential school staff stripped her of her favourite orange shirt the day she was taken from her family. As Residential school survivor Vivian Timmins said today, “The orange day shirt is a commonality for all Native Residential School Survivors because we had our personal items taken away which was a tactic to erase our personal identity. Maybe it was a piece of clothing, but it represented our memory that connected us to families. Today is a time to honour the children and youth that didn’t make it home. It’s a time to remember Canada’s dark history, to educate and ensure such history is never repeated.”

Alarmingly, that history is being repeated in many parts of the world. According to Survival International, there are nearly one million tribal and Indigenous children across Asia, Africa, and South America who are currently attending institutions that bear a striking resemblance to Canada’s residential schools.

Indigenous artist RG Miller’s haunting autobiographical painting recalls the horrific abuse he experienced at residential school. Photo Courtesy RG Miller

A horrifying legacy lives on

The horrifying legacy of residential schools is being repeated, on a massive scale, because the attitudes and intentions underlying Canada’s residential school system live on.

Tribal and Indigenous children around the world are being coerced from their families and sent to schools that strip them of their identity and often impose upon them alien names, religions, and languages.

Extractive industries and fundamentalist religious organizations are frequently pulling the strings behind these institutions.

One residential mega-school in India—which boasts it is “home” to 27,000 Indigenous children—states publicly that it aims to turn “primitive” tribal children from “liabilities into assets, tax consumers into tax payers.”

Its partners include the very mining companies that are trying to wrest control of the lands these children truly call home.

Parents have described the school as a “chicken farm” where children feel like “prisoners.”

An expert on Adivasi education told us, “Their whole minds have been brainwashed by a kind of education that says, ‘Mining is good’, ‘Consumerism is good’, ‘Your culture is bad.’ Tribal residential schools are institutions which are erasing the autobiography of each child to replace it with what fits the ‘mainstream’. Isn’t it a crime in the name of schooling?”

Without urgent change, many distinct peoples could be wiped out in just a few generations, because the the youth in these schools are taught to see their families and traditions as ‘primitive’, ‘backward’ and inferior to ‘mainstream’ society so that they turn their backs on their languages, religions and lands.

Survivors of Canada’s residential schools are beginning to speak out against these culture-destroying institutions.

“What’s happening right now at these residential schools in India and beyond is very similar to what happened with the residential schools in Canada”, says Roberta Hill

Roberta Hill is a survivor of the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Canada, where she was abused by the pastor and school staff in the 1950s and 60s. She sees the strong parallels between her experience and that of Indigenous children in these modern culture destroying schools: “What’s happening right now at these residential schools in India and beyond is very similar to what happened with the residential schools in Canada – this separation of Indigenous children from their family, language, and culture is a very destructive force. My experience at residential school was traumatizing. I was taken from my family at the age of six and put in the school where I experienced a lot of abuse and isolation. If this is happening again now, then there needs to be international attention. It needs to stop or else they are going to go through the same thing that we went through. It will cause irreparable damage – not only to the Indigenous children attending, but to the future generations of that community.”

RG Miller, a prominent Indigenous artist from Canada states: “My horrific experience at Native residential school destroyed my connection with community, family, and my culture. The abuses I suffered there completely broke any sense of trust or intimacy with anyone or anything including God, spouses, and children for the rest of my life.”

Over the past two decades, thousands of residential school survivors have shared their stories of abuse; but there are thousands of other children who will never be able to tell their own stories because they passed away while they were in a residential school. Other children, like Chanie Wenjack, died while trying to escape. The young Ojibwe boy ran away from his residential school in Ontario, trying desperately to reach home, 600 km away. He died of hunger and exposure at the age of 12 in 1966.

Half a century later—and 12,000km away—Norieen Yaakob, her brother Haikal and five of their friends, fled their residential school in Malaysia. The children, who belong to the Temiar—one of the Orang Asli tribes of central Malaysia—ran away to avoid a beating from their teacher. 47 days later, Norieen and one other little girl were found, starving but alive. The other five children died, including Haikal and seven-year-old Juvina.

Juvina’s father, David, told us, “The police said, “Why are you bothering us with this problem?” We felt hopeless. It was only on the sixth day that the authorities began their search and rescue mission for the children. But they told us parents to stay behind. They said if we went in it would just be to secretly give food to the missing children that we were supposedly hiding. They accused us of faking the whole incident to gain attention and force the government to help us more. That was what they thought of us… [Finally] they found a child’s skull and we could not identify immediately whose child it was. We had to wait for the post-mortem. I could not recognize my own child.” The families are currently taking the authorities to court in a case that the world should be watching.

Norieen Yaakob of the Temiar tribe of Malaysia barely survived running away from her residential school. She was found 47 days after fleeing her school; five other children died.

The terrible truth is that Indigenous children are dying in these schools. In tribal residential schools in Maharashtra state in India, over one thousand deaths have been recorded since 2000, including many suicides. With echoes of the traumas experienced in Canada, many parents never learn that their children are ill until it is too late, and they often never know the cause of death.

There are also a frightening number of cases of physical and sexual abuse, very few of which reach the justice system. Government schools across Asia and Africa are often staffed by teachers who have no connection to, or respect for, the communities they serve. Teacher absences are common, and abuse goes unseen and unreported. The potential for devastating damage is extremely high.

Survival International will soon launch a campaign to expose and oppose these culture destroying schools and to demand greater Indigenous control of education, before it is too late for these children, their communities, and their futures.

There is certainly a need for it. These schools endanger lives and strip away identities, but they also deny children the right to choose a tribal future.

The ability of Indigenous Peoples to live well and sustainably on their lands depends on their intricate knowledge, which takes generations to develop and a lifetime to master. To survive and thrive in the Kalahari Desert or to herd reindeer across the Arctic tundra cannot be learnt in residential schools, or on occasional school vacations.

What’s more, in this current age of severe environmental degradation, climate change and mass extinctions, Indigenous Peoples play a crucial role in preserving the world’s ecosystems. They are the best guardians of their lands and they should be respected and listened to if we have any hope of survival for future generations.

Rather than erasing their knowledge, skills, languages, and wisdom through culture-destroying residential schools, we must allow them to be the authors of their own destinies as stewards and protectors of their own lands.

Tribal children in Indonesia learning on their land, in their language. Photo: Sokola Rimba

Dr. Jo Woodman is running Survival International’s upcoming Indigenous Education campaign. She has spent two decades researching and campaigning on Indigenous rights issues, focused on the impacts of forced ‘development’, conservation and schooling on tribal communities.

Alicia Kroemer holds a PhD in political science from the university of Vienna on collective memory and residential schools in Canada, with publications, films, and lectures on the topic. She serves on the board of Indigenous rights NGO Incomindios in Zurich, where she is a human rights educator and UN representative. She also works as a research consultant for Minority Rights Group and Survival International in London, UK. She is interested in allyship, advocating and promoting human rights, with a special focus on Indigenous rights globally.

How Identity Became a Weapon Against the Left

How Identity Became a Weapon Against the Left

Dissonance created by a certain conception of identity: if we believe that “women and people of color” are defined entirely by their identities, it becomes impossible to understand how anyone who shares the identity could reject a candidate who fits that identity. Once the distinction between perspective and identity is erased, voters of color become an undifferentiated hive mind incapable of political independence.

     by  / Portside

Having an “identity politics” is incredibly beneficial. Identity politics, which emphasizes the unique concerns of different communities and demographic groups, shows how historical inequities have been distributed across different races, genders, religions, abilities, and sexualities. In doing so, it allows us to better understand how to critique and reform the systems that replicate those inequities. It reveals how the foreclosure crisis disproportionately hurtblack home owners, how health issues manifest differently across populations, and how various forms of “hidden taxes” penalize women in professional life. To ignore identity is to ignore injustice. Yet there are risks to viewing the world through the prism of identity. If people are defined by their demographic characteristics, they can be reduced to those characteristics in a way that obscures differences within groups. If “identity” becomes synonymous with “perspective,” dissenting members within the identity group risk having their viewpoints erased and their humanity diminished. And when used cynically, as a political weapon, a simplistic view of identity can allow people of a particular political faction to wrongly imply that they speak for all members of their racial or gender group.

Kamala Harris is black. She is a lot of other things, too: a person of South Asian descent, a woman, a former prosecutor and state Attorney General, a sitting Senator, and, according to Barack Obama, “the best looking attorney general in the country.” (I am your sister in side-eye, Michelle.) Out of nearly 2,000 senators in the country’s history, Harris is one of only ten black Americans and two black women to have held the position. Her personal characteristics and political accomplishments, together with the intelligence and tenacity that propelled her to the Senate, have made her a highly visible prospect for the 2020 presidential race. Already, influential Democrats have shown a strong interest in Harris, with prominent former Clinton donors meeting privately with Harris in the Hamptons. The San Francisco Chronicle called her the Democrats’ “Great Blue Hope,” and a Guardian writer suggested that the combination of Harris’s race and her centrist platform “could be the party’s solution to its identity crisis.”

But certain parts of Kamala Harris’s political résumé have led to skepticism from the left. As California’s Attorney General, with responsibilities for overseeing the second largest prison population in the country, Harris’s professional obligation to put people behind bars was seen as being in direct tension with the goals of Black Lives Matter, perhaps the most prominent progressive movement of our time. Harris touted a reform-minded “smart on crime” approach in her prosecutorial role, one that encouraged education and reentry programs for ex-offenders, and in the Senate, she has co-sponsored legislation to improve prison conditions for women. Yet she has also come under heavy criticism from activists for, among other things: defending the state against court orders to reduce its prison population, declining to take a public stand on sentencing reform proposals, attempting to block a court decision requiring the state to provide a transgender inmate with gender reassignment surgery, opposing a measure to require independent inquiries into police uses of force, and obstructing efforts by federal judges to hold California prosecutors accountable for an “epidemic” of misconduct. Harris has been a zealous prosecutor (at times, she said, she has been “as close to a vigilante as you can get”), and certain of her policies—like bringing criminal charges against parents whose children miss school—conflict with the efforts of groups like BLM to reduce the reach of the criminal justice system into people’s lives.

Harris has also drawn scrutiny over the crimes she wasn’t tough on. While serving as Attorney General of California, Harris failed to prosecute now-Treasury Secretary Steven “Foreclosure King” Mnuchin after his OneWest Bank engaged in a notoriously aggressive pattern of home foreclosures. Under Mnuchin, OneWest was a “foreclosure machine” that did everything it could to seize people’s houses, inflicting misery on homeowners while failing to properly review foreclosure documents. Harris’s consumer law division found that OneWest had engaged in “widespread misconduct” in its treatment of borrowers; the investigators urged Harris to “conduct a full investigation of a national bank’s misconduct and provide a public accounting of what happened.” Instead, Harris closed the case, not even pursuing the compromise measure of a civil penalty. As David Dayen writes, this “watered-down version of public accountability was seen as the best possible outcome, and Harris didn’t even go for that.” In failing to hold the bank accountable, Dayen emphasizes, Harris was far from alone among state law enforcement officials. Harris was, however, the only Democratic senatorial candidate to whom Steven Mnuchin felt compelled to give a campaign donation.

There are therefore both principled and pragmatic reasons why people on the left might be skeptical of a Harris candidacy. There’s a serious question about whether Harris can be counted on to advance progressive values when doing so might require political sacrifices. But there’s also a question of strategy: from a leftist perspective, it’s unwise to run yet another presidential candidate whose ties to banks could make them “untrustworthy” in an era of low public trust in elected officials. Given the crushing defeat of November 2016 (which was all but predicted by certain insightful progressives), it would seem obviously beneficial for the Democratic Party to listen to progressive criticism early and adapt candidates and their messaging accordingly.

Yet progressive critiques of Harris were met with swift and unyielding hostility. After a Mic article documented the lack of left-wing enthusiasm for a Harris candidacy, investigative journalist Victoria A. Brownsworth suggested that a better headline for the article would be: “Kamala Harris, biracial senator and former Attorney General of the most populous state, faces misogynist white men defaming her.” (This despite the fact that every critic quoted in the piece was female, and one was a woman of color.) Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden, a close Clinton ally and frequent defender of the Democratic Party, declared she found it “odd” that “these folks” (meaning Bernie Sanders supporters) “have [it] in for Kamala Harris and Cory Booker” in particular. “Hmmmm,” she said, implying that criticisms of Harris and Booker were racially motivated. MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid said the Mic article simply reported the opinions of “3 alt-left activists,” “alt-left” being a term used to brand leftists as racist analogues of the neo-Nazi alt-right. In Cosmopolitan, Brittney Cooper wrote that the left in general, but in particular the “Sanders Left,” “has a black-woman problem,” a charge I’ve addressed elsewhere. Cooper said that those criticizing Harris “think that black women who care about establishment politics lack vision” and that the debate “isn’t about Harris, but about the emotional and political labor that black women are expected to do to save America’s soul.” “Angry white Sanders voters,” she said, must “get off [Harris’s] back.” In large part, responses to skepticism about Harris have simply dismissed the substance of the analysis, instead suggesting a “targeting” of Harris because of her gender and/or race.

By wielding identity to neutralize political pushback, these commentators were continuing a trend. Throughout the 2016 campaign season, criticism of Hillary Clinton was frequently deflected with claims that her critics were motivated by sexism. And certainly, there were a lot of sexist attacks. Allusions to her husband’s sexual exploits, scrutiny of her appearance, and a perception of the candidate as “untrustworthy” were all rooted, in part, in gender bias. No one can credibly deny that Clinton’s gender has affected the public’s perception of her since the very beginning of her career, including the early political hostility she faced in Arkansaswhen she refused to give up her maiden name, and the time in 1992 when she was publicly pressured into proving that she liked to bake cookies.

But writing off Clinton’s leftist critics as necessarily motivated by gender bias was sexist in itself. It reduced Clinton to her gender and implied that she had no agency in her own decision-making. Some people had perfectly defensible grounds for seeing Clinton as “untrustworthy,” such her shifting position on subjects like the TPP, welfare “reform,” and NAFTA. Others disapproved of Clinton for her hawkishness, her insistence that single-payer would “never ever” happen, her ties to Wall Street, or myriad other legitimate reasons. Those who raised these concerns, however, were often dismissed as either “Bernie Bros” or unpersuadable “deplorables” motivated by bigotry.

The “Bernie Bro” narrative, which attempted to paint Sanders supporters as disproportionately sexist (and Sanders himself as borderline bigoted) was deeply pernicious and effective. Sanders was vulnerable to this kind of attack: in a world in which personal identity has become a shorthand for “progress” (see e.g. Obama), and “white man” has become an epithet, Bernie’s identity was an easy target. His unflinching support of women’s issues, his history of advocacy for racial justice, his record of support for civil rights and LGBT issues, even his Jewishness were all made secondary to his image as an “angry white male.” Sanders was accused of downplaying the political concerns of people of color. Even now, when 73% of African Americans view Sanders favorably (as compared with 52% of white people), he is still treated as having a race problem.

Since more allies are generally made by engaging one’s critics than dismissing them as biased deplora-bros, the heckling approach was not a politically savvy one. Just as importantly, though, the “bro” stereotype entirely erased the perspectives of countless women and people of color who did not share the center-left political position. The “Bernie Bro” mythology—that progressives are almost exclusively white, male, and young—will not die, no matter how often women and people of color try to speak up to disprove it. In all the words spilled about the uninterrupted whiteness of Sanders supporters, prominent “Bros” like Rosario Dawson, Ben Jealous, Pramila Jayapal, Eddie Glaude, Spike Lee, Killer Mike, Cornel West, and Nina Turner went largely unmentioned. Hillary supporters were appalled that leftists challenged civil rights hero John Lewis’s commitment to Clinton, but it seems civil rights legend Harry Belafonte was considered less sacrosanct—his endorsement of Bernie Sanders was whited-out of the public discourse along with the perspectives of Michelle Alexanderand Ta-Nehisi Coates—both of whom are generally considered among the most respected liberal thought leaders. One of the most powerful pro-Black Lives Matter messages heard during the entire campaign was a Sanders video featuring Erica Garner talking about her father, but Garner was an inconvenient figure for the narrative. As black progressive Leslie Lee III said in March 2016:

“Me, myself, and many other POC, people of color, who support Bernie Sanders, feel like we don’t get to be a part of the conversation. We get ignored. We get erased. It’s assumed that the black vote, the Hispanic vote, and everyone is all behind Hillary Clinton and none of us really get Bernie Sanders or like Bernie Sanders.”

In March of 2016, exasperated Sanders-voting POC even employed the hashtag #BernieMadeMeWhite, joking that a love of the band Journey and pumpkin spiced lattes would accrue with our new race status. Other, more sardonic, tweeters celebrated the immunity from police violence their newfound caucacity might bring. Ironically, whiteness—when attributed to blacks—became a punishment rather than a privilege.

Twitter has been an especially revealing host forum to this ugly friction between identity and ideology: there, unapologetically leftist people of color and women are routinely shouted down, called race traitors, self-hating women, or, incredibly, are accused of being white—even by people with white-presenting avatars. Twitter is where you can find a liberal Democrat referring to Our Revolution president Nina Turner  as “Bernie’s Omarosa.” It’s disorienting to see white (and black) liberals calling leftists of color sellouts, Uncle Toms, “coons,” house-slaves, and well, white people, all in the name of anti-racism. But the Bernie Bro framework tells us that all the racists are at the fringes of the political spectrum, while the middle remains pure. Progressive women or leftists of color therefore present a kind of glitch in the matrix. The solution? Deny our existence. Leftists of color are regularly told—by white liberals!—that we are white and/or secretly racist. And while stories about the sexism Clinton supporters faced online are familiar, the racism and sexism directed by the center against the left are ignored. Purported anti-racist Democrats stayed largely silent as an Islamophobic smear campaign was waged against progressive black Muslim Representative Keith Ellison, one of the ugliest instances of bigotry to come out of the Democratic Party in recent history.

The same kind of hypocrisy could be seen in Gloria Steinem’s inane quip that young women who supported Bernie must be in it for “the boys.” A feminist icon struggled so much to make sense of the inconvenient fact that a majority of young women supported Sanders that she fell back on the same basic gender stereotypes she has been fighting since the 1960s. But this is the dissonance created by a certain conception of identity: if we believe that Hillary Clinton is “the candidate of women and people of color,” and “women and people of color” are defined entirely by those identities, it becomes impossible to understand how anyone who shares the identity could reject the candidate. Once the distinction between perspective and identity is erased, voters of color become an undifferentiated hive mind incapable of political independence.

It’s strange that we’re at the point where this needs to be said: a black politician is not necessarily the best politician to promote black interests, and a female politician will not necessarily serve women’s interests better than a man would. Race produces a set of lived experiences that inform our political perspective, but identity cannot be used as a mitigating factor for political shortcomings. A glance at the unusually diverse 2016 Republican primary field illustrates as much. If we believe that a political candidate’s identity overrides their substantive beliefs and policy prescriptions, then a Ben Carson/Carly Fiorina ticket would have been a progressive dream. Brittney Cooper of Cosmopolitan, in her defense of Harris, makes a good point here: Cooper says that, despite a history of performing the role, black people should not be cast as “the conscience of the nation.” The burden is too heavy for any group, and it certainly exceeds the capacity of any single politician. Belonging to a protected class does not immunize a politician from error, nor should it insulate her from criticism.

During the 2012 presidential race, Cory Booker went on Meet The Press and defended—of all people—Mitt Romney against criticism of Romney’s work for Bain Capital. Booker, evincing more sympathy for the financial industry than for the disproportionate number of black people affected by the financial industry’s bad acts, told voters to “stop attacking private equity.” Booker was wrong to do so. During the 2016 primary, Representative John Lewis unfairly impugned Bernie Sanders’ character, implying that because Lewis hadn’t personally seen Sanders in the crowd of hundreds of thousands at the 1963 March on Washington, Sanders was probably lying about having gone. Lewis, likewise, was wrong to do so. Democrats defending Hillary Clinton’s support of the 1994 Crime Bill relish pointing out that two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus voted in favor of it. But those members, too, were wrong—despite being black. The other members of the CBC, the ones who opposed the bill, were right. Likewise, the contemporary equivalent of that dissenting third—the black voters who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary—should not be erased because other quantities of black people disagree. Any statement about what “black people” think or support automatically discounts the perspective of very large numbers of us, because—as is often said but rarely internalized—black people are not a monolith. Identity is, at best, a loose proxy for a person’s political commitments, and individual identity groups contain incredibly diverse perspectives. Failure to recognize that fact can result in dangerous consequences: it can lead us to support policies contrary to the best interests of a community simply because of optics, and it can turn us into a “firewall” to lean on, rather than a constituency to be won.

Even worse, because the optics are improved, it can actually become harder to combat the harm posed by in-group bad actors: a black-run police force can be just as harmful to a black community as one headed by whites, but the optics of equal representation can obscure the reality of systemic racism. Hillary Clinton was widely accepted as the best candidate for what are considered “women’s issues,” such as protecting the right to choose and ensuring access to reproductive care, even though Bernie Sanders had a nearly-identical track record. Yet even though Clinton almost automatically received endorsements from Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and other women’s organizations, she chose as her Vice Presidential nominee a senator who had historically been a staunch opponent of abortion rights. As governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine had advocated for adoption over abortion, pushed for abstinence-only education, and even supported a law requiring that minors seeking to end their pregnancies get parental approval. This history would ordinarily have caused outrage among reproductive rights advocates, who see abortion as a non-negotiable issue. (Witness the trouble Sanders got into after giving a speech supporting an anti-abortion mayoral candidate in Nebraska.) But Clinton’s gender insulated her from scrutiny with respect to women’s issues. Those who challenged Clinton’s VP choice on the grounds that it demonstrated a lack of commitment to feminist principles were—ironically—dismissed as “bros,” regardless of our gender. In short: the interest in Hillary as a woman candidate trumped interest in having the best candidate for women.

The recent backlash to rumors about Kamala Harris’s potential 2020 candidacy shows how this bizarre and cynical version of “identity politics” continues to be used as a weapon to derail progressives whose record of commitment to racial justice, gender equality, and LGBT issues has historically eclipsed that of the Democratic Party itself. Using identity this way is harmful to the interests of progressive politics. Leftists, particularly leftists of color, are invested in ensuring that the Democratic Party learns from its mistakes. To that end, we are committed to helping the party put forward candidates who are less vulnerable to the types of attacks which dogged Hillary – that she was a corporatist, that she was owned by Wall Street, that she could not be trusted.  That is why we question candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Deval Patrick – all floated as 2020 possibilities in recent weeks. Though each of them has at least one black parent, it is intellectually dishonest to pretend it is that quality, rather than their corporatism, which draws criticism from the left. (And with Nina Turner emerging as the presumptive heiress to Bernie’s progressive leadership, it is increasingly difficult to credibly contend otherwise.) It is natural to be skeptical of an out-group member’s views about a subject important to members of that group—especially when certain race or gender-based factions have historically been in conflict. But the inquiry into whether to listen to a particular critic cannot stop at that critic’s identity.

Of course, identity still matters, and prejudice operates in subtle and pervasive ways. On one level, my instinct is to agree with those who say all Harris’s critics are racist: the truth is that everyone is racist. But our culture’s conscious and unconscious biases won’t be resolved before 2020, and until they are, we must rely on something more than mere identity to determine the legitimacy of political criticism. It’s fair to ask of a critic: are you able to articulate a reason why you are wary of a candidate? Do, they, for instance, cite the candidate’s conservative “tough on crime” approach to criminal justice, or do they trade in gendered stereotypes, dog-whistles, or vague statements of “feeling” that suggest an ulterior motive?  This analytical step is crucial: a critic should not be impugned on the basis of a candidate’s identity, but on the soundness of the critique itself. Nor should a critic be ignored because of their own identity, without  anything more. After all: biology is not (political) destiny.

Harris, Booker, Patrick, Biden, Warren: all deserve scrutiny. So does any other potential candidate. That scrutiny should be applied evenly, in proportion to a candidate’s likelihood of success and the quality of their record. It’s not an act of racism to question whether the Democratic Party should select as its presidential nominee a career prosecutor with a controversial record on misconduct issues. Pretending that these candidates are criticized solely on the basis of race or gender is, in itself, a lesser form of prejudice: it erases their flaws, and flattens their humanity. Treating people as people requires acknowledgment of their imperfections. To err, after all, is human.

Briahna Joy Gray co-hosts the SWOTI podcast: https://www.swotipod.com/ She can be followed on Twitter @briebriejoy