"Identity Politics and Spiritual Politics: Our Dance of Connection and Separation"

"What will it mean to be white, Black, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American in the late twenty-first century? What exactly will the loss of a white majority bring? Because our identities are relational, it will at least suggest that no one and no one group will be able to dominate entirely. After years of apparent stability, white people may wake up in a neighborhood or country that feels unfamiliar and in which they are a “minority.” Then the question sneaks in: what does it mean to be American now?...

We are experiencing the decline of the enlightenment project. The pillars of this project, based in Europe and the United States, gave us the separation and dominance of reason over other ways of knowing and placed humans in a position of dominance over nature. It reiterated sexist notions of men’s dominance over women and racist and colonial notions of Europeans’ dominance over non-European people. It promised a world of light without darkness, an orderly park instead of a defiant forest, a secular disenchanted world of logic, reason divorced from emotion, and a radically self-contained modern self. But these were promises that it could not keep. The very effort was fraught with fear and anxiety. And this anxiety was projected into a world that then needed to be controlled and dominated. This included the apparent “other”—women, people of color, the disabled, and of course, the earth itself...

Many argue against a focus on or concern for our identity based on an assumption that what has been called “identity politics” is too narrow and divisive. Those who make this argument imply that identity politics is something only marginalized groups are concerned with such as women, people of color, gays and lesbians, and the disabled, while the more “serious” folks are attending to important things like politics and the economy... many of the demands of identity groups are in fact about belonging to and having full membership within society, including, but not limited to, economic status. Why are the fights for job access by blacks and equal pay by women labeled identity issues and not political or economic ones? Class and identity in the United States have always been bound up with race and gender. As such, most demands from identity groups could be better understood as structural and related to both class and politics."

http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/identity-politics-and-spiritual-politics-our-dance-of-connection-and-separation-2

Mm all these questions, all these framings. This is the mire of being American, exactly!