I've always found it absurd that white nationalists bitch the loudest about identity politics when they're the winy snowflakes who fucking invented the goddamn concept. White isn't even a race for Christ sake. There is no Whitestan. There is no traditional white tribe. It's a class concept designed to justify an oligarchy without a royal bloodline. I'm pretty sure that the first "white" guys were just a bunch of slave owners who settled on the superiority of their lack of melanin after they finished taking inventory on eye color and penis size and came to the conclusion that skin was the one thing they had in common that the field hands couldn't lay claim to. In today's divided states of America identity politics are mostly used to keep different genres of poor people at each others throats while the one percent rapes their wives (often literally) and pollutes their land.
This doesn't mean that race and other identities can't have a positive place in society. I take great pride in being a gender-bending Irish (lapsed)Catholic dyke. But if ancestry.com has proven anything it's that their is no such thing as purity. Through centuries of war, rape, and pillaging, we've all become a little bit of everything. There is no biological basis to racial identity. It's all a cultural crap shoot. So go ahead and take pride in being German, just know that you're making a choice to identify with 20% of your DNA and try not to be such a dick about it.
I know a lot of people hate to hear this, but gender identity is the same damn thing. Contrary to popular belief, human beings are not defined by their genitalia anymore than they are by their skin color. We all start out female in utero and are largely shaped by the amount of testosterone we're exposed to during pregnancy. They're are many cultures from Santa Fe to Sulawesi who have acknowledged the existence of three, four, five gender identities for longer than our loafer dragging puritanical medical establishment has recognized the existence of two. (Before the Victorian era, the Johns-Hopkins-class naively believed that male was the only gender and women were simply defective males.)
"So what does this mean!?" I can hear the hysterical cry-babies of the troll army weep through a veil of tears, soiling their pressed Fred Perry polo shirts, "If gender and race aren't determined by biology than people can be anything! Oh the madness!!" Many of my fellow left-wing queermos would now take the time to launch into some kind of complex post-modern argument about the nature of western civilization and dialectical materialism and blah, blah, blah. At the ripe old age of thirty, I've simply grown to old for this shit. I'll leave the intellectual hair-splitting to younger minds and longer attention spans. My only response to what can only be accurately described as the rise of voluntary tribalism is, so the fuck what? If race, gender, and sexuality are fluid concepts then why shouldn't they be at least semi-optional?
Many indigenous American tribal nations took a similar approach, accepting escaped slaves and impoverished paupers into the fold as long as they committed themselves to the tribal order. Even that pillar of Prussian nationalism, Oswald Spengler preached that race was not defined by blood but rather by shared ideals. So what if Rachel Dolezal is whiter than a bleached gym sock? Or Ward Churchill has less Indian blood than George Custer? Or that I identify as a lesbian with a stubby cock and a six o'clock shadow? We've all chosen our tribes and devoted ourselves completely to serving the only communities that feel like home to us. I may not have chosen to be non-binary but I did choose to leave the closet and embrace my spirit above my biology and it saved my life. Why shouldn't everybody be afforded that same opportunity? Isn't this the logical outcome of embracing voluntaryism and individuality?
This may also be the best way to hobble racism and rise above the incessant bitching of identity politics. If we're all whatever the fuck we want then what really matters? As I noted above, class is the real game changer here. When it all comes down to it, the real deciding factor in a capitalist society is cold hard cash and the power it affords. Things like race, gender, religion, and sexuality serve the state as distractions from the common thread that ties us all together. Black kids in Ferguson have far more common ground with rednecks in the Ozarks than the millionaire uncle toms in the Congressional Black Caucus. Honky Rust-Belt casualties in Youngstown have far more reasons to vote for a black radical like Ajamu Baraka than a Wall Street corporate welfare queen like Trump. As I said here before in the wake of the Charlottesville brouhaha, we're all niggers and faggots in the eyes of the one percent.
So pick a tribe, any tribe, dearest motherfuckers. Loose yourself from the shackles of identity tyranny and come together to smash the state that divides us against ourselves and our radical individuality.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.
* Cult of Personality by Living Colour
* Beast of Burden by the Rolling Stones
* She Walks On Me by Hole
* Absolutely Sweet Marie by Bob Dylan
* See America Right by the Mountain Goats
* All Along the Watchtower by the Jimi Hendrix Experience
* Say It Loud- I'm Black and I'm Proud by James Brown
* Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones
* Personality Crisis by New York Dolls
