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...who spoke that day, was solicited address the audience of protestors who had come to Washington to demand voting rights for African Americans. From the vantage point of 2003, the interviewer was curious how the organizers of a civil-rights march could have overlooked such obvious sexism in the midst of their fight against racism. Norton replied, "Well, shame on us! This was before the women's rights movement, and we didn't even realize, we did not even recognize, this injustice that was being done. We did not even think about it at that time, although as soon as three years later we were certainly aware of that type of thing." (1)
As Norton's remark reveals, a political identity does not arise spontaneously. Instead, by using categories of race, gender, and class to define an unequal distribution of rights and privileges, liberal democratic societies compel some of their members to identify with others of a similar ethnic, sexual, or economic character. In general, only those group definitions that have been used to restrict access to power will become self-conscious and gain salience, in the act of contesting--or protecting--the exclusions that constitute them.
Thus, movements form around issues of gender, race, or class, not because people feel a need to express a primary commitment to such shared identities, but rather because these categories have regulated the distribution of the goods of a liberal society. The emergence of new political identities therefore signals some shortcoming of the democratic system. We should think of such mobilizations, as Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres suggest, as a miner's canary, warning us of the poisonous gases of entrenched power threatening the health of our democracy. (2)
In this essay I explore the implications of constructivist theories of identity formation for liberal democratic politics. These theories pay particular attention to the origins and characteristics of political identities, and therefore imply a particular set of obligations and opportunities for liberal democratic societies. On one hand, democrats are obliged to engage in democratic deliberation with so-called identity groups. Because of the way the state itself is implicated in forging such groups, through its exclusions, the public sphere must be open to challenges and contestations that have the potential to expand or transform the scope of the public sphere itself. This cycle creates opportunities for democratic legitimation and holds out the promise of democratic renewal.
Identity is not only a possible ground of politics; it is also an effect of politics. People are attached to their race, gender, and ethnicity to the extent that the state has inscribed certain referents--such as skin color, language, beliefs, and practices--as important markers of differential access to resources. Therefore, we can no longer be content to treat categories like race and ethnicity as exogenous to the political process--the spontaneous result of a universal, but not readily analyzable, need for group membership. Instead, we should delve into the role institutions, discourses, and policies play in producing the terms of political contestation. (3)
Constructivist theorists of identity formation focus on how institutions, in particular, structure incentives and lived experience in ways that make some affiliations seem more natural, useful, or significant than others. Take, for example, 'the English working class.' E. P....
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