The very categories used to sort and suppress us are also the ones we keep reaching for as shields. Using identity as a political tool can do more work to uphold the system than fight back against it.
There is a scene early in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's story "The Finkelstein 5" where the protagonist Emmanuel performs a kind of daily arithmetic on himself. He makes sure to wear a tie, very professional shoes, lower the volume of his voice, and keep his hands still and by his side. Each choice he carefully makes in order to shave fractions off a number the story refers to as his "Blackness level."
"If he wore a tie, wing-tipped shoes, smiled constantly, used his indoor voice, and kept his hands strapped and calm at his sides, he could get his Blackness as low as 4.0." Adjei-Brenyah, 2018, p. 2
Adjei-Brenyah chooses the Blackness scale to center his story because it's absurd and outlandish, but it's also an impactful quantifier that describes the choices that we make every day. Quantifying identity on a scale is a ridiculous thing to do, but in the real world we do the same thing as Emmanuel, we take actions and present ourselves in a way to fit in a society centered around capital. To be hyper-aware of how we present ourselves and adjust ourselves accordingly is to be successful. We can analyze and take from the Blackness scale and apply these learnings to the real world, analyzing Emmanuel as being rational to hyperfixate on his Blackness given the world he lives in.
I. The Label Is Not the Liberation
Race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and other identities that people hold are real in the sense that they produce real material consequences, like employment opportunities in Emmanuel's case. The racism Emmanuel experiences at the mall is one of the many examples of institutional racism in the story, but when analyzing this on a deeper level, we can see that it is a mechanism for protecting capital by criminalizing Black presence. There is a crucial difference between acknowledging that oppression takes place on categories of a person's identity, and treating that identity as the sole problem to solve.
The damage of this distraction of identity does not stop there. The concept of Blackness and it being used as a threat harms all working class people. It actively prevents the kind of cross-racial solidarity that might threaten the system producing that constraint in the first place. When Blackness is constructed as something dangerous, something to be feared or managed, White working-class people are given a scapegoat to pin the blame on their Black counterparts for the problems they face. The shared material conditions that both White and Black working class people share, whether it be wage slavery, the exploitation of their labour, or lack of access to basic human rights become invisible behind the identity division. The owning class does not need to actively police and enforce that solidarity when the division in identity does the work for them.
In the story of the Finkelstein 5, identity is used as a weapon to divide working class people. The scale of Blackness as it exists hurts every working class person by giving Black people a goal to assimilate into the system, and gives non-Black people a measuring stick in order to judge Black people. If Blackness and identity as a whole becomes the main way people see each other, it is clear that the owning class is the one who gains the most when the societal issues are examined and class consciousness is not mentioned.
II. Individualism Masquerading as Liberation
There is another brief scene in Adjei-Brenyah's story that can be perceived more directly as collectivism. Emmanuel's friend Boogie recalls his conversation with his uncle about a man falling asleep on the bus. This speaks more about how the sleeping man is treated rather than the man's individual actions.
"He said that when you're on the bus and a tired man is kinda leaning over beside you, using your shoulder like a pillow, people tell you to wake him up. They'll try to sell it to you that the man needs to wake up and find some other place to rest 'cause you ain't a goddamn mattress."
"But if he's sleeping on his own, not bothering you, it's supposed to be different. And if that sleeping man gets ran up on by somebody that wants to take advantage of him 'cause he's asleep, 'cause he's so tired, everybody tries to tell you we're supposed to be, like, 'That's not my problem, that don't got a thing to do with me,' as he gets his pockets all the way ran through or worse."
"That man sleeping on the bus, he's your brother. That's what my uncle's saying. You need to protect him. Yeah, you might need to wake him up, but while he's asleep, he's your responsibility. Your brother, even if you ain't met him a day in your life, is your business. Feel me?" Adjei-Brenyah, 2018, pp. 7–8
The way Boogie's uncle tells the story is impactful. "They'll try to sell it to you" shows that in a capitalist society, individualism is what you should subscribe to. The counter to this is to name the sleeping man as your brother. This relationship has nothing to do with mutual benefit or personal choice, or anything related to the selfishness of individualism. In most American cities, the bus is a working-class space. Rejecting individualism for collectiveness in a setting of a working class space is what builds class consciousness.
This is precisely what an identity-first politics can undermine. A society that treats people by their identity categories inherently incentivizes people to compete within it, to climb the social ladder by distinguishing themselves from others in their class position. The person who manages to reduce their Blackness does not thereby become free from judgement. In doing so, they have complied with the system that measured them by this metric in the first place. The hypothetical solidarity between the man in the tie and the man asleep on the bus becomes harder to imagine. The frame they have been given tells them their interests are different.
Individualism dressed up as self-determination is one of the most effective tools capital has ever produced. Under individualism, people understand their liberation as a personal project centered around their own identity. Their identity is a unique combination of traits that they have (like sexuality, gender, or race) or choose to select. Once one is locked into this identity, relating with peers outside of the groups they belong in, and organizing in a class collective to change material conditions is very difficult to do, or maybe even impossible.
III. The Wrong Target
By the story's end, Emmanuel has joined a group carrying out retaliatory killings, targeting white civilians while chanting the names of the Finkelstein 5. The killers are dressed to the nines in suits and dresses. The targets are ordinary people, strangers with no connection to George Wilson Dunn or the verdict that freed him.
Adjei-Brenyah does not frame this as heroism. The killings are in cold blood, and no justice is directly served. The group has taken the logic of identity-based threat and reversed it's direction. The shallow answer to a system that kills Black children is to kill White people back.
While the killings do spread a message of the targets being innocent like the Finkelstein 5 were, the targets are people whose class position is not meaningfully different from Emmanuel's and others in Emmanuel's position. The man asleep on the bus from earlier in the story could easily be one that they killed.
Racial rage when it has no structural analysis beneath it travels exactly where the system wants it to go. The owning class has no interest in Black and White working class people recognizing each other as the uncle's brothers on the bus. Every act of violence where a working class person is killed in the name of the Finkelstein 5 makes that recognition harder. This further perpetuates the lie that the white working class is given, where Blackness is a threat rather than a tool the ruling class weaponizes to sow divide. The ones who own the mall Emmanuel was surveilled in, or the owners of the television networks that broadcast anti-Black sentiment, or any other person complicit in upholding the system never have to directly act to protect their capital. The division that has been sowed amongst the working class has accomplished this for them.
The Finkelstein 5 deserved justice, but the naming killings did not amount to justice, it was just vengeance instead. Vengeance directed at the wrong people leaves the actual architecture of oppression untouched. This becomes very clear in the end of the story at the end, where Emmanuel is shot by police while dropping his bat. He feels his Blackness drop to a nothing point nothing.
"He felt it. The feeling of his Blackness rising to an almighty 10.0... In that moment, with his final thoughts, his last feelings as a member of the world, Emmanuel felt his Blackness slide and plummet to an absolute nothing point nothing." Adjei-Brenyah, 2018, p. 26
The system that measured and managed him from the beginning is the one that ends him. The cop who pulls the trigger to kill him only does so in the manner of protecting the interests of capital, which are the same interests that sought to keep Emmanuel oppressed to begin with.
To tie in the collective framework aspect, we should examine what it can actually look like. Boogie's uncle recognizes this and is a fantastic place to start. The person beside you is your responsibility before you know anything else about them. The responsibility does not lay because your identities align, but because your conditions do. A collective framework is built when people resist the urge to sort themselves into ever smaller categories and instead connect with their fellow human. In doing so, shared material reality becomes the basis for solidarity. Labour organizes across racial lines, tenants recognize that they have power against their landlords, and people's identity is protected without letting it become the end goal. The rage that Emmanuel's group carries is real and it is justified, however the work is in redirecting it toward the people and structures that created the conditions for the Finkelstein 5 to be killed in the first place.