T

hese days, buzzwords from the United States travel fast to Indonesia. Recently, news reports and columns have adopted several terms that are common in the English-speaking world — terms like “fake news,” “post-truth” and “identity politics.”

And it seems that the whole world shares the same troubles. We are as concerned about fake news as Indians and the British are. We become irritated when family members and old school friends share news from dubious websites on an impending riot or on the pope converting to Islam.

We are as concerned about the post-truth world as Australians and Koreans are. Some taxi drivers insist that our President is a communist; a friend’s mother is worried that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) is making a comeback.

Finally, identity politics. Indonesians talk about it in relation to the Jakarta gubernatorial election, and always in the negative sense. Identity politics is often cited when talking about the Islamist rallies held over the last four months and on the repeated calls for Muslims to vote for a Muslim candidate.

On the other hand, some Christian and Chinese Jakartans worry that the overwhelming support for Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama from their communities is also a form of identity politics that can be counterproductive.

In short, Indonesians see identity politics as a tendency that unnecessarily divides people. It is also seen as a devious plot to appeal to people’s base instincts and to persuade them to put religious and ethnic identities above the interests of nation.

Even in the US, identity politics is still a controversial term with several detractors. Centrists blame it for the victory of Donald Trump in the recent American presidential election. By appealing to all minorities except the white working class, Hillary Clinton seemed to foolishly give away much of the American vote to Trump.

Socialists in the US and Indonesia also blame identity politics. For socialist-leaning Indonesians, the biggest lesson from America is that by neglecting the poor, the merry band of liberal capitalists allow them to be swayed by radical right wingers.

Some socialists even applauded the mass anti-Ahok rallies as a manifestation of Jakartans’ resistance to Ahok’s pro-capitalist policies.

For those who can be labeled American socialists and Marxists, identity politics distracts people from the real issues — inequality and class conflicts. Here identity politics is understood as the struggle of the minorities to be accepted and to be heard.

There are racial minorities, such as African-Americans, religious minorities, such as Muslim Americans, and sex and gender minorities, such as the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

In this decade, American minority groups have been fighting more intensively for visibility and rights in the mass media and in politics. We have seen how cartoon and comic heroes of the 1980s are reimagined as black people, as women and as gay people.

We have seen how history unearths the roles of minorities in the past, nulling the traditional narrative that a nation was built by a homogenous people or even single-handedly by one man.

For centrists and the far left, such a movement is politically unviable. It alienates the public, is trivial and only serves the elite. Yet identity politics is important for any country.

Many people, including academics, confuse identity politics with the conservative ideology that is gripping the US and so many other countries — ethnic nationalism. Trump is surrounded by white nationalist advisors and secretaries who believe that white Christianity (excluding churches of African-Americans) must become the captain of American politics, and who believe that the US must join other white nationalists in Europe to fight Islam and China.

In Indonesia, ethnic nationalists believe that Indonesia must remain an Islamic and conservative Javanese nation, otherwise it will be taken over by the Chinese and communists, i.e., nonreligious liberals. These nativists, of course, are different from young Chinese-Indonesians who are proud of their Chinese heritage, gay people who believe that homosexuality is an integral part of Indonesian culture and Javanese who want their traditional faiths officially recognized.

The confusion arises because we take nationalists to be decent, selfless people. Because we hope that as a nation, we are color-blind and secular. In fact, every nation whitewashes its history, omitting its minorities, and thinks that the women’s perspective is less important than the men’s.

Identity politics fights this continued ignorance; it is resistant to standard politics where the only ones who matter are men from the ethnic and religious majority.

Identity politics is very treacherous to navigate. Indonesian feminists cheered the global Women’s March in January, as part of protests against President Trump, which soon faced two objections from minorities and their supporters.

First, transgender women and non-binary people believed that the application of the vagina as a symbol of the movement excluded them. Second, many Muslim women didn’t like the adoption of the hijab as a symbol of Muslim women, since while in the US it could be a symbol of multiculturalism, in the Islamic world wearing a hijab doesn’t always come from personal choice.

But it doesn’t mean that identity politics is counterproductive. It is a long, exhausting road full of debate, mistrust and frustration, but it remains necessary. It is very important, even for socialism.

In most countries, socialism still relies on the thoughts of European men who were born 100 to 200 years ago and needs input from modern thinkers worldwide who grew up facing sexism, racism and homophobia.

We are in a long fight against ethnic nationalism, which wants to take the world back to the age of colonialism. Identity politics seems to be fragmenting and dividing, but in fact it is important to reveal who we are as humans, who we are as a nation. We can achieve true progress only if we admit the truth of past instances of discrimination and fix them.
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The writer is The New Guy columnist for feminist website Magdalene.co. The views expressed are his own.