In places governed by an honour politics, it is somewhat gauche to be mainly in the business of defending one’s own honour when it is under attack. Normally, it is the job of the person of the highest rank in a dynamic to defend the honour of those of lower rank. In this way, if a lady of rank and standing, a doña, let us say, is dishonoured, it is the responsibility of the nearest don to do something about it, to reprimand, assault or otherwise punish the offender for an etiquette breach like sounding too familiar (maybe using the tu pronoun instead of usted), or failing to bow as deeply as a difference in rank might merit, or inappropriately chewing, touching or spitting in her presence.
When one stands up for the honour of one less honourable, this does not merely defend their honour, successfully standing up causes honour to redound to you. In this way, a butler might defend the honour of the scullion he supervises; the lady of the house might defend her gardener; etc. Putting one’s own time and body on the line to defend the honour of others, even others not present, merely insulted in an indiscreet dinner conversation does not merely make you more honourable. Honour systems are social economies and so, the total amount of honour in the system also increases, the more exchange and competition there is over it, just like in the money economy.
For this reason, fights over honour are not a problem; they are a solution. It is in everyone’s interest for as many people as possible to be fighting about as much as possible. Consequently, the taking of offense on one’s own behalf or that of others has strong and constant incentives.
One can see this both within Identitarian communities and in Identitarian interactions with those outside their communities: offense-taking is a cultural practice that is cheered on, that produces minor day-to-day heroes and is fostered in new and exciting ways by modern social media platforms.
But for all the novelty we associate with the taking and communication of offense, Identitarianism is a deeply conservative set of movements. By this I mean that Identitarian movements are deeply invested in the reinvigoration of traditional forms of identity, often in reaction to liberation movements seeking to dismantle them.
We see this in what is arguably the first Identitarian social movement, Elijah Mohammed’s Nation of Islam (today led by Louis Farrakhan). In post-war America, there was a major invigoration of black liberation movements for a variety of reasons, from a sense of entitlement, camaraderie and confidence among black soldiers on the Second World War, the need to compete internationally with an anti-racist foreign power, the USSR, the continued Great Migration making black votes more plentiful and useful.
People like Paul Robeson, Richard Wright and others responded to this by redoubling their activism for socialism, arguing, correctly, that blackness was a thing co-created with capitalism, that race was an elaboration, a leavening agent of capitalist labour systems, something arising from class whose oppression functioned synergistically with it to keep workers divided and rightless. Robeson’s strategy was to build solidarity with working class and racialized people globally, to support miners’ strikes in Wales and South Africa and to deliver the message that there was a single culprit, capitalism, for the misery of workers. When the scales fell from people’s eyes and they saw that race was just a tool to divide the working class, working people would find the solidarity they needed to overthrow capitalism.
But Robeson, Wright and their comrades faced a new national security state apparatus that saw socialism (especially socialist internationalism) as treason and visited both anti-communist propaganda and persecution on America on a vast scale, labeling the movement as godless and anti-Christian, among other things.
It makes sense, then, that the more successful strategic response emerged in the form of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (the SCLC) that presented a more palatable anti-racist universalism. The movement that brought Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence also engaged in a rhetoric that sought to dissolve, to abolish race as a category: that of being colourless before God.
King and his allies preached a doctrine that in God’s eyes, race did not exist that God himself was, as one sympathetic author put it, “the colour of water.” King’s rhetoric was also effective in casting all people possessing race, not just black people, as suffering oppression and injustice at the hands of racism. Everyone was impoverished socially, culturally and personally by the barriers between essentially similar human beings by a trick of the mind that caused them to falsely see difference where there was none.
It is against these two movements that what we might think of as the first proto-Identitarian social movement emerged: NOI.
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The problem, they explained, was that things had been screwed up by an evil Jew. According to what is called “the Myth of Yakub,” a Libyan Jew of the fourth century BCE had genetically engineered a scourge on the other races by creating “White Devils.” White Devils, or modern white people, were then an aberration of the divine order, and maliciously designed to inflict evil and suffering on the world.
The true master race, the Moors (Black and Arabic people), had been subject to a brutal campaign of oppression by the Jews and the White Devils for millennia in order to prevent them from taking their rightful place at the head of the human race.
Rather than challenge the idea of race or even the justice of a racial hierarchy, the complaint of NOI remains, to this day, that the correct and just racial hierarchy of God has been inverted into the incorrect and unjust racial hierarchy of the White Devils and their Jewish masters. In this way, not only does NOI seek to reinforce the idea of race and the pseudoscience of scientific racism, it also has been able to nurture classic 1930s-style anti-Semitism.
But NOI did not merely limit itself to defending race and racism. A major part of its agenda was an attack on the failings of black gender politics, teaching a particularly austere form of black respectability politics. Women could not serve in the kinds of public leadership positions they could in the Black Church; women’s dress was more carefully policed and their sartorial choices narrowed to garments that were both strongly expressive of sexual dimorphism and modest and austere in their colours and shapes. While the Jews and White Devils were trying to force women outside through the home by depressing black wages, NOI members were to redouble their efforts to become single-income families.
NOI men were routinely compared favourably to other black men. NOI men were faithful in marriage; NOI men protected ‘their’ women; NOI men supported their families; NOI men did not beg, did not ask for help, did not complain to white people about their sorrows; they were independent, industrious and self-sufficient. And NOI mocked the SCLC for their effeminate adoption of non-violence, rather than holding the paramilitary drills NOI held for the inevitable “race war.”
In addition to defending race and gender as universal pillars of a divine order, NOI also generated new forms of offense-giving and offense-taking, directed primarily not at whites but at non-NOI Blacks. Like actual Muslims, NOI members swore off pork, the primary meat of 1950s black America. Family gatherings with NOI converts became sites of conflict over sumptuary laws; traditional family foods and recipes could be rejected or fought-over; or additional expense could be incurred by a host to avoid such conflict and generate its own complexities.
More fraught still, was the matter of the name. A crucial part of conversion was the rejection of one’s “slave name” and the adoption of a “Muslim” name. In all cases, this entailed the rejection of the family name one had inherited through one’s father because it could likely be traced back to one’s ancestor’s owner’s name. But it also often entailed the adoption of a new given name. This might instill a sense of rejection, not just in a proud and conservative father whose name might no longer live on through the generations but in the mother and father who chose the person’s name at birth.
Conflicts over name did not just arise through intentional provocation
and grievance-raising; they primarily arose through habit. Family members,
especially older ones, not to mention family friends might refer to a convert
by their given name out of habit or out of a failure to apprehend that the new
name was a replacement, rather than an addition to a given name, something
African Americans were used to, having a complex and rich set of cultural
practices around nicknames and diminutives.
In this way, some of the poorest and least powerful Americans built a cultural
movement that made conservative anti-feminist retrenchment, conservative
anti-racist retrenchment and a new system of etiquette and offense available to
people previously unable to participate in a traditionally elite form of social
behaviour.
And it is important to recognize that while Identitarianism is conservative in the sense of seeking to reinforce threatened and crumbling ideas of gender and race; it is democratic in the sense of seeking, however inefficiently or fruitlessly, to make honour politics universally available to all people.
