“Identity Politics” Illuminates Past, Present

As you reflect on Veterans Day, Khalilah L. Brown-Dean asks you to think of Jimmie Lee Jackson and Leonard Matlovich.

And when you think of them she wants you to consider how their identities and the politics and policies that shaped their lives still have much to teach us today.

Brown-Dean, an associate professor of political science at Quinnipiac University who lives in Westville, is the author of the new book Identity Politics in the United States.

On Sunday evening, she read aloud from her work before a full house at Kehler Liddell Gallery on Whalley Avenue and talked about why she chose to write a book about a phrase that became a pejorative during the last presidential cycle.

She told the audience that when she couldn’t have one more discussion, read one more article, or see one more meme on social media that oversimplified the results of the 2016 election, she followed the advice of the late author Toni Morrison: Write the book you want to read.

Brown-Dean said she wrote the book so that people remember that ​“past is always prologue in the United States.”

She talked about Jackson, an Alabama native who was deemed fit to fight for his country during the Vietnam War but not fit to vote because of the color of his skin. He died while peacefully pushing for voting rights after being shot by an Alabama state trooper.

She spoke about Matlovich, another Vietnam War veteran who also was deemed fit to fight, until he outed himself as gay.

Brown-Dean’s book includes a picture of Matlovich’s tombstone. The inscription on the tombstone reads: ​“When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”

Brown-Dean argued that identity politics matter in a 21st-century world where non-citizen immigrants serving in the military and their children have a more uncertain path to citizenship in spite of their service and the ongoing inconsistency in policies regarding the right to serve for people who are LGBTQIA+. Identity politics always mattered.

They mattered when Brown-Dean was ​“a little brown girl with a big Arabic name” growing up in Lynchburg, Virginia. It was a time, she said, when Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was amplifying the political voice of the Christian right. That voice didn’t resonate with her own Southern Baptist upbringing. But that voice had the power to make change, according to Brown-Dean’s book.

And identity politics matter now that she has the ability to help educate young minds in the classroom and raise a little brown girl growing up during a time when young people are again leading and organizing around the big issues of the day including civil rights and climate change.

When the time for questions came at Sunday evening’s event, the audience naturally asked about the lessons of the recent elections and how identity politics might shape the coming presidential election in 2020.

Brown-Dean’s response: It’s not just about Donald Trump.

Brown-Dean said she’s been known to critique both major political parties, third parties and independents alike. But, she said, ​“if you make the 2020 election just about Donald Trump, you have already ceded your power.”

Catch more of the Q&A in the video below. As well as Brown-Dean’s recent appearance on WNHH FM’s LoveBabz LoveTalk radio show.