Strategic Essentialism

Description

1. From the Wikipedia:

"It refers to a strategy that nationalities, ethnic groups or minority groups can use to present themselves. While strong differences may exist between members of these groups, and amongst themselves they engage in continuous debates, it is sometimes advantageous for them to temporarily 'essentialize' themselves and bring forward their group identity in a simplified way to achieve certain goals.

Strategic essentialism, a major concept in postcolonial theory was introduced by the Indian literary critic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_essentialism)

2. Steven Lawrence:

"In the Atlantic article, Where the New Identity Politics Went Wrong, Mounk introduces the term and provides useful information about the history of the unfolding influence of postmodern philosophers, anti-racist legal scholars, and decolonization activists in the development of this ideology, which, according to Mounk based on his research on postcolonial thinkers (see Gayatri Spivak), relies heavily on the adoption of “Strategic Essentialism” to achieve a socially just world. Strategic essentialism means that we intentionally adopt a strong and sturdy identity based on our sociocultural characteristics (or demographic makeup) and to assign traits to the inner lives and outer actions of all people based on their membership in a demographic group. Embracing essentialism means that there are essential characteristics of all Black people, all white people, all women, all genders, all men, and so forth. It is from the foundation of strategic essentialism that scholars have developed the almost metaphysical categories of Blackness and Whiteness, as though there were something deeply true at the core of each metaphysical category — a kind of spirit or vibe that is said to suffuse the entire existence of those who belong to these groups, including thoughts, beliefs, actions, behaviors, and even assumptions about all of reality in all its dimensions.

As Mounk (and decolonization scholars themselves!) has noted, it doesn’t matter that the “essence” that is spoken of is empirically falsifiable (able to be discovered through objective analysis of facts). What matters is that the strategy of assigning a totalizing essence to entire groups is effective in winning rights for those groups that have been deemed marginalized or oppressed. To put it in oversimplified cartoonish terms, this strategy involves the design of a heuristic (an intentionally simplistic teaching tool or framework) that depicts one demographic group as essentially bad and another demographic group as essentially good, then whatever we do to the bad demographic group becomes justifiable."

(https://groundexperience.substack.com/p/carrying-a-message-further-part-8)