Elvis and Identity Politics

Elvis with B. B. King, circa 1957

I have been meaning to write something about identity politics (and its hazards) for ages.

Last night I dug out an old article from 2002, published in a well-known left-leaning newspaper, in which the writer asserted baldly that Elvis Presley had appropriated the songs of Black artists such as Little Richard and Chuck Berry “and got rich and famous off others’ work“.

Hip hop artists like Macklemore and Public Enemy went further, with the former calling Presley out for being “so plastic, you’ve heisted the magic“.  In 1989’s “Fight the Power“, Chuck D went straight in, calling Presley a racist.

While there’s a lot to admire from both artists, their knowledge of history and grasp of social nuance was sadly lacking in the case of Presley.

Chuck D comparing Presley to John Wayne in the same song – the latter a man who made explicitly racist remarks on the record – is almost unforgivable.

I’ll explain more in my next post, but for now here are some thoughts which I hope might spur some healthy and open-hearted discussion about a complex issue.

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All of us should keep developing and changing right up to the day we die.

Having said that, as someone now in their 7th decade on this earth, there are a few – just a few – personal truths which have stood the test of decades.

One of these truths is that every human being wants to feel a sense of control over their life and destiny.

Some people achieve this sense of personal control and agency through personal development.

Some choose to place their fate entirely in the hands of their God (or they pursue their own human desires, and later claim “Divine Agency”).

But other people come to believe that the easiest, best, or only way to achieve a sense of personal control and agency is through the control of other people.

They want power.

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Almost every single negative aspect to life as a human dealing with other human beings can be traced to someone’s lust or desire for more power.

At the most basic level, most people simply want enough power to resist those who attempt to impose their power over us – this is the basic desire to not live in fear.

Even though this writer can be called a “Leftie” for most practical conversations, on many fundamental levels I find myself often at odds with what might be termed “Academic Leftism”.

This is the type of Leftist politics so common today (especially online), in which “enemies” must be identified – quite literally – by giving these enemies an “identity”.

In this way of viewing the world, certain “identities” are often framed as “natural enemies” of social justice and equality and must be called-out or “cancelled”.

In other words, we are supposed to disempower our “enemies”.

At the same time, we are supposed to support any measure which further empowers our “allies”.

No real discussions can take place within this paradigm, because actually trying to understand why others think and say the things they do gets shoved aside.

We become hyper-vigilant in our search for signs of bad faith.

Understanding gets set aside in favor of measuring people against various ideological “purity tests”.

These purity tests include checking whether people buy into the entire “Leftist Ideological Kit”.

Failure to tick every box without question can mean being labelled an “enemy” instead of an “ally”.

I learned this last year when I wrote a piece about Buffy St. Marie being “outed” as a non-Indigenous person claiming Indigenous ancestry.

While certainly not condoning cultural appropriation, I had argued that St. Marie was the inevitable product of the racism deeply embedded in American society over centuries.

This invitation to imagine being another person, and to consider empathy in place of condemnation, did not go down well with some.

Black is Black, White is White, and identity, far from being a complex and mutable interplay between ancestry, cultural upbringing and lived experience, is a line in the sand between “The Good Guys” and “The Bad Guys”.

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When we simply look at the “usual suspects” in power today, and create an “enemies list”, we are in danger of playing the worst kind of identitarian politics.

We are fighting symptoms instead of the cause, or putting the cart before the horse (pick your idiom).

COERCIVE AND UNJUST EXERCISE OF POWER IS THE ULTIMATE ENEMY.

And it occurs at every level of society, among all genders, all economic classes.

A working- or middle-class mother psychologically bullying and traumatising her 8-year-old child is committing the same crime as an authoritarian dictator – it’s simply a question of scale.

Both involve the unjust and coercive exercise of power.

Colonialism, racism, patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, bigotry, white Christian nationalism – name your poison – ALL are SYMPTOMS of the underlying problem.

I have spent years trying to explain that racism did not lead to slavery.

The selfish quest for money/power led to slavery, and racism is the “justification” which got tacked-on later.

The same formula works when explaining patriarchy. An insecure man wants the power to control a woman. Women’s “shortcomings” or “inabilities” are the “justifications” for a patriarchal system tacked-on afterwards.

Identitarian, academic Leftism doesn’t take into account one of the oldest facts of human existence.

This fact is the existence of greater and lesser power hierarchies which cross and pervade all social categories – men, women, children, and fellow animals.

In my younger, coarser days, this was simply called the “shit rolls downhill” theory.

Company owner wants a new car.  Sets unrealistic sales targets for management.  Rank and file workers are made to work unpaid overtime.  Man goes home and shouts at his wife.  Stressed wife is short-tempered with the children.  Damaged kid goes outside and kicks the dog…

A child slapped around by its mother sees matriarchy, not patriarchy, from their position in the greater hierarchy.

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The problems of this world will not be solved by placing people into neat categories of “enemy” or “ally”, or as “oppressors” and “victims”, based on terms, catch-phrases, or identities neatly laid-out in someone’s academic thesis.

Diagrams showing “intersectionalities” can sometimes appear very 2D in a 3D world.

We are all oppressors AND victims in some way, somehow.  Again, it’s always a matter of degree.

Sometimes I think of the shaken young gunman in the 1992 film “Unforgiven“, as the kid sought to sooth his own conscience and justify his killing with the remark “Well, I guess they had it coming“.

Clint Eastwood‘s character William Munny replied “Kid, we’ve all got it coming.”

For every “old white guy” out there wielding power unfairly today, there will be an “old white woman” (or Black, or Asian, or Latina woman) happy to do the same tomorrow, if we ignore the underlying truth that the desire for power, and the temptation to wield it unjustly, crosses all ethnic, religious, economic, and gender boundaries.

None of the foregoing is intended to suggest that we shouldn’t be fighting for an equitable society, or indeed, calling-out the various symptoms.

But sometimes it seems as if The Left has descended into arguments about the best cough remedy, when what the patient really needs is to shut down the coal-fired power plant belching out smoke next door.

At its deepest core, it’s a power (and class?) struggle, not a struggle between identities.

And Elvis wasn’t a “white guy appropriating Black culture”.

More anon…