We contain multitudes. So, act like it.

Boiling people down into single axes of identity when thinking of them politically is a trap. You don’t see whole people and you don’t see their full intentions.

If you’ve spent any time on social media in the last week (and my God why would you willingly do that to yourself?!?), you’ve seen the infographics breaking down voting patterns by identity. All those little red/blue bars, pushing against each other in an electoral tug-o-war, revealing who did what in the ballot box last Tuesday. They’ve often formed the basis for a thousand-and-one hot takes about who’s to blame for the results of the election, who we need to be angry with, who we need to watch out for, and who can rest easy because “we completed the assignment.”

All of that’s given me the “ick” over the last week, because I think it misses some important things, particularly around identity and how we use it.

In her 1997 essay, “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens,” Cathy Cohen points out the political insufficiency of looking at yourself through a single lens:

“The inability of queer politics to effectively challenge heteronormativity rests, in part, on the fact that despite a surrounding discourse which highlights the destabilization and even deconstruction of sexual categories, queer politics has often been built around a simple dichotomy between those deemed queer and those deemed heterosexual…

Undoubtedly, within different contexts various characteristics of our total being-for example, race, gender, class, sexuality-are highlighted or called upon to make sense of a particular situation. However, my concern is centered on those individuals who consistently activate only one characteristic of their identity, or a single perspective of consciousness, to organize their politics, rejecting any recognition of the multiple and intersecting systems of power that largely dictate our life chances.” - Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens”

What I like about Cohen’s point here (and the entire piece — go read it. It’s wonderful) is the word “activate” and the line it draws between our identities as things we are versus things we do. For Cohen, it’s not so much about “being” an axis of identity; it’s about working on the world through that axis of identity, activating it as the vehicle for your engagement in the world, and focusing solely on it instead of the complex system of identities we all are, all the time.

So we can look at exit polls and see what identities voted in which way, but it doesn’t really tell us something wholesale true about the people who make up that group, or whether that axis of identity was at the forefront in the voting booth. Did white women tend to vote for Trump? Yes. But LGBTQ+ folks overwhelmingly voted for Harris. What does this say, then, about white queer women? Where do we place them? How do we decide, from these broadly-surveying polls, what identity was activated when they went into the booth? We can ask similar questions about Latino voters, who swung toward Republicans. Was being Latino the activated identity in the voting booth? Or was some other part — gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, class — at the front of the line when their vote was cast?

Boiling people down into single axes of identity when thinking of them politically is a trap. You don’t see whole people and you don’t see their full intentions. None of that works when you’re trying to build coalitions and none of that works when you’re trying to understand why people think — and ultimately act — the way they do.

I think a place we can start answering Cohen’s desire for more complex politics is to see ourselves through those multiple lenses and become more aware of who’s activated when we’re engaging in the world. Which axis of mine is activated when? How is what I’m doing informed by which identity I inhabit? Who am I foregrounding in how I make marks on the world?

This can help us make better choices in our relationships with people, but it can also help us recognize who’s showing up in other people. And maybe, if we’re better at recognizing who’s activated when we’re engaging with others, we can be more effective communicators and coalition builders with them. We can speak to who we see activated, and we can understand them more fully.