A while back, in 2011, German philosopher Richard David Precht wrote a book titled Who am I? And if so, How Many? acknowledging that an individual might define themselves in a variety of ways. Reflections on identity in academia are not much more than half a century old, coined as a term in social sciences in the sixties and seventies of the last century. Today, identities and identity politics are in the crosshairs of societal debates and fierce controversies. Identities are mostly fought over in terms of speech, or more concretely, in how to name and how to speak about groups that claim their own identity. The rattle is tantamount on college campuses, newsrooms, and campaign rallies.

Maybe because of its ubiquity, this persistent debate around identity has, for once, come under scrutiny from the left and the right. In their 2018 book Hidden Tribes, a group of American scholars collected and evaluated data to ultimately conclude that speech about identity groups, often called political correctness, is out of favor on both sides of the political aisle. For a majority of Republicans, they say, political correctness is an infringement on the freedom of speech. Democrats on their end fear they will be overrun by the latest development of how to speak correctly and therefore be ridiculed by their peers at best, ostracized at worst. 

The fight over words, which has become emblematic for reflections about identity, proves the arguments of the linguistic turn, an academic inflexion point in the sixties. Two of the linguistic turn’s main proponents, philosophers J.L. Austin and John Searle, saw language not as an abstract constant but as “language in use,” meaning that it is always the context that defines the proper usage of language and the meaning of the used language. This turn came at the same time in which French academic and public intellectual Michael Foucault stunned the world with his thoughts on language and power: Speech, he argued, always serves those at the top, cements their reign and neglects those who are oppressed. Foucault spoke into the context of the previous wave of decolonization, but his reflections still ring true today. Foucault and his assertion that language is power is pertinent to the struggles of groups who assess and define how they want to be called and addressed. In the fight for inclusive language that respects all genders, we can consider Austin and Searle, who refer to political and social contexts as determinants of accepted use of language.

Language is also the tool of analytical philosopher Kwame Appiah, who teaches at New York University. Having grown up in Ghana and the United Kingdom, his reflections on belonging and identity always also have a biographical reference. He names five markers - creed, country, color, class, and culture - as defining for one’s identity. Clearly, any of those can come in conflict with an alleged national, ethnic or religious narrative that claims homogeneity over a society.

Dictators such as China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin run their country as an ethno-nationalist entity in which any deviation from their ordained norms are severely punished. It can cost you your life if you are a member of the LGBTQI+ communities in Russia or a Falung Gong-member in the People’s Republic of China. But also, today’s democratic populists from Argentina to Hungary claim that their nations are such uniform entities as well, undermining the promise of democracy to not fall back on race and religion.

Allowing for citizens to thrive as they please and not treat them as subjects that have to bend to the will of a dictator is one of the, if not key, elements that differentiates free societies from subjugated ones.