Identity politics assumes that each identity has its own epistemology, a different way of seeing the world, and that a white straight man can never understand the experience of a black gay man or a lesbian woman of color. Identity comes before, and is the foundation of, knowledge or truth.

But if experience is the origin of politics, if what matters are not ideas but the origin or identity of those who hold those ideas, criticism and political dialogue are impossible. Political discrepancies become personal attacks, attacks on an identity.

Identity politics constructs cognitive ghettos in which something is true or not depending on the identity of the speaker. Normally one listens more to one's own people, but it is pathological to think that any argument of the Other is false. This strategy can only be explained from a completely cynical political approach, in an ideological battle in which we yield nothing to an opponent whom we consider illegitimate. The real problem is that he or she is not illegitimate because of his or her ideology, but because of their identity. It is a dangerous terrain, which the ultra-right, expert in fomenting identity differences, tends to exploit.