Individuality, Civil Rights Not Identity Politics

As society continues to place more and more responsibility on the individual, we being to perceive the collective as weak and silly. Individuality is the western perception of the person as a static, singular, indivisible being without extensions beyond the individual body. You are taught that you, and you alone, are in control of your success and failure. If you struggle with your health or finances, it is not the responsibility of the collective to fix your situation. In the reverse, if you are successful financially and have vast material wealth, it is not your responsibility to help other individuals. In this way, you are supposed to be given agency over your life.

Civil rights are, by definition, the rights that protect the social and political freedoms of the individual. Having your civil rights protected means that your personal freedoms are not infringed upon by the government or any organization. Couched in these terms, it would make sense to favor the individual over the collective. However, a heavy favoritism on individuality is creating a disconnect between desire and reality.

We want to be in control of our lives. We are taught that we can take personal credit for our successes and that we have the power to undo our failures. Too much focus on personal agency takes blame away from the subjugation caused by governments. The reality is, the individual does not have as much agency as we would like to believe.

Various groups of people have been systematically subjugated, ignored, and shut out from the decision making that affects their personal agency. This includes groups that have been purposely destroyed through genocide (such as indigenous people) and marginalized populations (such as the homeless).

While western cultures emphasize the indivisibility and individuality in constructions of personhood, other cultures understand personhood in a variety of other ways. People in other cultures are individuals as well but they won’t necessarily place the same kind of emphasis on individuality or express their personhood as indivisible.

One of the major ways that other groups of people perceive the self is as “dividual.” The dividual person’s identity is written by contextually changing relationships. External experiences and qualities come together to compose dividuals. Unfortunately, the dividual person, has been historically seen as outside of the “real world view.” Laws drafted with this bias are exclusionist and do not take into account the diverse nature of personhood.

In the case of indigenous rights, many Indigenous Peoples come from cultures that put more emphasis on the collective, yet international laws protecting the rights of the collective remain extremely vague. There are not laws which protect the rights of Indigenous Peoples to own land collectively or to be in complete control over their material culture and heritage.

By equating agency with individuality and drafting laws based on this mythology, vast numbers of people are left out. The laws which govern us are being shaped by the debate between the individual and the collective. Current civil rights problems in many western and capitalist countries are being driven by this disconnect.

To perceive the world as a place where human beings interact with each other and understand themselves only in terms of individual human relationships is to put the modern individual on a pedestal, truly it dehumanizes the complex relations that occur between people and the world at large.

Personhood is accessed from a multitude of places and on many levels depending on a person’s identification of, relationship with, and experience in the world. There is no one theory, assumption, or interpretation that can pinpoint the complex expression of personhood. A multilateral approach to understanding the strategies through which people produce personhood is more effective than trying to identify people as having one expression of identity. Civil rights laws need to take this into account, or else they will never effectively protect all people.

This article originally appeared on the now defunct site facesofunity.com for the documentary Face of Unity.