That makes no sense.
Identity politics exists throughout history. It is the vehicle by which groups organize to gain power.
As such, it has been used to gain power to act against other groups as it is in response.
Think about it.
Are you suggesting the Germans identified as the "Master Race" because of the racial inequities and injustice they suffered? The Egyptians of Ancient Egypt enslaved the Jews because the Egyptians experienced racial inequities and injustice? The Iroquois identified as Iroquois because of the racial inequities and injustice against them by other tribes.
For something to describe human behavior it has to work across history. Tribalism begins with a "sense of identity"/community. Once an identity is achieved, you need a way to "organize" the group in order to pursue power. Identity politics is simply a new word for tribal politics. Politics is the mechanism of organizing in order to secure power.
I am not ignoring the past; I am studying it and have for over 50 years.
Humans are "apex" predators and social creatures. They "socialize" for advantage and one of those advantages is to project power against other groups (Chimpanzees do the same thing).
These political conflicts can occur in two ways. Tribal groups can attack neighboring tribal groups, war, border raids, or less violent political threats.
In the process, the "enemy" is dehumanized to help justify the violence you intend to inflict on them. This dehumanization produces "bigotry" towards the other group and a sense of superiority by the group assigning these traits.
And prisoners taken in those wars are not automatically accepted into the tribe and are thus subject to discrimination and bigotry. Immigrants whether arriving as slaves, prisoners of war, or migration have been the target of bigotry in every nation's history.
Alternatively, societies can fracture.
Whether they fracture along racial lines, religious lines, ethnic lines, cultural divides, economic lines, etc. The result is the same.
Just look at the conflict between conservatives and progressive liberals and increasingly polarization, that erupts in violence, when a conservative speaker wanders onto to liberal university campus to discuss a politically charged issue. Or the American Civil War where whites fought whites along political and cultural lines. Not all Southerns joined the South and not all Northerners joined the North. Instead, identity determined who they sided with... an identity grounded in values and beliefs.
As someone who studies "anthropology", you should understand the "status quo" is inherently unstable. Either identity groups move toward integration, or they move toward conflict. Look at the Russian Revolution, before the blood was dry from overthrowing the Czar, the identity groups that comprised the "Reds", immediately went to war against one another to pursue power, until finally the Bolsheviks emerged triumphant.
How do you explain all those other groups that were the victims of inequities and injustice, now becoming the victims of the Bolsheviks, who themselves were comprised of victims of inequity and injustice?
The only path within a nation to avoid conflict is to build an overarching sense of national identity and have that go hand in hand with the integration all the way to the biological level. My grandchildren are African American, white, and if my two youngest daughters have children, they will be Asian American. They don't view themselves as African American (even if the mother of four of them is from Africa), nor do my children think of themselves as Asian American. Our family is simply to integrated for such labels to make sense or to feel any need to respond to past racial inequities and injustice... instead the goal is to practice what MLK preached... choose people based on their character.
If you want to achieve equity and justice, you have to avoid separatism. Malcolm X was a big advocate of separatism and often it is a useful tool for an "identity group" to push for greater power, but if integration is not going on concurrently, you are simply laying the grounds for another conflict. One of the challenges after the war was to end the separate identities of the southerners from the northerners. Promoting separatism was not going to achieve that.
