If we understand ourselves politically as victims, that means our politics is reduced to asking for protection from the state. But if we understand ourselves fundamentally as political agents who are capable of engaging in resistance - that's a very different kind of politics. That's the kind of politics that can actually lead to emancipation, that can actually lead to changing society. Claiming victim-hood and asking for protection will not change the existing structure of society.

Writer Asad Haider explains how today's reductive form of identity politics acts as an obstacle to understanding and confronting oppression - by neutralizing the work of social movements and disempowering individuals - and calls for a radical political project that recognizes and fights racial, gender and class based injustice as one.

Asad is author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump from Verso.