In activism for social justice, people are reduced to a particular identity: references to cross-group commonalities or individual particularities are sacrificed for a collectivist group belonging (see Identity Politics). Both universalism and individualism are regarded as white ideologies with which powerful persons obscure the oppression of marginalised groups.
The rejection of universal viewpoints in favour of radical particularism was adopted from postmodern theories.
In postmodern conceptions, every human experience—especially everything connected with knowledge—is fundamentally dependent on cultural conditions.438 In this view, cross-group commonalities are impossible, as different cultures with different discourses have fundamentally different experiences of reality. The striving for objectivity is regarded as pointless from a postmodern perspective.
Woke activists adopted the postmodern view of multiple, relativistic truths. In order to be able to act nevertheless, they developed a partisan methodology from critical theories. To this end, alleged differences based on group identity are to be emphasised in order to use identity as a means of demarcation (see Empowerment).439 Group-specific identity-political viewpoints are to be developed, as universal viewpoints are blind to the respective different experiences. Allegedly universal values such as reason, empiricism, and logic would unjustly exclude other forms of knowledge in order to secure the standpoints of the established (see Standpoint Theory).440 All universal approaches are considered at least illusory as long as systemically conditioned power structures still exist.
An identity-based demarcation was also demanded by the CRT activist Kimberlé Crenshaw: “I am Black”, Crenshaw wrote in 1991, means something different from “I am a person who happens to be Black”. The statement “I am Black” adopts a societally imposed identity and uses it as an anchor for resistance.441