More specifically, Mao originally created ten identities for people: five “black” (bad) and five “red” (good, Communist). People and their children, grandchildren, and further descendants were classified and handled according to this system. The idea was primarily to pressure youth given black identities to want to renounce and destroy the “Four Olds” of society and become Maoist revolutionaries. A variety of identity campaigns, involving both carrots and sticks, were employed in the process. Denounce your old way of life and thinking publicly and repeatedly, undergo criticism, self-criticism, and struggle, denounce your father and family if they had the wrong kind of identity, pledge loyalty to Mao, help his revolutionary cadres and forces—those kinds of things could get you a ticket out of a “black” identity into a “red” one.
The goal Mao had was to enact the formula he claims he created in 1942, though it is probably a Soviet import. That program he called “unity – criticism – unity.” Create the desire for unity (just like Biden’s Democrats). When people desire to have unity, show them how they are failing to live up to the standard unity demands through criticism. Get them to self-criticize. Put them through humiliating struggle. Teach them that they’re racist and must become anti-racist and would except they lack racial humility and exhibit white fragility because they covet their own white privilege and the benefits it provides, for example. Exact confessions and apologies and promises to “do better.” Always hold out radical identities as a possible escape from some or all of the pressure, which never quite goes away (white and queer is still white—do better). Only when they die to their old selves and are reborn on the side of the oppressed (in Freire’s language, anyway) can they adopt unity “on a new basis,” which Mao called “socialist discipline.”
Today, of course, under Intersectionality, the program is the same. Straight, white, male, cis, blah, blah, blah: black identities. Ally, radical activist, change agent, queer, and all that: red identities. The goal isn’t “unity”; it’s “inclusion” and “belonging.” Those sound nicer. The program is the same. Create a desire to belong; initiate a period of struggle, criticism, and self-criticism as a cult initiation and hazing ritual; and achieve unity under a new “inclusive” standard.
What this achieved, especially thanks to his thorough and early capture of the schools, turning them into revolutionary universities and high schools, was the creation of an extremely radical youth culture that didn’t know any other standard some sixteen years after Mao first claimed power. These were called the Red Guard, and they were selected only from the ranks of the red identities. They had praise heaped upon them; they were celebrated and affirmed; and they were largely above the law in their rampant and destructive radicalism. They ransacked homes and temples, destroyed statues and art from the old culture, bullied, humiliated, and tortured wrongthinkers, sometimes to death, all with the blessing of Mao’s police. From 1966 to 1968, they ran a red terror through every corner of China, and Mao rode the terror to increasingly consolidated and unquestionable power.
