Atrios really gets it:
Look, if you’re an African-American you can close your eyes and put your hands of your ears singing “la la la”and pretend to ignore the fact that every single person you meet (black, white, asian, latino, whatever) is going to saddle you with a group identity, no matter how you live your life or who you choose to associate with, or you can recognize it as a fact of life and act accordingly.
Critics of “identity politics” seem to want minorities to experience all of the negative aspects of their race/ethnicity without allowing them the use their race to further either individual or group causes. Those who engage in it realize that right now, you can’t escape your group identity, so you may as well try and use it. Whether or not that’s a practical strategy or not is subject to debate, but critics seem to always blame the victims of bigoted identity politics for its existence. The biggest practioners of identity politics are white people, though one rarely hears it lablelled as such – being the dominant power group, what whites do is simply “normal,”as opposed to “special interest politics”or “identity politics.”