It may be true that the generation of our anger is bound with our class identity. Some rapes may be more rapes to us than other rapes. Some crimes feel more criminal.
However, mobilization based on the attack on one’s tribe has been the norm for a long time. Our tribes, or communities to make it more general, are now bound to our educational institutions, classes, creeds, and other identities. It is understandable, therefore, that if an attack can be characterized as an attack on one’s communitarian identity, it will help the mobilization.
In that sense, hiding a victim’s communitarian identity seems a bad strategy. If you generalize them into hundreds of other victims, they would be treated like hundreds of other victims and their cases will be thrown into a pile, with those of hundreds of other victims.
Therefore, the latest rape should be used to point at the structure of rape, but it would be naive to say that the victim has no identity than that of a human. You would not know about the rape if the victim was just a human. The victim, in that case, would be reduced to a number in the yearly rape statistics.
So, we must use the entry point of the latest crime to point at the structure of crimes, but without hiding the class and institutional identity of the victim. This may be cheap, but this is what brings people together, this is what makes people protest. Show them a relative deprivation, and they will act. Without forming an identity, there can be no relative deprivation, hence no action. You must know who you are fighting for, even when you may not exactly know who you are fighting. Don’t discard identities. Human groups do not exist simply on a humanitarian identity.
So come down to the street because you feel personally attacked, but build a frame that can make others feel personally attacked. If we cannot use the strategies of social protest effectively, the protest will not hold. Idealism has its place, but that is not in the streets.