If you want to know where identity politics if headed, look at the pro-Palestinian protests of the last few weeks. Huge crowds composed of the Palestinians diaspora, of a lot of Arabs and a lot of Muslims. There were also a lot of self-proclaimed Jews, from secular leftists to the Ultra-orthodox, calling for peace and a ceasefire. I mean, Jews for Peace are doing an incredible job. There are also a lot of minorities at these protests. In a clip from the London protests I saw both an Irish dad and a Black dad stating they were protesting because of their own experiences as marginalised people. I see plenty of Black and Brown (both Latino and South Asian) faces at these protests, plus a scattering of East Asians. Young LGBTQ people came out for Palestine, refusing to allow Western Liberal values be used as a justification for slaughtering the more conservative Muslims. The Left generally seems revitalised, with trade unions calling for solidarity protests for Palestine.
At a Mississauga, Ontario protest I saw a woman with a placard reading “A Chinese-Canadian for Palestine”. I am a Chinese Canadian standing for Palestine. I look at the siege and bombardment of Gaza, and I see the Rape of Nanjing, I see the carpet bombing of North Korea, North Vietnam and Cambodia. I see people not mattering because they belong to an inferior race and culture. I see a White or a White coded people feeling impunity to slaughter their inferiors. I remember that barely anyone in the enlighten West even bothers to remember the hundreds of Han Chinese who were attacked, raped and killed in the Anti-Chinese Riots in Jakarta in 1998. I see how no Western Liberal even acknowledges when Han Chinese are attacked in Tibet in 2008, in Xinjiang in 2009 or in Hong Kong in 2019-2020. I see World War Two always stated as starting in 1939, not 1937, despite 20 million Chinese deaths and horrendous suffering throughout East and Southeast Asia. I am a Chinese Asian who has lived her life in the West. I know what it means for Asian lives to be valued less than White Western ones. I identify with the Palestinians, with anyone who has less power and is deemed of lesser value.
Hopefully this is the future of identity politics: people motivated by their own experiences, their struggles, suffering, hard wrought pride - to try and dismantle the oppression and the dehumanisation of any vulnerable people. Minorities can embrace our ‘otherness’ and use it to flip over the toxic cream pie of the current social order, rather than to finagle a larger slice of ourselves.
I'm talking about the style of violence and the acts committed by Hamas are closer to what the Japanese did in Manchuria. What you're doing is comparing Richard Ramirez to Murder Inc. and concluding Ramirez should be set free since MI killed hundreds of men, women and children in the New York area. I don't really have a dog in the fight but I think it's naive to boil it down a simple good guys vs. Bad guys.
Every time I see someone infer that identity politics might be coming to an end, I think of Black liberals and how most politically engaged Black people aren't actually leftist. Identity politics is ready-made for a group of people who see the world first through a racial prism. I listen to This is Revolution pretty frequently, and they are two Black men who talk about issues from a Marxist perspective. They reject identity politics, and concepts like "racial capitalism". I recently read an article/interview with a Black Marxist, a woman, in NYC who said that anyone who rejects racial capitalism is a class reductionist. And I think a lot about how Black women are MASSIVE pushers when it comes to race ideology; whether it's defending one drop or forcing everyone to see things through a racial lens, Black women are the main ones who do this.
While trying to clear up my Instagram feed, as I try to decide what I want to look at online, I randomly unfollowed this Black woman, an internet personality/micro celebrity who works in Hollywood as a TV writer. Her online content is either about her personal (dating) life, or pointing out random things on the internet that only a Black liberal would care about; calling out a white lesbian TikToker who used the N word on Twitter and posted a faux apology, critiquing the apologies of a random restaurant that some random, other micro-celebrity on TikTok called out. There's another Black liberal whose ideology is basically an embodiment of "if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail". I will often read her takes, or those of her partner's, and wonder if she even understands the thing she's critiquing because her takes are either so bad faith they border on cringe or they're just flat out wrong. She has a massive following online, and it's like, you don't actually know anything and don't know how to talk or think about issues in a cohesive or illuminating way.
I think as long as DEI positions exist, and universities (and businesses) find ways to keep Black liberals employed to be ventriloquists for other Black people - identity politics is never actually going to die. At least on this end. Coleman Hughes went through this huge thing with TedTalk and in his piece he talks about Black Ted people wanting to push back on his color blindness talk, and then the white liberals just started pearl clutching around it behind the scenes.
For me, identity politics will come to an end when white liberals stop mindlessly supporting Black liberals in everything they say or think or if Black people embrace militancy and begin rejecting bipoc ideology/multiculuralism, creating an actual leftist politic that rejects identity politics, etc.
No one actually cares about Black people, but I do think that once Black liberalism dies out, or loses steam/access/relevancy, a lot of other things will begin to follow suit. It's just hard to convince liberals to not support Black people (ie Black people who think mid 20th century Black political thought is The Way and we all need to view the world through a Black Feminist lens is straight up brain washing) when Black liberals have cultivated an image of Black people as the permanent underdog. Which doesn't align with reality. Because class exists!
It's not surprising that this black female "internet personality/micro celebrity" would want to define identity politics as revolving around her personal interests like dating and taking her social rivals (like other social media influencers) down a peg. How convenient and satisfying would it be for all of us to have a righteous political ideology that just so happened to cater to our every vain whim! But identity politics as we know it says that this special treat is reserved only for the chosen few, and thus, a mad scramble ensues to be within that chosen few.
I just find it weird to have a chronically online politic. Both of these women will post negative comments they receive from people online, and it's like why. I also saw her rejecting cancel culture even as she was calling out this random white girl from TikTok. Like, you're saying doing this doesn't have an effect but if she loses brand opportunities due to your posting this has nothing to do with you?!
Noooooo, Chris Noooooo! You need to keep feeding me your trauma stories! If I can’t sadly shake my head at and lament how horrible white people are, how else can I demonstrate that I am “one of the good ones”?
The biggest problem with identity politics aka racism is there’s no place in it for merit, for agency, for morality. It’s a veritable denial of what makes humans beautiful and worthy. It’s all about power derived from immutable characteristics. So you don’t have to be competent or striving or good, at all. Just being non-white, cis-hetero, male is good enough. Not to forget you only have value as long as you stay down, a victim lacking agency and individuality. If you can stomach that it can be a great and profitable grift... er I mean... gig! Looks like you got past it. Welcome to the light.
Hi Chris. Didn't see this post until today as part of a Your Weekly Stack email.
Anyway, like most liberal white guys, I got swept up in The Great Awokening in the 2010s too, beginning in 2013. I started questioning it in 2017 over, of all things, massive angry woke backlash to movies I liked that were nominated for Oscars.
I was pretty die-hard anti-woke for a while, but today in 2023 I feel burnt out by the whole thing. I just turned 40, and I feel I wasted major chunks of my 30s caught up in the Social Justice Yelling game.
Now that we've come out of the fog, better days lie ahead for us all.
(1) I hope you're right about a general recession of idpol. Aggrieved white Americans becoming racially self-conscious and joining the zero-sum tribalism game is something nobody should want, and we've already seen it occurring as a reaction against identity politicking by other groups.
(2) It might be the case that identity-political content isn't going away, but simply migrating from blogs and written thinkpieces to venues like TikTok.
If you want to know where identity politics if headed, look at the pro-Palestinian protests of the last few weeks. Huge crowds composed of the Palestinians diaspora, of a lot of Arabs and a lot of Muslims. There were also a lot of self-proclaimed Jews, from secular leftists to the Ultra-orthodox, calling for peace and a ceasefire. I mean, Jews for Peace are doing an incredible job. There are also a lot of minorities at these protests. In a clip from the London protests I saw both an Irish dad and a Black dad stating they were protesting because of their own experiences as marginalised people. I see plenty of Black and Brown (both Latino and South Asian) faces at these protests, plus a scattering of East Asians. Young LGBTQ people came out for Palestine, refusing to allow Western Liberal values be used as a justification for slaughtering the more conservative Muslims. The Left generally seems revitalised, with trade unions calling for solidarity protests for Palestine.
At a Mississauga, Ontario protest I saw a woman with a placard reading “A Chinese-Canadian for Palestine”. I am a Chinese Canadian standing for Palestine. I look at the siege and bombardment of Gaza, and I see the Rape of Nanjing, I see the carpet bombing of North Korea, North Vietnam and Cambodia. I see people not mattering because they belong to an inferior race and culture. I see a White or a White coded people feeling impunity to slaughter their inferiors. I remember that barely anyone in the enlighten West even bothers to remember the hundreds of Han Chinese who were attacked, raped and killed in the Anti-Chinese Riots in Jakarta in 1998. I see how no Western Liberal even acknowledges when Han Chinese are attacked in Tibet in 2008, in Xinjiang in 2009 or in Hong Kong in 2019-2020. I see World War Two always stated as starting in 1939, not 1937, despite 20 million Chinese deaths and horrendous suffering throughout East and Southeast Asia. I am a Chinese Asian who has lived her life in the West. I know what it means for Asian lives to be valued less than White Western ones. I identify with the Palestinians, with anyone who has less power and is deemed of lesser value.
Hopefully this is the future of identity politics: people motivated by their own experiences, their struggles, suffering, hard wrought pride - to try and dismantle the oppression and the dehumanisation of any vulnerable people. Minorities can embrace our ‘otherness’ and use it to flip over the toxic cream pie of the current social order, rather than to finagle a larger slice of ourselves.
What Hamas did in Isreal was much closer to the rape of Nanking than the bombing raid. Beheading children and brutal rapes.
I'm talking about the style of violence and the acts committed by Hamas are closer to what the Japanese did in Manchuria. What you're doing is comparing Richard Ramirez to Murder Inc. and concluding Ramirez should be set free since MI killed hundreds of men, women and children in the New York area. I don't really have a dog in the fight but I think it's naive to boil it down a simple good guys vs. Bad guys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Italo-Ethiopian_War
Every time I see someone infer that identity politics might be coming to an end, I think of Black liberals and how most politically engaged Black people aren't actually leftist. Identity politics is ready-made for a group of people who see the world first through a racial prism. I listen to This is Revolution pretty frequently, and they are two Black men who talk about issues from a Marxist perspective. They reject identity politics, and concepts like "racial capitalism". I recently read an article/interview with a Black Marxist, a woman, in NYC who said that anyone who rejects racial capitalism is a class reductionist. And I think a lot about how Black women are MASSIVE pushers when it comes to race ideology; whether it's defending one drop or forcing everyone to see things through a racial lens, Black women are the main ones who do this.
While trying to clear up my Instagram feed, as I try to decide what I want to look at online, I randomly unfollowed this Black woman, an internet personality/micro celebrity who works in Hollywood as a TV writer. Her online content is either about her personal (dating) life, or pointing out random things on the internet that only a Black liberal would care about; calling out a white lesbian TikToker who used the N word on Twitter and posted a faux apology, critiquing the apologies of a random restaurant that some random, other micro-celebrity on TikTok called out. There's another Black liberal whose ideology is basically an embodiment of "if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail". I will often read her takes, or those of her partner's, and wonder if she even understands the thing she's critiquing because her takes are either so bad faith they border on cringe or they're just flat out wrong. She has a massive following online, and it's like, you don't actually know anything and don't know how to talk or think about issues in a cohesive or illuminating way.
I think as long as DEI positions exist, and universities (and businesses) find ways to keep Black liberals employed to be ventriloquists for other Black people - identity politics is never actually going to die. At least on this end. Coleman Hughes went through this huge thing with TedTalk and in his piece he talks about Black Ted people wanting to push back on his color blindness talk, and then the white liberals just started pearl clutching around it behind the scenes.
For me, identity politics will come to an end when white liberals stop mindlessly supporting Black liberals in everything they say or think or if Black people embrace militancy and begin rejecting bipoc ideology/multiculuralism, creating an actual leftist politic that rejects identity politics, etc.
No one actually cares about Black people, but I do think that once Black liberalism dies out, or loses steam/access/relevancy, a lot of other things will begin to follow suit. It's just hard to convince liberals to not support Black people (ie Black people who think mid 20th century Black political thought is The Way and we all need to view the world through a Black Feminist lens is straight up brain washing) when Black liberals have cultivated an image of Black people as the permanent underdog. Which doesn't align with reality. Because class exists!
It's not surprising that this black female "internet personality/micro celebrity" would want to define identity politics as revolving around her personal interests like dating and taking her social rivals (like other social media influencers) down a peg. How convenient and satisfying would it be for all of us to have a righteous political ideology that just so happened to cater to our every vain whim! But identity politics as we know it says that this special treat is reserved only for the chosen few, and thus, a mad scramble ensues to be within that chosen few.
I just find it weird to have a chronically online politic. Both of these women will post negative comments they receive from people online, and it's like why. I also saw her rejecting cancel culture even as she was calling out this random white girl from TikTok. Like, you're saying doing this doesn't have an effect but if she loses brand opportunities due to your posting this has nothing to do with you?!
Black liberals want to be blameless SO bad.
Noooooo, Chris Noooooo! You need to keep feeding me your trauma stories! If I can’t sadly shake my head at and lament how horrible white people are, how else can I demonstrate that I am “one of the good ones”?
The biggest problem with identity politics aka racism is there’s no place in it for merit, for agency, for morality. It’s a veritable denial of what makes humans beautiful and worthy. It’s all about power derived from immutable characteristics. So you don’t have to be competent or striving or good, at all. Just being non-white, cis-hetero, male is good enough. Not to forget you only have value as long as you stay down, a victim lacking agency and individuality. If you can stomach that it can be a great and profitable grift... er I mean... gig! Looks like you got past it. Welcome to the light.
Hi Chris. Didn't see this post until today as part of a Your Weekly Stack email.
Anyway, like most liberal white guys, I got swept up in The Great Awokening in the 2010s too, beginning in 2013. I started questioning it in 2017 over, of all things, massive angry woke backlash to movies I liked that were nominated for Oscars.
I was pretty die-hard anti-woke for a while, but today in 2023 I feel burnt out by the whole thing. I just turned 40, and I feel I wasted major chunks of my 30s caught up in the Social Justice Yelling game.
Now that we've come out of the fog, better days lie ahead for us all.
(1) I hope you're right about a general recession of idpol. Aggrieved white Americans becoming racially self-conscious and joining the zero-sum tribalism game is something nobody should want, and we've already seen it occurring as a reaction against identity politicking by other groups.
(2) It might be the case that identity-political content isn't going away, but simply migrating from blogs and written thinkpieces to venues like TikTok.