Identity politics stir up hatred and division
The toxic and divisive identity politics that now defines much of Left-wing thinking across the Western world rests upon the notion that individuals today can use past injustices to further their own illiberal agendas. Conversely, certain ‘privileged’ groups are viewed as having responsibility for the wrongdoings of another era.
Take, for instance, the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, a far-Left group which is by no means representative of the views of all black people in America. Supporters of Black Lives Matter believe that white people in the United States and the Western world have inherited privileges that black people do not have because of slavery and the abhorrent Jim Crow laws which discriminated against black people in the southern United States well into the 1960s. However, it is hard to take seriously the claim that black people are an oppressed minority in 2017, when we have had a black President, there is a large black middle class and black people have equal rights under the law and the same equality of opportunity as any other ethnic group. Still, the narratives that Black Lives Matter promulgate have widespread support among university students whose minds have been poisoned with illiberal post-modernist academic theories that fuel identity politics. The most absurd aspect of all this is that some black students at elite universities, spurred on by their white supporters, claim they are victims of white privilege. I’m sorry, but you can’t play the victim card when you are a student at Yale and are more privileged than working-class Americans, be they black, white or Latino.
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