The American nightmare
by Rakib Ehsan, Artillery Row:
America’s toxic racial politics cannot be allowed to take root in Britain.
Being raised in predominantly working-class and super-diverse Luton — a town that experienced its fair share of troubles when it comes to ideological extremism — I was motivated to establish myself in the field of social cohesion.
I care a great deal about the collective well-being of my community, town and country. While I have often said that Britain remains one of the finest examples of an advanced hyper-diverse democracy in the modern world, there exists an uncomfortable feeling within me that the country is at risk of losing its way — being distracted by the radical identity politics which is being manufactured across the pond in the United States.
A growing number of American universities are increasingly forsaking robust critical thought in favour of pseudointellectual grievance theories — with much of this being imported into the UK by British “educationalists” who are, in reality, identitarian social-justice activists. The aggressive importation of US-origin pseudo-academic theories, which have a tendency to place racial identity at the heart of understanding very complex forms of social disadvantage and material deprivation, threatens to undermine the respectability of the British anti-racism movement.
As I flesh out in my forthcoming book Beyond Grievance, the “disparities = discrimination” paradigm is a crudely reductive framework for understanding racial and ethnic differences in areas such as education and employment. The US’s broader identitarian-left movement is responsible for framing “disadvantage” and “privilege” through the simplistic prism of race, as well as vilifying traditional institutions such as the family and marriage, and aggressively promoting ultra-liberal forms of gender self-identification that pose a fundamental threat to women’s rights.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
