The culture wars are far from over
by Mary Harrington, UnHerd:
Ed West wrote last week about how much he misses the Before Coronavirus (BC) culture wars, in which elites got themselves worked up about minor things. Is Friends racist? Is reality transphobic? The BC version of social justice, he argues, represented a situation in which ‘the white blood cells of society’, political activists, ran so totally out of real problems that they turned on society itself.
All this, he suggests, took place against the backdrop of rising material comfort built on trading relationships with a Chinese regime that practices levels of surveillance autocracy straight out of a sci-fi dystopia. But this is all old hat now: “Now society faces an actual threat, and meanwhile our devil’s alliance with China has been irreparably damaged, it all seems so dated”.
I fear Ed may have called it too soon. The recent replacement of BC-style culture wars with social media coronapanic may look superficially like the end of the woke era. But the recent relative silence of the activists should be read as a temporary ceasefire, not a defeat. Witness this webinar above, posted on Saturday by the African American Policy Forum and featuring the grandmother of intersectionality herself, Kimberlé Crenshaw.
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