There is nothing progressive about identity politics
by Tom Slater, spiked:
When did supporting colour-blindness, gay rights and women’s liberation become a right-wing position?
We need to stop saying identity politics, wokeness, or whatever else we want to call it, is progressive. We need to stop referring to the people who are actively reviving racial, misogynistic and homophobic thinking – under the guide of being ‘racially aware’ and ‘trans inclusive’ – as left-wing radicals. They are anything but. These people are reactionaries and bigots. And it’s high time we started naming them as such.
All this was brought into sharp relief this past week or so. First, with the monumental US Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action in university admissions.
Everyone sane knew it had to go. This system, set up to boost the prospects of the descendents of American slaves, disadvantaged by generations of oppression, had become utterly dysfunctional – benefitting only a sliver of well-to-do black Americans, many of them first- or second-generation immigrants, who therefore had no familial connection to the evils of US slavery and segregation.
Worse than that, it was justifying the most grotesque racial discrimination. The biggest victims of this were Asian Americans. Too many of them were getting the grades to get into the Ivy League, they were way above their allotted quotas, and so the racial bean-counters at top colleges cooked up increasingly crude and racist measures in order to push the numbers down.
This led to the most perverse trade-offs, which no one could reasonably defend. As Wilfred Reilly put it pointedly on spiked this week, ‘affirmative action in practice often involved the well-fed son of a Jamaican American or Colombian American dentist being given a 300-point test-score advantage over the daughter of a Vietnamese immigrant shopkeeper’.
It had become abundantly clear that these race-based policies were distracting attention away from the class inequalities that blight Americans of all skin pigmentations – inequalities that are left completely untouched by shuffling the deck a bit at elite colleges. What’s more, they were giving a leg-up to wealthy black and Hispanic kids at the cost of the truly disadvantaged.
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