The grim re-emergence of white identity politics - "White identitarians are aided in all this by the hypocrisies and double standards of mainstream society, particularly in relation to freedom of speech. The Burnley fan who flew a ‘White Lives Matter’ banner above the Etihad Stadium in response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations was sacked from his job at an engineering firm. Meanwhile, a Cambridge academic, Priyamvada Gopal, not only kept her job, but received a promotion, after stating that ‘White lives don’t matter’ on her Twitter account this week. Not everyone knows, or has to know, the complexities and nuances of race-related matters in Britain. ‘White lives matter’, taken literally, will strike many as an innocuous statement. Therefore, at a glance, this discrepancy in attitudes towards statements made by people of different races will be interpreted as unfair treatment based on race. This perception and reality will, understandably, breed resentment and division. If free speech is applied differently to different people, it’s not free speech... The Black Lives Matter protests, which broke lockdown and sometimes turned to violence, were largely praised, and even joined in with, by the police. Whereas a counter protest, attended by largely white football supporters (and not all white), was widely condemned and derided. The mecia can see no negatives in the BLM protests – invariably reporting them as being ‘peaceful’, despite physical attacks on police and criminal damage to public monuments. Meanwhile, that ‘white’ counter protest was described only in terms of ‘far-right thuggery’, which was a feature of, but by no means the defining about that counter-protest. The double standards here are evident. For the media, this seems to be an exercise in ‘nudging’ the viewing public towards a ‘virtuous’ anti-racist viewpoint. But this deliberate one-sidedness will rightfully annoy many decent non-racist people (the majority), and provoke the margins occupied by the genuine far right (however tiny this group is)."
The liberal case against identity politics - "to protect a woman who needs an abortion in Texas, or a black motorist in Oklahoma, you have to win elections in those places. And there seems to be an indifference to that. I discovered just how symbolic and self-reinforcing the politics of the identity movements are, and the degree to which they’re getting in the way of building a democratic majority in the country again. The response abroad, on the other hand, has been a curiosity about how this phenomenon developed. What way forward is there? How can liberals gain power again? It’s a much calmer response that I’ve had abroad, and people are more curious and thoughtful about it, than in the US... What has progressively changed from the 1980s down to the present is that identity politics has become focused on the identity of the individual self, rather than a shared characteristic and an idea of how we might pursue a common agenda together. Identity politics in this country became much more about self-expression, self-assertion and self-discovery, and so the political horizon of young people growing up in this atmosphere is limited to issues touching the way they happen to define their identity. (And this is no longer just one thing, but a mix of things: gender identity, race and so on.) So it’s led to a kind of narcissistic turn within, accompanied by an indifference and an incomprehension of the realities of achieving anything in the long-term politically. And it’s that turn within and the radicalisation which comes with it, which has led to a very subjectivised politics. If I have a political aim and a political position, I can argue with someone about that, and my commitment is to my argument and my principles. But if my politics comes out of the way in which I define myself in an intimate way, and the way I understand my subjective experience, I’m not going to be very interested in engaging with people who are very critical. I’m going to be highly sensitive and feel that my very self has been challenged, rather than my arguments or my politics. And as soon as that happens, people become impervious, and not only turn away from practical politics but also become intolerant when it comes to political debate. That’s one of the reasons why you see the kind of hysterical reaction to political debate – like attempts to shut people down, concerns about Safe Spaces – in US universities. It’s because of this subjective turn within... It really has been building since the 1980s. Even in our educational system, from a very early age, kids are taught about their identities... identities have to be protected and cultivated and not offended. That’s not a psychological model that opens people up to public debate about issues, including those that don’t necessarily have anything to do with them personally. For example, there’s very little interest among young people today about foreign policy, because it doesn’t have anything to do with their identities... if you’re talking about these groups all the time, it’s inevitable that people who are not included are either going to feel left out (so you better mention everyone) or, if they don’t have a group consciousness, they’re going to develop one, because if everyone else belongs to a group then they must, too.
Take the rise of white identity. There are all sorts of things that have contributed to white supremacy, which is real. But the recent spike in this sense of a wounded white population, if you look at surveys, really starts to surge in about 2014. What contributed to this was the identity focus on the left, and then how that played out on right-wing media...
Whelan: Does politicising identity not also make political arguments insoluble? There can be no compromise between competing identities, only what Max Weber thought of, tragically, as a value conflict…
Lilla: there are two fundamental principles that have animated American liberalism since the progressive age. One is social solidarity, the other is equal protection under the law... different groups are going to have different interests and concerns, but the thing that has to be projected is that the general message covers everyone... someone who teaches at my university, Columbia, whom I’ve never met, wrote an article in the LA Review of Books comparing me to David Duke, who is the head of the KKK. She said we were both white supremacists, and that though we may wear different clothing, we were working towards the same end. I guess every time I get charged with being a white supremacist, my response is that I know too many white people to be a white supremacist. I have no illusions about the superiority of the white race... In the individualisation and atomisation of our societies, and the individualisation of our political rhetoric, the whole concept of duty is dropped out. There is no notion that you might have obligations as well as rights in a society."
Why they hate Nadine Dorries - "This unhinged reaction was a delightful display of the middle-class arts establishment being caught off-guard, as if a housemaid in the 1920s had accidentally left a copy of Peg’s Paper above stairs in the conservatory. For those art types who think of themselves as so ‘inclusive’ and ‘open to all’, their reaction to Dorries shows that they think they own culture, and that they have an inalienable right to own it. It also shows the limits of their much-vaunted identity politics. Dorries is a working-class northerner, educated at a comprehensive, a survivor of child sexual abuse, a woman, and a bestselling writer who has succeeded with all the odds stacked against her. But all these normally celebrated identity factors evaporated in an instant – as they always do when one of the subjects of the middle-class faux-left has the wrong opinions. When you’re not saying the right thing, identity counts for nothing. You’re just another uncouth, déclassé pleb. I hate to break it to Mr Anderson of the NYT, but eating an ostrich anus on TV is as much a part of culture as Verdi or art history, even trained art history. There is nothing wrong or suspicious about having fun, and you would think the arts sector might consider its audiences could be due a bit after the past couple of years. These people live in a world where the arts are permanently about to be destroyed by massive Tory cuts. But somehow this never quite happens – and on they merrily roll, getting more elitist along the way. Immediately after the reshuffle there were horrified cries of what might happen to television under the Dorries heel. The BBC has supposedly been on the verge of being transformed into a privatised trash factory since at least 1979. In fact, the bungling and media illiteracy of the Tories in the 1980s led to the creation of the rampantly posturing Channel 4, a hugely more antagonistic independent TV production sector, and the elimination of the last lingering traces of pure entertainment from the British film industry. This all led directly to the increasing disconnection and embourgeoisement of the arts ever since. With enemies like these, who needs friends? This reaction shows that the arts world doesn’t want anything but clunking reproductions of its own tepid ideology. Culture is only for them. Everything has to have an ‘improving’ purpose, a busybody element of self-flagellation. We mustn’t forget that we now live in a world in which Hollyoaks – HOLLYOAKS – is on a mission to make us ‘better’ people... Dorries may not win plaudits from the arts world. But as her book sales show, she has a quality her detractors – and let’s face it, her peers and predecessors – will never have: an understanding of what people actually enjoy"
Safety Pins and Swastikas - "Spencer, who popularized the now common euphemism “alt-right,” is fond of describing his platform as “identity politics for white people.” He takes pains to correct those who refer to him as a white supremacist, insisting that he is merely a “nationalist,” or a “traditionalist,” or, better yet, an “identitarian.” He wants to bring about what he calls a “white ethno-state,” a place where the population is determined by heritability. In a knowing inversion of social justice vocabulary, he describes it as “a safe space for Europeans.” Spencer has an advanced degree in humanities, spent time in the famously left-wing graduate program at Duke University, and wrote an antisemitic interpretation of Theodor Adorno’s music criticism for his master’s thesis. His political mentor, Paul Gottfried, was a student of Herbert Marcuse. Spencer is clearly intimately acquainted with both academic left philosophy and campus social justice activism. It was only a matter of time before the right identified liberal and leftist strategies that they themselves could adopt... It may come as some surprise on both sides of the battlefield, but the Left has not always understood “cultural appropriation” as a form of oppression. This connotation of the term has become ubiquitous in today’s social media-driven political climate. But when it first came into use, “cultural appropriation” denoted very nearly the opposite of its contemporary meaning... It was a cornerstone of the work of scholars like historian James Sidbury, who used it to describe the “creative acts” of African slaves in 18th-century Virginia in the formation of an “oppositional culture.”... Hebdige’s claim was that punks didn’t wear the swastika in representation of a right-wing ideology. Instead, it was a naive method of distancing themselves from the culture of their parents, a British generation for whom the swastika “signified ‘enemy.’” Hebdige quotes a young punk, interviewed by a magazine during London punk’s 1977 heyday, as explaining that she wore a swastika simply because “punks just like to be hated.”... “We need an outward sign of sympathy, a way for the majority of us who voted against fascism to recognize one another,” she wrote. Instead of Allison’s pledge to take action, the safety pin would function as a signal of affinity between defeated supporters of Hillary Clinton... This new role made the safety pin all the more vulnerable to criticism. At Mic, Phillip Henry described it as no better than “a self-administered pat on the back.” Soon enough, the safety pin became a symbol not of proactivity or solidarity, but of superficiality. It was the epitome of what Henry called “performative wokeness,” a pithy shorthand for the game of oneupmanship played by white liberals on the internet to determine who is the best ally. As a result, being critical of the safety pin was an even woker position to take... Among other things, this confusion presented a business opportunity. Enter Marissa Jenae Johnson and Leslie Mac, with Safety Pin Box... One of the earliest criticisms came from investigative journalist Lee Fang, who questioned the motives behind the business. In a series of trenchant tweets, he called it “Herbalife for performative woke people.” The reaction to Fang revealed a pattern in the social justice practice of the “call-out.” The question was not whether Fang’s comment was fair, but whether he was entitled to make it. A since-deleted tweet put it succinctly: “Lee Fang is everything wrong with white millennial men.” There was a problem with taking this position, which was that Lee Fang isn’t white. An alternate tactic dismissed his “self-hating racist ass” for subservience to “white daddies,” and at its worst invoked bananas and Twinkies — yellow on the outside, white on the inside. “Lee Fang is the Asian guy who makes his living by dumping on black people in order to impress white people”... The eligibility of people to make certain kinds of claims is dependent on the set of criteria that fall into the category of “identity.” Your right to political agency is determined by your description. We’re left with a simple rubric for determining the truth-value of a statement. Who said it, what group do they belong to, and what are members of that group entitled to say?"
From 2017
Woke identity politics distracts the left from economic progress - "if anyone truly clashes with modern wokeness, it is the traditional class-focused left. The idea that race, gender, trans vs. “cis” gender status, sexual orientation, and many other things represent unique identities which, one, can only be understood by those possessing them and, two, provide legitimate bases for political activism constitutes the tallest (was that “heightist?”) possible barrier to the creation of a unified and organized working class... Occupy Chicago, possibly the largest gathering of Guy Fawkes-mask wearing radicals outside Manhattan’s Zucotti Park, fell apart largely because of the endless bifurcation of members’ agendas. Whenever a task force of leading members was proposed to discuss some almost-consensus working-class issue like support for an increased minimum wage, the call would immediately come for a women’s task force. Then, what about a Black women’s task force? A Black gay women’s task force? Very often, 37 quarreling proposals about what to do would eventually be made, and nothing would ever get done. By the end, there actually existed a separate all-Black and minority version of Occupy, called “Occupy the Hood.” This same sort of thing has derailed more than a few politicians running on a traditional class-based platform. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders consistently struggled to win over Black voters... In 2015, a Sanders speech praising the 80th anniversary of Social Security and the success of a hood-to-the-holler range of anti-poverty programs was literally shut down by Black Lives Matter activists who demanded four and a half minutes of silence in honor of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and claimed to be holding Sanders accountable for failure to support their movement. When the progressive audience — made up of thousands of people, mostly whites, who had paid to attend the speech — booed, protesters castigated them for racism and accused them of "white supremacist liberalism." In contrast to the Fidel Castro defender but “racist” Sanders, global mega-corporations which parrot woke talking points get a break from many influential social justice activists... Both Nike and German rival Adidas will gladly sell you a sporty “BLM” T-shirt, generally for about $35 to $50. All of this is no doubt harmless and even positive. However, it buys the average citizen no health care — and a cynic might be tempted to wonder just how free the overseas workers sewing together “Equality Now” tank tops actually happen to be."
The best criticisms of post-Marxism come from a Marxist perspective
The Tories still don’t know how to fight the madness of identity politics - "When Boris Johnson became party leader, he brought something else: an obvious disregard for the self-appointed thought police. His journalistic oeuvre includes a great many off-colour jokes that his enemies like to quote in hope of exposing him as a monster. His being rude about wearers of the burqa, in the pages of this newspaper, sent his opponents into meltdown. He didn’t reply that it was absurd to call this Islamophobic, given how many Muslim countries have banned the burqa. Nor did he point out he was defending the right of all women to wear what they pleased. He just kept quiet. He didn’t rise to the bait. At the time, his silence was well-judged: one should never feed the trolls. But his enemies were unwittingly doing him a favour: painting him as someone who said what he thought, who didn’t mind making jokes and didn’t walk on eggshells. “There’s a huge political market for this,” says one of the red-wall Tory MPs. “It’s a big part of why we won: our values. But even now, No 10 doesn’t seem to realise this.”... The opportunity for the Tories is to say they believe not just in free speech but in forgiveness – that no one should be judged by what they said (or tweeted) years ago. No one should be defined by their worst mistake. While Labour is captured by identity politics, dreaming up ways of preaching victimhood and setting people against each other, the Tories can counter with a new form of One Nation conservatism: rejecting racial divisions, emphasising what we have in common and celebrating Britain’s status as the most successful melting pot in the world. But for now, Tories seem to seek short-term wins, weighing in on cricket spats and Oxford common rooms but without any hint of a wider strategy or philosophy... A Left that cannot win via the ballot box will start a march through the institutions and make decent progress if the Tories cannot say what they stand for and fight for it."
On Identity Politics and the Left in Decline: An Interview with Mark Lilla - "the kind of narcissism that Americans now display -- the search for the true self has become our Quixotic quest – is in a sense de-politicizing. It distracts people from being able to speak to those who are not like themselves, and define a common ground... Identity Politics can work to mobilize the members of any group. But that’s not what’s happening in the U.S. Rather we have a cultural revolution going on regarding race and gender – a non-democratic one led by cultural elites in the press and Hollywood – that is focused on having everyone represented and everyone heard in civil society. But it is not political in the sense of exercising power within institutions. Institutional politics is not about recognition; it’s about having a goal and figuring out how to reach it with others, which you can do if you’re able to articulate principles that apply to different groups who have very different problems... By claiming that a certain group, by virtue of colour or history or anything else, are not being incorporated and enfranchised as citizens, you are appealing to the concept of citizenship. And as a fellow citizen you ought to listen to their claims and respond. It’s another thing to say ‘we have a story about America, a story about you and your ideas about me. And now you need to get on your knees, confess your sins, and get ‘woke’’. Such identity politics is not a political strategy, it is an evangelical strategy to change hearts and minds... if you try to do two things in an election, that is, transform people’s souls and the way they vote, you will probably fail at both... We also need to make it clear on what grounds we are calling on people to sacrifice for each other. That’s what solidarity is about. From the 1930s until the 1980s it was natural in the U.S. because we had gone through a depression and a world war. That gives you something to work with. Once memories of those things disappear and people are able to live more independent, individualistic lives, you have to find a new way of educating people so they feel that they have a stake in their fellow citizens... A childish kind of American progressivism has a Kafkaesque picture of power: There is a castle and we are not allowed in, so we have to organize and bang and bang and bang on the door until authority throw us something that we want. But that’s not an accurate picture of democratic life. There are all sorts of ways in which authority gets legitimated and constrained, and in which we can participate. Progressive activists are always fighting authority, but are incapable of becoming the authority. The only way to achieve your ends is to become the authority. And that means having to work within institutions and gaining some latitude to make decisions. There is a certain kind of activist that hates authority in a democracy, but then falls in love with a tyrant who wields it without constraint. How else do you explain the recent idealization of Hugo Chavez on a certain left? ... we end up criticizing those people that get into power as sell-outs. Remember the criticism that Obama got from the left when he was in office? Progressives have an adolescent view of power: Dad is always wrong. Perversely this is how the activist left always stay in business. If activists were to succeed in getting the things they want through our institutions they would be out of business. They get most excited and charged up when things are going badly for us. Weirdly they have a stake in that."
Identity Politics Is Devouring Itself - "What’s striking about the Women’s March, if the New York Times is right, is that there is one more result: the organizers hate each other now more than ever before. In fact, there were two separate marches in most cities, one being the original under a new name because the founder was kicked out and the other being the break-off march that is protesting not only the patriarchy and every other imagined evil in the world but also the ruling class of the march itself, which the dissidents regard as being dominated by the wrong demographic... Here we have a movement deeply suspicious of, or entirely opposed to real property rights but very enthusiastic when it comes to the legislated fiction of intellectual property rights. It’s the modern Gangs of New York, this time fighting over trademark law. The result: a low turnout. How is that solidarity coming along? The hilarity here reminds me of the classic enactment of movement factionalism from Monty Python. There is the additional problem of deciding precisely what the marchers are for. Social justice, yes, but what actually does that mean? Many of the goals are in conflict with each other, not just in intention but especially in results. There are truly endless opportunities for fighting between the traditional gender designation of “women” and the LGBTQIA community, not to mention the rights of the non-binary community which is demanding respect so as to end the many millennia of oppression by people who hopelessly imagined the existence of two sexes. And there’s the problem of anti-Semitism that gets to the heart of the issue. The “progressive” left, with its century-long default loathing of capitalism, has a deep history of blaming Jews for most all the problems in the world: have a look at progressive-backed immigration restrictions on Jews, then regarded as non-whites, imposed by these supposed champions of human rights in the 1920s. Combine that with the identity obsession of these movements and you create an inexorable tendency to renew these ancient hatreds. Thus does a movement founded on big social goals turn into on itself, like the Ouroboros, expending most of its energy eating itself under the mistaken impression it could live forever this way. All political movements have this tendency but none more than one rooted in the fusion of ideology and biology. The Women’s March asserted that it was organized by and for women as a group but this designation necessarily excluded Republican women who voted reliably for the man who is the main object of the marcher’s hate. These people, we surely all know, are not authentic women because they remain deluded about their real ideological obligations... If you believe that progress consists of a mathematical definition of perfect equality, and the reason we are not there yet is due to one group winning at the expense of another, and therefore the path forward is forged by disparaging and harming others, climbing over reputations and bodies to realize your own dreams, you have set up a framework for a war of all against all. This worldview is neatly summed up in the phrase conflict sociology. Where are the irreconcilable conflicts? The varieties are essentially infinite. Find any biological trait, posit it as a collective interest, set that trait against all other traits, and then struggle for power and privilege; your outlook comes to be characterized by loathing and resentment against the collective guilt of everyone but yourself. Just about anyone can play this game. Modern politics encourages it and rewards it. Whether this is a productive way to spend your days is another matter. It’s surely not a path to pesonal happiness. Listening to interviews with the participants, organizers, and speakers confirms this impression. This is not an aspirational gathering. It’s a gathering that seethes in resentment. It can no longer even pretend to be a united front of anything in particular. But they will claim: White men have been running the system for centuries and look at the evil that has resulted. What do you expect us to do? First, realize that the problem is not white men; it is power exercised by anyone over anyone else. Second, realize that a politics based on retribution, bad theory, and reckless claims of collective guilt produces another round of injustices, resentment, blowback, more violence, and a return of the world that Mill said was the stuff of the past."
Identity Politics Does Not Continue the Work of the Civil Rights Movements - "Universal liberalism focuses on individuality and shared humanity and seeks to achieve a society in which every individual is equally able to access every right, freedom, and opportunity that our shared societies provide. Identity politics focuses explicitly on group identity and seeks political empowerment by promoting that group as a monolithic, marginalized entity distinct from and polarized against another group depicted as a monolithic privileged entity... The Civil Rights Movement, second-wave liberal feminism, and Gay Pride functioned explicitly on these values of universal human rights and did so to forward the worth of the individual regardless of status of race, gender, sex, sexuality, or other markers of identity. They proceeded by appealing directly to universal human rights applying universally... These movements succeeded, but not because of a tiny minority of activists, even those as inspirational as Martin Luther King. They succeeded because they appealed to a universal liberal spirit through which liberal democracies proudly defined themselves, but which had not been extended to all their citizens... Identity politics is a very different approach than universal liberalism and, in its Social Justice form, it stems from an intellectual shift in leftist academia. In the late 1960s through to the mid-eighties, a number of leftist intellectuals from various disciplines became disillusioned with Marxism and theorized a radically different way of seeing society. This was a time during which Western societies were making huge leaps forward in tackling legal inequalities... Ironically, at this very time, this group of disillusioned leftist intellectuals decided it was time to give up on the myth of progress and the validity of science. This was postmodernism, and it would trade upon the good name of the civil rights movements to advocate its own approach to breaking down hegemonic forces in society and thus disrupting the problems those cause... This new way of thinking was rooted in social constructivism, the idea that knowledge is not found but made by humans in the form of discourse – ways of talking about things... While the original postmodernists were fairly aimless, and their ideas were not very user-friendly, in the late ‘80s and ‘90s a second wave of “theorists” significantly adapted these postmodern ideas and made them politically actionable—and they kept trading on the good names of the civil rights movements to do it... They identified that these power dynamics arose largely on the level of discourse. Consequently, for true equality to exist, the knowledge of women and racial and sexual minorities, which are understood to be different and products of lived experience, should be foregrounded. Identity politics were born, and they claimed to be the true inheritors of the liberal civil rights project even as they abandoned both the epistemology and ethics that define liberalism both in theory and practice... The problems with the identity politics approach are:
Epistemological: It relies on highly dubious social constructivist theory and consequently produces heavily biased readings of situations.
Psychological: Its sole focus on identity is divisive, reduces empathy between groups, and goes against core moral intuitions of fairness and reciprocity.
Social: By failing to uphold principles of non-discrimination consistently, it threatens to damage or even undo social taboos against judging people by their race, gender, or sexuality...
intention does not matter nearly as much as impact from the perspective of identity politics, and the experience of the marginalized person is considered authoritative... It also reduces the ability to be able to genuinely empathize across identities if we are understood to have entirely different experiences, knowledges, and rules... The universal human rights and principles of not judging people by their race, gender, or sexuality—which have developed over the modern period and resulted in the civil rights movements, legal equality, and much social progress—are much more uncommon to us and must be consistently reinforced and maintained. If we allow identity politics in the form of Social Justice to undermine this fragile and precarious detente, we could undo decades of social progress and provide a rationale for a resurgence of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Given the novelty of egalitarian society, it is not at all clear that women and racial and sexual minorities could easily win these losses back."
Another explanation of the connection between postmodernism and SJWism/wokeness/modern liberalism
We keep getting told that wokeness is about empathy, but it is anti-empathy by claiming no one can understand each other
Identity politics do more harm than good - "Two days before the California Board of Education voted to adopt a revolutionary Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, a delusional white man in my home state of Georgia shot and killed eight people including six women of Asian descent in three massage parlors. At the eight hour meeting held by the State Board of Education this Thursday, many used the Atlanta murders to justify the urgency of passing the nation’s first-ever ethnic studies model. One should also connect the two events, positing that they demonstrate the ruling elites’ pathological obsession with race, masqueraded as symbolic acts to help Asian Americans. This addiction to examining all social issues through the prism of race is harmful as it seeks to legitimize a claimed victimhood into our already balkanized society, inaccurately depicting historical and current events, and deflecting from a genuine search for meaningful redress. In both cases, Asians are caught in the crossfire of a cultural war, with the ascending progressive side seeking to inject traces of white supremacy into every situation to confirm their ideology. While police are still at an early stage of investigating the motives behind Atlanta shootings, the Biden administration has rushed to point finger at the damaging rhetoric of the prior administration scapegoating Asian Americans for the pandemic. CNN calls out racial identities of the shooter and victims in a bid to condemn “White supremacy.” Ironically, CNN, along with most other progressive media outlets, has hesitated to report on the racial identities of perpetrators in other recent crimes targeting Asian Americans. Doing so would invalidate its confirmation bias; the attackers weren’t all White... In this ideological witch hunt of systemic racism, evidence of white supremacy is what counts... California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, aside from other glaring issues rooted in its foundational framework of critical race theory, also capitalizes on the “model minority myth” as a stereotype to highlight systemic oppression against Asians and a racial wedge between Asians and other people of color. Instead of celebrating best practices of many Asian Americans in defiance of historical marginalization, the ethnic studies curriculum points to “White adjacent” power and privilege as the plausible explanation for Asian American success, stoking racial animosities and tensions. The radical narrative caricatures Asian Americans’ reliance on hard work, initiative, and emphasis on education, not as the agency of Asian Americans, but as the features of an oppressive system that strong-arms Asian Americans into “White adjacency,” separating them from other victim groups. In the alternative universe of these anti-racism pundits, the collective condemnation of anti-Asian racism, rather than a commitment to public safety, is apparently the key to combating the rising wave of crimes against Asian Americans... Conflating an attack on Asian Americans with claims of “White supremacism” and systemic racism is dangerous. It seeks to foster a victimhood mentality among all Americans of Asian descent, eroding social solidarity and trust. At a minimum, choking up all present and past injustices to racism, while proselytizing the model minority myth for Asians, is dishonest. Harvard provides the best example, releasing a statement expressing outrage at the Atlanta shootings and affirming its steadfast commitment to battling “hatred and bigotry.” Yet Harvard to this day has refused to admit that it has used race in its admissions to unduly penalize Asian American applicants, beyond what is necessary to achieve a critical mass of underrepresented minority groups or to satisfy any compelling government interest. The school downgraded its Asian American applicants, subjectively rating them low on personality traits, to enable admitting members of other racial groups less academically qualified. Progressives claim to oppose racism and discrimination, except when it doesn’t suit them. The “model minority” myth and other fictional narratives obscure and downplay the real, significant, and impactful accomplishments of Americans of Asian descent. These accomplishments explode the myth that systemic racism precludes advancement of racial minorities in America. Race-obsessed progressives can only cling to this narrative by diminishing the agency and accomplishments of Asian Americans. Welcome to the wonderland of race-centric progressivism."
