What identity politics misses: It’s not an absolute
By: Orrin Konheim
Tags: Cancel Culture, Wokeness, White Privilege

In the past month, I’ve been accused multiple times of not doing enough to recognize my privilege as a white cisgender straight male as if that’s the biggest sin one can commit.

Just because society has drastically shifted in the past few years does not mean it is accurate or beyond critical reproach.

Defining yourself by your gender, orientation and race is a school of thought. It’s not a law of physics. In fact, it’s a very very recent way of defining the world and you will find very little literature or even mentions of intersectionality, micro-aggression, white privilege, tone policing, etc in English speech as recently as 2012–2013.

I was talking to an anthropology professor who said she doesn’t teach POC in her classes and wants to vomit at the sound of that. I have a master’s in public policy, an undergraduate in geography, where I studied conflicts all over the world. It’s a massive oversimplification to say that all white people have been oppressing non-white people forever and that’s the long and short of it. Suicide rates are highest in those living in the former Soviet Union and the biggest genocide of the mid-90s was in what was then known as Yugoslavia. Slavery was practiced by most societies before it morphed into a uniquely terrible institution. Oppression and brutal civil wars happened on the African continent as well as among the Japanese, Chinese and Mongol empires. Read up on the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda or the abolitionist experiment that created the war-torn nation of Liberia. I am equally aware of the 1885 Berlin conference where Europe created a map that split up Africa in untenable ways and screwed those people over a million times, but things are complicated.

The idea of explaining the world through the lens of intersectionality where the “oppressed” can be placed in three tidy little boxes — women, LGBT, and POC — is at best an attractive over simplification. It frees people from having to think of complex policy situations and allows people to feel good about themselves without having to actually understand the world. It’s also a macroscopic measure that’s being used the wrong way to define good and bad, justice or injustice, poverty and wealth.

The costs are higher because those people who preach privilege and identity politics are out of touch with how the world works. If you believe people’s patterns of human activity and voting are based entirely in privilege, then you’re coming at those you wish to influence from a place of distance and alienation.

If you wish to help marginalized groups using that definition of marginalization, that’s amazing but there shouldn’t be such massive negative consequences for people who don’t subscribe to that school of thought. As far as I’m concerned, this way of looking at the world is a mistake and my heart doesn’t go out to people along that definition as it does people who are poor, immigrants (from any country), people afflicted by a natural disaster, or those bullied for their thoughts.

The justification but Groups A, B, and C have been bullied for centuries doesn’t satisfy me personally. What we should be concerned about is an accurate assessment of the degree to which these groups are oppressed in 2020 rather than a constant reckoning of and a balance that’s somewhat accurate instead. Otherwise you have atrocities like the decision in Oregon to over-award the black population in that state for Coronavirus relief.