The power of identity politics
“The strong cannot help confronting; the less strong cannot help evading.”
Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time
One of the core themes of my forthcoming book The Tribe is the remarkable power that certain kinds of identity politics have attained
in our public life.
The knowledge base of this politics is the universal
victimhood of its favoured identity groups.
As the United Nations’ ‘Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance’ Tendayi Achiume put it in her report on how awful and racist Britain is, “The harsh reality is that
race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability status and related categories all
continue to determine the life chances and well-being of people in Britain in
ways that are unacceptable and in many cases unlawful.”
For this interpretation, which is appearing in our public
life daily and prominently, the life chances and well-being of non-white-skinned
people, women, the ethnically non-British, Muslims and disabled people are determined by those identity markers, so
that they appear as universal victims
of society and of the identity groups which dominate it. This is direct causation
she is talking about – that identity leads to either success or failure. She
makes no qualification on it and makes an unequivocal judgement on the
situation as unacceptable and also sometimes unlawful – so assuming a kind of absolute authority over it.
Achiume, who The Times described as a ‘Zambian-born, US-based academic’ and ‘a UN expert’ on its front
page, added, “Austerity measures have been disproportionately detrimental to
racial and ethnic minority communities. Unsurprisingly, austerity has had
especially pronounced intersectional consequences, making women of colour the
worst affected.”
Here we see the logic of this form of knowledge, attributing
victimhood along the lines of identity categories – so, combining women and people
‘of colour’ as victims, we arrive at a maximum victimhood of ‘women of colour’.
This type of knowledge, of ‘intersectionality’, will be familiar to anyone accustomed
to the theories coming out of the social sciences (and wider humanities) departments
of Western universities.
However the ability to make assertion in the public sphere –
and to have it leading the news with the one
making the assertion described as a ‘UN expert’ as in this case – is an
indication of political power. The
domination of academic discourse by this sort of universalising theory is a
sign of political power. That someone
propounding this theory gets appointed by the body that brings the world
together to go and inspect countries
and tell them what to do is a sign of political power.
My book explores how this power works through relationships which have built
up between what I am calling ‘the liberal-left’ (the ‘tribe’ of the title) and
these favoured groups via those who appear as their representatives – so
feminists, Islamists and ethnic group activists for example. These
relationships make up what I am calling ‘the system of diversity’ – a form of society
grounded in these relationships of favouring and representing, linked to assumptions
of identity group victimhood.
As I am seeing it, many of our major institutions, including
major media organisations like the BBC, Sky
News, The Times and especially The Guardian and Channel 4 are
constantly being drawn towards the system of diversity and its ways of relating
to the world – seeing fixed and ‘quasi-fixed’ identity as primary to what is
going on in the world and primary to how they should address it.
Achiume’s statements drew fierce criticism as soon as they
appeared. However, the way similar statements and reports keep on appearing –
for example just recently with accusations that Oxbridge admissions are biased against black people (when they are not) and attacks on the Canadian psychiatrist and identity politics critic Jordan Peterson,
tells us something significant about where power lies in our society.
The critics are constantly mobilising just to respond to the
tide of assertion and accusation and demands for favourable treatment for the favoured groups. They are
not setting the agenda. They are barely holding back the tide.
For the rest of us, this agenda is increasingly working its
way into our daily lives as rules and orders and social norms – to implement
positive discrimination in the workplace, to attend training to correct our ‘unconscious
bias’ and to report assertions that are not favourable to favoured group members to the police as ‘hate crime’.
The natural response in this situation is to give way, which
is after all, fundamentally, a giving-way to
power. We evade, we protect ourselves, while the winners go on producing
their reports and setting the agenda and setting the rules that govern our
lives.
The Tribe: the
liberal-left and the system of diversity, will be published on 1st
July by Imprint Academic (for order details, click here).
For more on the theoretical background to the book, click here.
Good summary. Your final three paragraphs make for a depressing conclusion - an unstoppable inevitability. Where will this all end?
ReplyDeleteIt might be the fad du jour but it's going to run into an increasingly fed up public. Plus there is very little support for more minority quotas:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2018/02/don-t-mistake-british-public-s-leftie-economic-views-liberalism