By Mitchell Blatt
Saturday, August 27, 2016
There is a paradox at the center of the identity politics
left. Those who consider themselves the most ferocious opponents of racism and
bigotry are in fact the only other ones besides racists who are so obsessed
with their identities.
Hillary Clinton’s latest speech attacking Donald Trump
for his past comments was well-received by those websites to the left of center
that viscerally oppose such comments, like Jezebel, Salon, and multiple
times at Slate.
Clinton slammed Trump for hiring Breitbart executive
Stephen Bannon as its new campaign manager and went down a list of unhinged
articles Breitbart has actually published under his tenure. The interesting
thing about many of Breitbart’s headlines isn’t just the casual bigotry and
insanity but the obsession with identity politics present in such articles as
“Straight People Have Ruined Gay Rights,” which argued for straights to be
banned from gay spaces. Nothing would need to change for those words to be
published nearly verbatim at Salon.
Other articles would look just like Salon if only a few
words were changed. “Why Equality and Diversity Departments Should Only Hire
Rich, Straight White Men,” would just need to change the identity words to
SJW-preferred groups. Another Breitbart writer was outraged about “How Feminist
Propaganda is Destroying Men’s Lives,” just the kind of article Salon publishes
when the topic is “rape culture” and the lives in question are female.
So it was amusing to see Breitbart torn apart by a
presidential candidate, but it would be even better if those same outlets
cheering Clinton on weren’t themselves proponents of some of the very tactics
she put up for criticism. Dividing people by race is what politically correct
SJWs thrive on. Many can’t even evaluate an argument without invoking the race,
gender, or sexuality of the person making that argument. PC activists have
created a whole language to demean an argument based on the identity of the speaker.
Claiming someone is “mansplaining,” “whitesplaining,” “straightsplaining,”
“cissplaining” or some other kind of “-splaining” is considered sufficient for
SJWs to refute an argument. When Jonathan Chait critiqued the culture of
extreme political correctness on the left,
writers at some of those same outlets that applauded Clinton for
smacking down Breitbart’s toxic identity politics invoked Chait’s identity to
attack him.
“[H]ere is sad white man Jonathan Chait’s essay about the
difficulty of being a white man in the second age of ‘political correctness,’”
white male Alex Pareene, who is getting ready to move over to a sports website,
Pajama-Boy-splained in a post that will soon only exist at Archive.org. (I wish
him success in his new job at Deadpsin and think that he will really enhance
their coverage of the Washington Redskins name controversy.) “Many progressive
critics have written off the piece as the whining of an out-of-touch white guy,
and that’s certainly a fair response,” Slate’s J. Bryan Lowder wrote.
In August Autostraddle, a culture website with a
GBLT-focus, even retracted a favorable review of “Sausage Party” on the grounds
that the writer was white and one of the characters was played by a Latina (or
“Latinx,” in SJW-ese). The accompanying editor’s note was so hilariously SJW
that observers had a hard time distinguishing it from satire, making it a
textbook illustration of Poe’s Law.
There’s an underlying perception that someone can’t offer
a fair assessment or argument about topics related to a different race or
background. When the “controversial” review came into Autostraddle, the
editor’s first question was not about whether it was well-written or accurate
but, “is the reviewer white[?]” “I was blinded by my own whiteness existing
inside a system of white supremacy. I must do better. I will do better,” the
editor later virtusplained as part of her apology.
Liberal cultural critics will shift their assessment of a
work upon finding out the race of the author or authors. The food blog Thug
Kitchen was written anonymously from the start and became popular with the
kinds of enlightened foodies who like vegan kale smoothie recipes. Mateeka
Quinn of BookRiot wrote that she felt “let down” when she found out. “Many
readers were shocked and suddenly offended.” But why should the race of the
bloggers matter, especially considering the blog wasn’t about race? Did the
critics, who protested a book signing in L.A., associate the word “thug” with
black culture?
Quinn offered an explanation that doesn’t stand up under
scrutiny:
The problem that the African
American community has with writers like Stockett and Thug Kitchen is not the
fact that they are White. Rather, it’s the fact that their controversial
writing assumes a perspective that they have not—could not, by the simple
nature of their birth—experience.
Individuals can learn from experience. They can also
learn from books and study. But one’s race in and of itself often doesn’t tell
us anything definitive about that person’s experienced. Individuals of a single
race can have different individual experiences. If thug chiefs Michelle Davis
and Matt Holloway were so out-of-touch with the topic they were writing about,
then why was it such a surprise when their race was revealed? That fact alone
shows that they wrote it convincingly.
White Scottish historian William Dalrymple has written
some of the most brilliant and sympathetic portrayals of colonial era India in
the English-speaking language, even though he is neither Indian, nor was alive
in the 1800’s. Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote one of the most brilliant
books describing the early United States. Indian-born British author Salman
Rushdie wrote compellingly about American rock’n’roll culture in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Their
heritage and country of origin didn’t prevent them from describing countries
and cultures apart from their own.
Of course someone who doesn’t know anything about a topic
wouldn’t be qualified to write about it, but that problem can affect people of any
race or sexuality. For example, I haven’t written as much about white
Appalachian culture as author of Hillbilly
Elegy J.D. Vance has, despite my being white, but I have written a lot
about China. And Autostraddle editor Heather Hogan hasn’t written a lot about
reality despite her identity as editor of a GLAAD-awarded website.
Ironically, those liberals who insist that we must take
into account the identity of a writer or speaker making an argument are making
the exact same argument Trump was (rightly) criticized for making about the
Trump University lawsuit, including in Clinton’s speech. His thought that an
American of Mexican descent can’t be impartial due to his heritage is the
logical equivalent of Autostraddle saying that a white reviewer can’t be
impartial on account of his heritage. In her speech, Clinton once again quoted
Paul Ryan’s rebuke that it was the “textbook definition of a racist comment.”
It’s also the textbook definition of a politically
correct comment.
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