Equality Is Not Immunity

By George Case

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

 

In a 2016 New Yorker profile of first-time American voters, a young respondent explained why he was planning to cast a ballot for the unlikely upstart Donald Trump: “The thing about the word ‘racist’ is that every time it gets used it loses meaning. For the past decade or two, it’s been used by people on the left as a kill shot. That just kills your argument, no matter what you’re trying to say. You’re a racist and therefore you’re evil and therefore you lose. But I think a lot of people are noticing that it doesn’t work that way anymore. ... That’s what a lot of people on the left don’t realize. It’s not 1959 anymore. You’re the establishment. You guys run shit.”

 

Whatever the wisdom of the voter’s electoral preference, he was correct that 2016 was not 1959. Near the core of today’s bitterly contested politics is a dispute over just how much social justice is necessary, not the necessity of social justice itself. No one, after all, is calling for a return to slavery, or for a repeal of the franchise for women, or for homosexuality to be once again criminalized. No one seriously wants to bring back the standards of 1959; indeed, most of the adults who set those standards are no longer alive.

 

Instead, the debate now turns on whether the response to objections of specific groups should be single institutional or legislative changes—which have to a large extent already been realized—or an ongoing growth industry. In his 2020 book Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, Christopher Caldwell noted the difference: “At some point in the course of decades, what had seemed in 1964 to be merely an ambitious reform revealed itself to have been something more.” Feminism, the civil rights movement, LGBTQ advocacy, and other causes now divide people not over their original premises but over their ongoing relevance, or lack thereof. Who’s evil and therefore loses? Who’s the establishment and runs shit?

 

***

 

Consider the following range of issues that remain pressing crises to some but closed cases to others: 

 

Racism: It’s now common to hear statistical disparities between white and non-white populations within countries and between them cited as conclusive proof of racial discrimination’s continued effects. Troubling gaps in income and education, life expectancy, rates of incarceration and addiction, and other metrics suggest that black and brown people in many places are treated differently—or treated worse—than whites, either one-on-one or under whole political systems. Thus, goes the reasoning, modern anti-racist government policies, and movements like Idle No More in Canada and Black Lives Matter in the US, are vital instruments in finally securing the rightful equality that history has long denied, and still denies, persons of color.

 

Yet a catalogue of legal amendments and cultural shifts across several decades can be offered to refute this reasoning. Constitutional safeguards; statutory holidays; official departments and mandated programs; school curricula; a litany of formal land acknowledgements and apologies for past wrongs; the prominence of non-white entertainers, and pop styles with roots in Africa or Latin America; the accomplishments of non-white politicians and professionals; the very visibility of racial concerns in public discourse; even the near-ubiquitous capitalization of the word Black as a racial denominator—all of this suggests that the subtle and overt racism of previous centuries is behind us.

 

These developments have probably influenced recent reversals (such as last year’s decision by the US Supreme Court that Affirmative Action programs in university enrolments are unconstitutional), but they have surely seeped into general opinions around prejudice, fairness, and rights that in turn have shaped the outcomes of elections and referenda around the world. At the very least, we ought to agree that the definition of racism now means only insufficient anti-racism, rather than actively promoted bigotry. We can quibble over what’s sufficient, but what’s actively promoted has become pretty much nil. 

 

Sexism: With the rise of so-called Fourth Wave Feminism in the 2010s, and then the #MeToo campaign against sexual assault that gained visibility in 2017, countering the oppressions of a purportedly male-dominated order has taken on an urgency not seen since the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. As evidence that continued struggle remains necessary, proponents point to women’s persistent experiences of gendered violence, harassment, and double standards; the exposure of sexually predatory males in show business, pro sports, and other exclusive fields; and the election of the chauvinistic Donald Trump as US president in 2016. The renewed popularity of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, and mass demonstrations against the overturning of abortion rights in the United States, are likewise hailed as grassroots resistance to an age-old process of female subjugation. 

 

But the problems motivating women in Western societies are offset by a remarkable record of women’s advances since the last third of the 20th century. By now, the register of successful women in politics, industry, law, and medicine in the West—including as high-ranking national leaders—is barely newsworthy, while the ratio of females to males in higher education is decidedly skewed in women’s favor. Barriers to career and personal opportunities that once blocked today’s grandmothers are virtually unknown to their daughters and granddaughters; the genies of birth control, sexual agency, and equal pay for equal work can never be put back in their respective bottles. All of this represents a world-historical evolution in public and private life to which the angriest young feminists of 2024 seem oblivious. Sexist attitudes and behavior may endure in particular males, but the sexist assumptions that underlay the civilization of yesteryear have become unthinkable. 

 

Homophobia/Transphobia: Parades, flags, school textbooks, and email signatures are now deployed everywhere against the allegedly widespread hatred directed at gay and transgender people. Leaders and commentators who question the need for educational agendas or medical interventions are accused of countenancing violence. Parents and private citizens who refuse to accommodate non-heterosexual identities are said to be putting lives at risk. Of all the communities pleading vulnerability today, members of the LGBT lobby cast their precarious position in the most desperate terms. 

 

The act isn’t very convincing. Since any individual’s gender expression or sexual taste may vary over a lifetime, and since it will never be exactly the same as any other’s, the proposal that homosexuals, bisexuals, and the transgendered constitute unique human typologies, deserving special recognition by law, remains unsettled in the court of public opinion. Their relatively tiny place within the human family diminishes their contentions further. The broad acceptance of gay marriage, the steady procession of LGBT public figures (Pete Buttigieg, Elliott Page, Kaitlyn Jenner, Kristen Stewart, Ellen DeGeneres, et al), and commercial entertainment depicting LGBT people as noble victims or cutting-edge trendsetters (Carol, Ammonite, Call Me By Your Name, Spoiler Alert, Boy Erased, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and so on), all present a generous spectrum of possibilities that betrays contemporary LGBT activism as a rebellion in search of a cause, a self-conscious defiance of norms which are in fact no longer very normal. When a crusade’s demands center on dress, bathrooms, and titles, rather than jobs or votes, it is hard to distinguish from mere vanity. 

 

Antisemitism: Millennia of Jewish persecution by Christians, culminating in the Nazis’ Final Solution, has been extended in our own time by implacable antagonism toward Jews in the Middle East and over the globe. Jewish schools or places of worship in numerous locations have been vandalized with swastikas, and in 2018, a gun rampage at a synagogue in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania claimed the lives of 11 people. The assailant responsible for that outrage was motivated by murderous far-Right conspiracy theories against Jews that fester throughout social media. And the Hamas surprise attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which left over a thousand dead, was excused or even approved by political progressives internationally. The world’s oldest hatred continues to thrive online, and in street demonstrations, mass shootings, and suicide bombings. 

 

At the same time, however, diaspora Jews commonly achieve as much or more as their Gentile neighbors and colleagues—across continents, Jewish luminaries are familiar in business, scholarship, or the arts—and Israel is a prosperous nuclear-armed stronghold in a perpetually poor and unstable region. The old Gentleman’s Agreement-style restrictions on Jewish employment or housing belong to another age; indeed, Jewish intermarriage and Jewish secularism have left Jewishness itself regarded by some as just another comfortable “white-adjacent” category. Even memories of the Holocaust are fading as survivors and perpetrators pass away, and Hitler’s crimes lately share notoriety with other genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, China, and the Americas. However it’s perceived, the antisemitism of 2024 doesn’t pack the same trauma as the antisemitism of 1492 or 1941. 

 

***

 

Uniting each of these disconnects is the difference between weakness and strength. Before, even the mildest instances of racism or sexism—a teacher singling out a student’s ethnicity or a boss hitting on a secretary—came from an imbalance of authority. More injurious by far was the white judge sentencing a non-white defendant, the straight jock beating up a gay nerd, or the WASP recruiter rejecting a Jewish applicant. Nowadays, the teacher, the boss, the judge, the jock, and the recruiter are themselves just as likely to be ethnic, female, non-white, gay, or Jewish. Demographics that carry an ancestral recollection of disadvantage are still invoking it long after the disadvantage has evolved away or been legislated out of existence.

 

Sometimes this invocation is cynical. “As the formerly oppressed move into greater and greater freedom, they are often more wedded to the idea of themselves as oppressed than to the reality that they are freer than ever,” argued Shelby Steele in his 2015 book Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country. “Their grievance against their former oppressor is leverage, entitlement, and even self-esteem within the larger society. It is power.”

 

Elsewhere, perhaps, the invocation is simply force of habit: protesters reflexively drawing on a universal sympathy for the lowly or the helpless without acknowledging that those on whose behalf they speak are no longer among them. As much as anything, complaints of racism, sexism, homophobia, or antisemitism may just be misapprehensions of impartial conditions that could apply—rightly or wrongly, perfectly or imperfectly—to anyone. Being judged by the content of one’s character, and not by one’s color, sex, orientation, or religion, is judgement nonetheless. People who once clamored to be considered as equals are finding out just what that consideration entails—that unwelcome ideas are not necessarily hateful ones, that equality is not immunity, and that you can still lose on a level playing field.

 

Only one group’s claimed handicaps remain for us to reflect on:

 

Poverty/Hunger/Loneliness: No change.