Identity Politics and the End of DEI?
This is the second guest post by The Appollonic. His first can be found here (A Plea to the Unrighteous); and he can be followed on Twitter. I have purposely left the date up – I had several essays in the queue when he sent it and then I got slammed with work deadlines (which is also why this is the first essay in 3 weeks!). Yes, he sent this to me in November. This turns out to be valuable because his essay was prescient. In the very first paragraph, he pretty much nails exactly what has happened since he sent this to me. Facts are one thing, opinions another. As always with guest posts, the opinions expressed here are his and not necessarily mine.
The Apollonic
November 28, 2023
It was an atypical day in the United States. Black Lives Matter (BLM) published a picture depicting a paragliding terrorist, the swastikas were out, crowds were parading and celebrating an act of terror and calls for the death of Israel filled the campuses. While these events of mass hate are always shocking and morally reprehensible, we should all prepare for more of the same as the iterations of the dark underbelly of identity politics surface with increasing intensity
The First Breakdown of the Civil Society
During the Floyd riots the most sinister event against civil society was the acceptance of the falsehood that racial hatred against the White people wasn’t racism. It was claimed that privilege and power made it impossible for BIPOC, “minoritized” or whatever the term du jour you prefer for people who do not identify as White, to commit racist acts against White people, no matter how openly aggressive or vile, while White people were under the microscope of microaggressions and implicit biases. It was followed by a barrage of anti-White racist articles and the dividing of the society into two groups, oppressors and the oppressed, a perception to be throttled to every aspect of society. And like the Nazis, the White were to be designated as “Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has -- a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘White’ people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one's body, in one's mind, and in one's world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts' appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonWhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate.”1 Not only was this a time of overly simplistic, infantilizing ideas not supported by the empirical reality, but a time when a form of punitive mass hate based on race was inducted to the institutional culture in a wide scale. Systemic racism based on the idea of reparative justice.
The Normalization of a Racial Hierarchy
The society based on pluralism and ideological diversity was made taboo. Inducted instead were practices of a two-tiered justice system where the identity of the perpetrator superseded the actions against the victim. This same error of judgment was replicated throughout the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) industry’s demands for equity. Individual actions and accomplishments were no longer a priority. The priority was in the racial and now also the sexual identity of the individual. After all, in the Critical Social Justice matrix of identity politics, the oppressed can do no harm against the oppressor group, even if there is no reality for the claims of oppression. Through the normalization of the claim that all White people are oppressors despite financial, social or mental status, it was a short step to “justifying” committing racial hate crimes against them, and against Asians and Jewish too as adjunct to Whites. A racial hierarchy was set.
The Second Iteration
These actions were just the warmup. It was time to induct intersectionality into the mainstream. The second iteration of the identitarians was trans activism. Not using the right pronouns became hate speech, belief in the biological realities of differences between males and females became participation in trans genocide as did opposing the possibly irreversible effects of hormonal and puberty blocking therapies (which have now been banned by the UK, Sweden and Finland for having no positive outcomes).
Radicalization of the Youth
Underneath the public eye was the sustained radicalization of the youth in schools and campuses across the US following the death of George Floyd. Children were subjected to privilege walks, chained to feel the weight of oppression, LGBTQ messaging beaconed from the intersectional identitarian messaging and of course, there’s no Critical Race Theory (CRT) in schools. Schools chose to create a generation of activists at the expense of the children. These practices made learning secondary to identity and the treatment of the human mind, human sentience as property of the state to be shaped to its political beliefs has not yet departed the classrooms in spite of strong opposition.
The Mass Departure from Reality
The identitarian intersectionalism is an expansion to the CRT view that society consists only of the oppressors and the oppressed by increasing the minutia of categories. It’s the LGBT vs. the heterosexuals, Male vs. Female, Black vs. White and so on. This overly simplistic and unrealistic view of society is the heart of our present chaos. None of the perceived oppressed groups can be accused of any wrongdoing just as there can be no racism against White people. It’s the error that repeats itself so long as the identity supersedes the action including the fallacy that members of a “privileged” racial/identity group cannot feel pain or be a victim of injustice (except at the hands of a person who is a member of an even more privileged group). And even as all people can feel pain, it’s justified by the racial identity superimposed on them based on the color of their skin through the intersectional identitarianism. By this logic, biological males can compete against biological females, the streets of San Francisco become life threatening for the civilian population, and college students become ardent supporters of Hamas and justify butchering children.
So Are We the Nazis Now?
As a result of the years of identitarian critical social justice aggression, the project of Western civilization has essentially resurrected Nazi ideology on intersectional grounds. Hitler’s racial hierarchy has been brought back through Crenshaw’s intersectional oppression hierarchy, children as subject to dubious hormonal treatments on ostensibly compassionate grounds, the struggle against Whiteness is an ongoing project through blunt racism. The far left believes it should dominate the world without giving room for any other thought to exist, with the DEI educational-tech-cultural complex forcing these utterly amoral acts upon the populations.
DEI is not Science
That an entity as ideological as DEI exists on campuses is an affront to civil society. It’s not based on pluralistic worldview and is focused solely on the identity of the individual, not the acts of the individual. That students gain points for having participated in activism is the first act of treating humans as property, as those interested solely in sciences and not the human condition are punished for their non-participation in state politics. Through the ideology DEI embodies, with politically assigned victim groups are the cream of the crop, open support for terrorism has emerged. Through the related decolonial ideology, the idea that Israel has committed “genocide” has emerged. It’s after all about the identity, not the acts of the individual. Which paints a horrific picture as now even terrorism is approved in the palette of the intersectional identitarian sects. Is this the view of the scientific institutions or have they been forced to accept something that isn’t founded on any empirical evidence at all?
The Wakeup Call
These movements and ideologies must be unequivocally recognized for their racial hatred and expelled from every civil institution. DEI has failed on all counts of their mission as seen from the unfathomable displays of antisemitism and racism. The time for quiet tolerance is over. It’s time for the defense of reality and the truth against the distortions and falsehoods of the activist hate groups and DEI industry.
Quote from Moss (2022). On Having Whiteness. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
On Black Lives Mattering in 2020: The story that never got past the MSM 'news' selectivity was just how many black-on-black murderers went free in the wake of the 'mainly peaceful' orgy of opportunistic looting, raping and murdering that followed the death of George Floyd?
On DEI: Heather Mac Donald's The Diversity Delusion - (that I reviewed here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind) is a great mythbusting reality-check on the siren calls of ‘social justice’ now so insistent in all Western societies. It is a devastatingly compelling expose of “how race and gender pandering corrupts the university and undermine our culture.” To be a believer in personal responsibility in the contemporary West is to be continually assailed by invocations to feel guilty about the - largely baseless - alleged grievances of an ever-growing list of ‘victims of society’. This competitive victimhood narrative originated in academia but now oozes daily from the liberal media and has progressively been absorbed as orthodoxy in each and every one of our institutions, all the way from schools to armed forces."
This was nearly 170 years in the making, right since the advent of feminism in Seneca Falls. MRAs have warned people repeatedly that the rampant casual misandry spouted by the mainstream was a slippery slope, that giving rights and privileges without the attendant responsibilities and accountability would lead to disaster; now here we are.
People should've acted when the pioneer of women/gender studies courses in American universities said that the population of men should be reduced to and kept at 10% of the world population. Now those people have had decades to entrench themselves and shape policy and culture.
What did you all expect?