Identity Politics

 There is an unfortunate tendency in the UK to import social movements from the US, where society, and history, is very different.

Amongst these tendencies has been the substitution of identity politics for community politics. Instead of everyone uniting for the common good, this philosophy incites competitive victimhood amongst arbitrary groupings, focussing on what divides society (or can be made to divide it) rather than on what unites us. The foolish assumption is, that all people sharing a particular common characteristic are the same and have the same problems, needs and complaints.

The secondary, even more insidious, message is that non-members of the said arbitrary group have historically cherished enmity to its members and continue to discriminate against them today.

I cannot speak to the relevance of such thinking to The USA, though it seems to me that it can hardly be constructive anywhere. I do believe, however, that having crossed the Atlantic and found themselves largely irrelevant to British society, such movements have focussed on exaggerating any problems that can be found in order to justify their own continued existence.

Moreover, by taking the sort of public protest action that creates maximum annoyance and irritation to the uninvolved general public, they are succeeding in creating, by way of backlash, precisely the problems against which they supposedly protest.

I am reminded that, over a century ago, Booker T. Washington pointed out what one might today regard as the beginnings of the race relations industry. There were people, he said, who made it their business to complain about problems, but did not actually want them solved, because the problems provided them with influence and income as protesters.