Identity Politics in Overdrive: From the Kavanaugh hearings to a lawsuit alleging that Harvard discriminates against Asian-Americans, the Left sees “white supremacy” at the heart of everything. city-journal.org/kavanaugh-iden…
The core premise of academic victimology is that whites game the system to disable non-whites. The effort seems to have failed miserably.
But rather than acknowledging the implications of Asian success for the narrative of systemic pro-white bias, the proponents of identity politics simply trot out the “white supremacy” mantra as if doing so routs any countervailing evidence.
That some left-wing Asians adopt the same rhetoric is a testament to the status accorded to alleged victims of white privilege and to the lure of oppositional identity politics in elite circles.
The eleventh-hour ambush of Kavanaugh began as a straightforward feminist morality play: male abuser, female victim, each standing in for half of the population.
But race and ethnicity trump sex in the victim sweepstakes, so the “white” epithet was soon added to the mix, directed both at Kavanaugh and at the “white male” Republicans of the Senate Judiciary Committee who would be voting on whether to send the nomination to the full Senate
. (Texas Republican Ted Cruz became an honorary white for these purposes.) But how could this be “about” race when Kavanaugh’s main accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, was also white? That question was never answered.
Instead, the media granted Ford absolution from her whiteness, leaving her simply as the embodiment of female “survivors,” whereas Kavanaugh was portrayed as evil whiteness incarnate.
NYT columnist Michele Goldberg called Kavanaugh’s Jesuit high school, Georgetown Prep, a “bastion of heedless male entitlement.” A Times article opined that “few Americans qualify as more privileged and elite than Judge Kavanaugh, a prep school graduate with two Yale degrees.”
But Ford was as “privileged” as Kavanaugh. Her tony private high school, Holton-Arms, sits on 57 acres of forested land in suburban Maryland and boasts athletic and performing arts facilities the equal of many a college; it is the girls’ equivalent of Georgetown Prep.
Yearbooks from Ford’s era at the school portray a drunken, promiscuous party scene reminiscent of many a male frat.
Democrats and the activists chose to ignore those details, while Kavanaugh was triply marked for infamy. For the moment, femaleness, represented by Ford, was a totalizing category, unriven by divisions of color and privilege.
When Maine senator Susan Collins delivered a careful analysis of Ford’s account and explained her reasoning in confirming Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, however, the identity coalition cleaved. Femaleness was no longer a unifying victim category.
Whiteness and privilege were reintroduced into the female side of the ledger, distinguishing Ford’s female backers, still unmarked by race and class, from the turncoats who supported Kavanaugh.
These “gender traitors” put “their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status,” wrote Alexis Grenell, a gender commentator, in the New York Times.
The female senators who voted for Kavanaugh and the female voters who supported Trump did so “to prop up their whiteness,” according to Grenell. Reasons beyond gender and race could have nothing to do with that support, in the eyes of the Left.
The 2017 Women’s March against Donald Trump, for example, had faced criticism for being too white. “I’ve never felt anything remotely resembling sisterhood with white women,” wrote cultural critic Jamilah Lemieux, to explain her absence from the march.
A month before the Kavanaugh accusations exploded onto the political landscape, Harper’s Bazaar ran an article on how feminism is “white supremacy in heels.” They “completely vacuum the energy, direction, and point of the conversation to themselves and their feelings”...
But these divisions were papered over when a privileged white female offered the last hope for keeping a qualified conservative jurist off the Supreme Court—until, that is, Susan Collins “doubled down on white supremacy,”
Suddenly, with Collins’s defection, intersectionality was back. White women have failed people of color over and over again.
The Left’s increasingly desperate approach to political debate may energize its base, but unmoors it from reality. Sooner or later, that unreality could be its downfall.
