The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
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Then I came across everydayfeminism.com, a website that expressed a simplistic version of these new ideas and idioms in a highly accessible form.
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“You Call It Professionalism; I Call It Oppression in a Three-Piece Suit.”
Andrew Powell
Lol! 🤡
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Meanwhile, administrators at the University of California have instructed students to refrain from using “offensive” phrases like “melting pot” or “there is only one race, the human race.”
Andrew Powell
Ha! Ha! Ha!
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“the ACLU has become in many respects a caricature of its former self.”
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When Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, the state director of the local ACLU affiliate, tried to explain the organization’s long-standing principles at an event at William & Mary, students—holding signs that read, aclu, free speech for who? and the oppressed are not impressed—shouted her down before she had a chance to speak.
Andrew Powell
That's what people do when they can't argue on logic.
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ACLU. It now seems “more important for ACLU staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,”
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In an accompanying video, the bestselling author Robin DiAngelo—who is herself white—explained that becoming less white would take considerable commitment: it is “a lifelong process.”
Andrew Powell
Lol!
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“All it takes is one particularly vocal, particularly difficult individual to raise concerns through social media and whether or not there’s any basis to it, often you can’t defend yourself publicly.”
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“We used to want to make the world a better place,” he said. “Now we just make our organizations more miserable to work at.”
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So can we predict when the pressure to conform becomes so crushing that anyone who dares to dissent is vilified and those who are left in the group feel an even stronger need to go along with the views of its loudest members? The answer appears to be yes.
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“If you’re a white person in America, social justice educator Robin DiAngelo has a message for you: You’re a racist, pure and simple.”
Andrew Powell
Lol! She’s a clown.
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The job of a loyal ally is to “listen,” to “affirm the beliefs of the less privileged,” and to “amplify their demands.”
Andrew Powell
Eye roll.
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Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead.
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“Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thought and opinions has ceased to exist,” Frederick Douglass once said.
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a society that gets into the habit of censoring unpopular viewpoints would be just as likely to suppress their own points of view.
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Finally, free speech functions as a crucial safety valve that allows people to organize against all kinds of injustices; limiting free speech therefore makes it harder to achieve social progress.
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“an all-Black identifying audience.”
Andrew Powell
"Identifying"?!?
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On the other hand, it could well happen that the guilty party, in order to lighten his uncomfortable moral burden, will finally begin to rationalize his sins and affirm them as virtues. And by such a process, today’s ally can become tomorrow’s enemy.”
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Dani Bostick echoes the growing consensus even more starkly, asserting that the idea of color blindness “is actually racist.”
Andrew Powell
Ridiculous.
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policymakers pretend that race doesn’t exist, they will neither be able to spot willful discrimination nor be able to recognize when a policy has an unfair and disproportionate impact on one demographic group.
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Many people have a difficult start in life because they suffer from entrenched disadvantages. If you grow up in an impoverished neighborhood that has high crime and terrible schools, you deserve special assistance to ensure you have a fair shot at succeeding in life.
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am at times impatient with the legal framing of moral debates in the United States.
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As Manisha Krishnan put the point in Vice, “It is literally impossible to be racist to a white person.”
Andrew Powell
This stops black people from seeing themselves as bullies.
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Both scientists and medical professionals, for example, know that biological sex is a key determinant of important human attributes, from the prevalence of heart disease to the ability to become pregnant.
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For centuries, America drew immigrants on the promise that even the lowliest dishwasher could become a millionaire. But if the American dream figured so prominently in the imagination of mankind, a big part of the reason is that the United States also afforded a good life to people who did not climb all the way to the top. Today, each of these promises is starting to sound hollow.
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It is possible for members of marginalized groups to hold dangerous prejudices against members of groups that are comparatively “privileged.” A failure to recognize this makes it harder to understand the world or to combat certain kinds of hate crime.
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as Robin DiAngelo has claimed, anytime a white person interrupts a Black person, they are bringing the whole apparatus of white supremacy to bear on them.
Andrew Powell
Lol!
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The identity synthesis portrays itself as an ambitious ideology that seeks to make the world a better place. But its vision is ultimately neither realistic nor desirable. One of the core appeals of liberalism is that it aims higher.
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The values of political equality, individual freedom, and collective self-determination make a huge contribution to fostering tolerance and prosperity, helping liberal democracies avoid the terrible suffering that has so often bedeviled humanity in the past.
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But when they think about how and where they want to live, most people will, as surveys of the dream destinations for would-be immigrants reveal, choose countries like France and Germany, Canada and the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States: countries, that is, in which they could speak freely, enjoy great autonomy in how they lead their private lives, and contest the decisions of a government they consider out of touch.
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“I want my two sons to understand that responsible citizenship in a diverse democracy is not principally about noticing what’s bad; it’s about constructing what’s good.”
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Appearing on Pod Save America, a progressive podcast run by four of his former staffers, a few weeks before the 2022 midterms, Barack Obama warned that “sometimes people just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells. They want some acknowledgment that life is messy and that all of us, at any given moment, can say things the wrong way.”
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“In the 1960s, left-wing radicals wanted to overthrow capitalism. We ended up with Whole Foods,”
Andrew Powell
Lol!
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2. Don’t Vilify Those Who Disagree
Andrew Powell
I am proud that I don't do this.
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social media and cable news, it can seem as though society were cleaved into two mutually antagonistic halves. Most Americans are either “woke” or “MAGA.”
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Don’t discipline anybody before the facts are clear and passions have cooled.
Andrew Powell
Exactly! I wish this would happen to me.
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Michel Foucault
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To write a book is a lonely process.