The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

by Yascha Mounk

The trend of supposedly progressive institutions “focusing principally on our own separateness, our own ethnic identity, culture, and traditions” wrongly suggested that members of marginalized groups were somehow “unable to share in the general riches of human culture”; in the description of the literary critic Adam Shatz, this struck Said as a kind of “apartheid pedagogy.” In the end, Said therefore embraced a form of universalism that stood in direct conflict with some of the core tenets of the identity synthesis: “Marginality and homelessness are not, in my opinion, to be gloried in; they are to be brought to an end, so that more, and not fewer, people can enjoy the benefits of what has for centuries been denied the victims of race, class, or gender.”