The term was once used in the battle against oppression. Not after Christchurch
‘You turned the issue on its head,” someone said to me after I gave a talk on identity politics in Melbourne last week. “I’ve never thought of it that way round.” It always was on its head, I said to her. It’s just that we’ve never noticed.
I’ve been in Australia over the past week talking, among other things, about the politics of identity. The issue has, in the wake of the Christchurch mosque massacres, acquired new resonance …
… There is, though, in Australia as elsewhere, a strange disjuncture in such discussions. There is a heated debate about identity politics, which focuses primarily on the left, and on whether it makes sense to adopt such politics. There is an equally heated, but separate, debate about white identity and white nationalism …
… Where reactionaries adopted an identitarian outlook, radicals challenged inequality and oppression in the name of universal rights. From anti-colonial struggles to the movements for women’s suffrage to the battles for gay rights, the great progressive movements that have shaped the modern world were a challenge to the politics of identity, to the claim that an individual’s race or gender or sexuality should define their rights, or their place in a social hierarchy.
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Well, those who should know better in Australia don't help themselves too much. There is a continous media campaign to combat the scurge of domestic violence, media across all platforms is used. Invariably, the main perpetrator is a white male.
ReplyDeleteNo doubt they are scared to use another skin toned male for fear of being called racist, but it feeds right in to the Right Wing's narrative.