The Right now acknowledges the correlation with a smirk. A rhetorical flourish could understate the whole brutal history of racism in America as 400 years of “white identity politics,” in order to demonstrate that the Right was guilty of the same tactics as the Left. Until recently, the phrase “white identity politics” was a trap progressives tried to set for the Right. In late 2016, alt-right trolls formed an online mob dedicated to ousting George Ciccariello-Maher, a Drexel professor who ironically used the phrase “white genocide” on Twitter - a phrase that also appeared unironically on Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, when he retweeted an alt-right account. Amid widespread debate over trigger warnings, he refused to read Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, a memoir that included depictions of lesbian sex.Īlso in 2015, Yale student activists campaigned for the dismissal of Erika Christakis, a lecturer who had written an email arguing that the administration shouldn’t enforce policies regarding the cultural sensitivity of student Halloween costumes. It was only a matter of time before the right identified liberal and leftist strategies that they themselves could adopt, as a conservative Christian Duke freshman portended in 2015. Spencer is clearly intimately acquainted with both academic left philosophy and campus social justice activism. His political mentor, Paul Gottfried, was a student of Herbert Marcuse. Spencer has an advanced degree in humanities, spent time in the famously left-wing graduate program at Duke University, and wrote an antisemitic interpretation of Theodor Adorno’s music criticism for his master’s thesis. In a knowing inversion of social justice vocabulary, he describes it as “a safe space for Europeans.” Spencer, who popularized the now common euphemism “alt-right,” is fond of describing his platform as “identity politics for white people.” He takes pains to correct those who refer to him as a white supremacist, insisting that he is merely a “nationalist,” or a “traditionalist,” or, better yet, an “identitarian.” He wants to bring about what he calls a “white ethno-state,” a place where the population is determined by heritability. The National Policy Institute is an organization of white nationalists, overseen by neo-Nazi media darling Richard Spencer. ![]() If you had attended, you would have been in for an unpleasant surprise. If you had read in early 2016 about a National Policy Institute conference on the theme of “Identity Politics,” you might have assumed it was an innocent gathering of progressives.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |