Identitarianism was a good idea. And it's good that it's dying
Exploring a bad idea and discovering it's bad is the academy working as intended
The slow failure of Identitarianism proves the academy is good. AND was right to explore the idea. It was a new idea. And did have valuable elements.
For example microaggressions were a concept I found the most complicated. Because they were real. I worked for NY Life for a minute and brought a friend and colleague, she was far more progressive than me, along with me to try to sell an Asian-American couple life insurance. And her first statement was something like “I don’t know if your culture mourns death”. I forget the exact wording but I was cringing about the idea that maybe some people aren’t sad about dead relatives. And also they were born and raised in New Jersey. This is their culture. She had gone so far into sensitivity to race that she found herself being a little racist. But the point is microaggressions do exist. And should be called out. The problem is the manichean way they were presented as. You can let it go (like the couple did, but also they went with a different company)1. Or you can throw a little etiquette and civility on it and preface your statement with “I know you didn’t mean anything. But it’s weird to ask if we’re sad if Asians are sad when our families die.”2 And I’ve seen this kind of thing many times. It’s just better when it happens in childhood.
The point being I get why this kind of granular examination of racism was a valid experiment for the academy. But sunlight is the best disinfectant. And it’s slowly dying as it’s both not helping anyone and also making people miserable. And the next problem is the alt-right vibes-Right3 have started learning the progressive tactics and using them on much more fertile ground.
But that’s what the Ivory Tower is for. To experiment with bold ideas. And reject the ones that fail. Many people were Chicken Littles saying the sky is falling. But it just needed for these ideas, once they were fully developed, to be released to the normies and for the normies to all scream “NO!” And now they’re being slowly retired.
For the record I don’t blame her. I brought her in because she could sell a type of insurance I wasn’t licensed for that they liked with a different company. So it was always an uphill battle. But I don’t think this helped.
I always feel weird using anecdotal evidence. And in this case specifically I don’t know how I’d express it with statistics. But I also think that statistical evidence is shallow in understanding. If you’ve seen something over years you understand it better. And a story can convey more understanding than mere numbers. It’s the very concept behind long form journalism. The issue comes from people who relate a single anecdote as proof of something. I feel both are lacking in need of each other. Simply knowing statistics shouldn’t be a qualification. To be an “expert” you should need both the statistics but also some real life anecdotes.
Very little formal ideology. But just anti-Left