[Robin McAlpine Blog] The unresolvable labyrinth of identity claims more victims

[ALBA-Bot]

The unresolvable labyrinth of identity claims more victims

There are two stories you’ve very possibly read today that you have not linked in your head. But they are linked and understanding why they are linked will do a lot to help you understand why parts of our political debate seem not only extremely hostile but unresolvably so.

So what links a man with Tourettes at the Baftas and a Green Party motion on Zionism at its party conference? The answer is identity politics. And do they need to create such a vicious public debate that seems so hard to resolve? Yes, because identity politics creates anger and internal incoherence which it is fundamentally incapable of resolving.

I have explain the mechanics of this in more detail in this three-parter here, but let me work this one through. First, while I can’t quite summon the level of outrage Mark Smith does here, I’m with him on my overall feelings – making a man with Tourettes Syndrome sit in a separate room excluded from the wider audience is an ugly compromise which feels simply too ugly to me.

A usual, I look not for a way to resolve an individual issue but seek out the underlying principle on which the decision ought to be made. Therefore my principled question is ‘on what basis should someone be excluded from the Baftas?’. And I’m sorry, ‘because their presence makes others uncomfortable’ is not a sufficient basis. I mean, let’s just take that category; if a large proportion of the audience were uncomfortable with having Muslims at the event, would we pack the Muslims off to an overflow room?

That would be considered simply awful, so no, that is not a sufficient excuse. So why is it in this case? Because the organisers have identified ‘sanctioned’ discomfort and ‘unsanctioned’ discomfort. Being uncomfortable with Muslims is not a sanctioned discomfort and so is invalid. But being uncomfortable with someone who has Tourettes is sanctioned and therefore ‘valid’.

‘Valid’ is the key term to understand identity politics. This is the phrase that makes something real. I may believe certain things which are demonstrably not true but because I believe them my feelings are valid and validity is the basis of sanctioned discomfort. So my discomfort is in turn valid. But only sometimes.

Different identities are easily able to be valid in a way that invalidates another

So when is it valid and not valid? It is (deep breath) valid only when it clashes which something else which is deemed valid. Me being a racist about Muslims isn’t valid no matter how much I feel it because it is not valid to dislike Muslims. But black people are a valid category and so when someone with Tourettes says something racist, the upset of anyone black is valid.

And it is. But it is not a different category of exclusion just because someone has come up with this schemata. Shoving a person with a disability in a cupboard isn’t less awful because the people who might be upset by his presence have real reasons to be offended by something upsetting he might say.

With a giant caveat; there needs to be no context to the statement. My partner is Mexican and if I met someone who called her something really awful, my reaction is going to be quite specific. To change that reaction completely you just need to tell me he has Tourettes. Now my feelings are completely different. Now I feel nothing but tolerance and acceptance and patience.

It was stupidly crass of the BBC not to blank out the phrase in the (time delayed) broadcast, but how on earth was everyone in that room not given the proper context? With that context I find it hard not to believe everyone should have been able to accommodate each other.

But in land of the tyranny of HR, you can’t have nuanced conversations like this because ‘safe’ is non-negotiable and is defined in a way that immediately takes the context away again. Modern HR simply can’t resolve a conflict between a racial characteristic and a disability characteristic, so something has to give.

Why? Because the whole point is that you can’t resolve identity. They clash. Different identities are easily able to be valid in a way that invalidates another. It is a literal zero-sum game. Unless the last two people on earth are clones or identical twins, there are still two giant identify blocks and they cannot be resolved logically.

That’s why there is a hierarchy of identity and that hierarchy was built from a number of specific elements and became established as non-negotiable. Tourettes sufferers were not at that table so the resultant schemata doesn’t include them. So they’re in a broom cupboard.

(And the fact John Davidson says this is his choice is clearly a result of bullying because that wasn’t his choice the last time. If I open a cupboard and find out it is full of black people and when I ask them what they are doing there they tell me they feel ‘more comfortable’, something catastrophically wrong has happened.)

This is also the point with the Green Party motion. Let’s not beat about the bush – there were a dozen ways to phrase and frame that motion better and it really helps if you try one of them. Rather than ‘Zionism is racism’, let’s try ‘any ideology that defines a right to participate equally in society as based on any racial, religious, gender or ethnic characteristic is abhorrent’.

Because it is, right? If I say ‘white people should be allowed to self-determine and have their own country where they are free to ban blacks from voting’, that would be considered awful, right? Or protestants with catholics not being able to vote. There is literally no category of people you can put in there which is considered legitimate other than ‘Palestinian’.

But (you know this without me writing it down, you just don’t hear it said often) in identity politics Jew beats Palestinian but Woman beats Muslim, like black beats Tourettes

So why is this controversial? Because the concept of a ‘homeland’ is central to some people’s personal reading and practice of Judaism. In identity politics having the identity justifies almost any practice that goes along with it. Unless it clashes against the identity of a group whose ‘identity power’ trumps the original identity.

Therefore we’re not discussing whether female equal opportunities legislation is invalid because it clashes with the beliefs that some Muslims hold about the fundamental tenets of their religion. But (you know this without me writing it down, you just don’t hear it said often) in identity politics Jew beats Palestinian but Woman beats Muslim, like black beats Tourettes.

The concept of a god-given right to live on someone else’s land and then exclude them from not only that land but any legal or other associated rights that derive from that land is utterly, utterly terrible. The context is that the Holocaust was more terrible. But the Holocaust being terrible doesn’t make race-based colonialism any better.

Except in identity politics. That’s the problem – it was the left that opened this game up but this is an equal opportunities game and so utterly predictably, everyone now wants their identity ‘respected’, and that actually means ‘anything I want it to mean at any given moment’. The offence might not be something anyone can see – fine, let’s call it a micro-aggression or a trope and you then need to take my word for it.

It is utterly normal to take a policy stance against systems of government that discriminate and persecute a single ethnic group. Why on earth is that even controversial? Because Israel uses identity politics as its most important shield (after the Americans).

I will keep saying this forever – you cannot resolve identity politics because they don’t resolve. Eventually all you have is hypocrisy. And is this article a meandering mess that follows ideas to their logical conclusion and then finds nowhere to go so has to loop back inelegantly to a previous idea? Absolutely, because I’m trying to show you the giant meandering loops and utterly illogical jumps identity politics takes.

That a man with a disability is to spend one of the biggest nights of his life separated from everyone there to celebrate what he was involved in… That there is a version of morality that thinks its OK for all but a chosen ethnic group to have their rights taken away…

These do not stand up in the real world. But in identity politics these positions make their own tortured logic. And that is why identity politics are such a toxic dead end, one we should run from as fast as we can.

Source: The unresolvable labyrinth of identity claims more victims