The “Intersecting Axes of Privilege, Domination and Oppression” lists fourteen categories of oppressed groups with a corresponding “privileged group” for each one.18 There’s whites (privileged) vs. people of color (oppressed), “ masculine and feminine” (privileged) vs. “gender deviants” (oppressed), attractive (privileged) vs. unattractive (oppressed), credentialed (privileged) vs. nonliterate (oppressed), and even fertile (privileged) vs. infertile (oppressed).
Our bias in favor of people who can read and write, is, according to the Axes of Privilege, “Educationalism.” Our bias in favor of the fertile is “Pro-natalism.” Our bias in favor of men who look like men and women who look like women is “Genderism.” Heaven help you if you’re a literate, attractive, straight white man who looks and behaves like a man. According to the categories of oppression dreamed up by intersectional theorists, nothing and no one could be more privileged.
This is why, despite facing their own unique problems, men, and especially white working-class men, are routinely ignored by the new leftist political class—because regardless of the data, straight white men can never be the victims of anything. Any attempts to address their issues are usually met with outrage and condescension. In 2016, when the British Conservative MP Philip Davies gave a speech at a conference on men’s issues, the reaction of feminists in the left-wing Labour party was to demand he be suspended from his party. As for whites, any attempt to organize is usually received by the mainstream as the revival of Nazism, despite the fact that much of such organizing activity today comes as a direct response to a culture that appears to hate them.
I’d prefer a world with no identity politics. I’d prefer we judged people according to reason, logic and evidence instead of barmy left-wing theories about “oppression.” But if you are going to divide everyone up, you have to accept that straight white men are going to want their own special party too. If we are to have identity politics, we must have identity politics for all.
Straight white boys in college aren’t Neo-Nazis for resisting Black Lives Matter and feminism or for advocating for their own identity groups: they are simply responding—entirely logically—to what they’ve been told about how the world works. It just so happens they have been born into a group that invented the best and worst stuff in history, so they have to deal with that legacy.
Popular culture, dominated by the Left, is instructive. Movies are filled with petty, mean-spirited jabs at straight white men. There’s a huge trend in movies that seek to channel white guilt over slavery, like Django Unchained, 10 Years A Slave and MLK. In the wake of #OscarsSoWhite this is only getting worse, as Hollywood bends over backward to avoid being called racist again (Moonlight was a terribly boring film and never would have won Best Picture if it weren’t for white appeasement). The straight white male villains in these movies get progressively more sadistic and irredeemable. Strangely, there are no movies about Ottoman or Middle Eastern slave-owners. I suppose we’ll have to wait for Muslim guilt to become a thing.
With straight white men replacing the bourgeoisie as the hated oppressor class of the Left, they’ve become fair game for smug champagne socialists in entertainment and the media. That’s why you routinely see movies, stand-up routines, songs and Guardian columns about straight white men that would be classified as “hate speech” if they were directed against any other group in society.
White men can’t dance, jump or sexually satisfy their partners. These are all socially acceptable jokes. Call an Irishman a drunk leprechaun or an Italian a made man, and you’ll have no problem. But if you dare joke that black people are loud, Asians can’t drive, or Latinos steal, you’ll face the full force of triggered Twitter mouth breathers.
The new, identity-driven Left doesn’t hate only white men. One of the consequences of replacing the old working-class/bourgeoisie dichotomy with the myriad identities of intersectional theory is that everything has become much more complicated. Yes, straight white men are the most oppressive, but how do you order everyone else? Are Muslims oppressing women, or are women oppressing Muslims? Is a disabled black man oppressed more than an able-bodied black woman? And what do we do about white men who are, for the sake of argument, extraordinarily gay, but also rich, popular authors of bestselling books about free speech?
The result of dividing their political coalition into a hierarchy of victim groups is a tragicomic battle for the bottom (insert cheap dick taking joke here). Each group fights to be more oppressed than the others. You see this on social media all the time; “white feminists” attacked by intersectionalists for not being ethnic enough, and thus not being oppressed enough. Or, they are criticized for being too ethnic, aka “cultural appropriation.” Probably.
Since the 1970s, social psychologists have been aware that emphasizing differences between groups leads to mistrust and hostility. In a series of landmark experiments, the psychologist Henri Tajfel found that even wearing different-colored shirts was enough for groups to begin displaying signs of mistrust. So guess what happens when you tell everyone that their worth, their ability, their right to speak on certain subjects and—shudder—their “privilege” is, like original sin, based on what they were born with, rather than any choices they’ve made or who they are?
Here’s what you get: the modern Left. Blacks fighting gays fighting women fighting trannies fighting Muslims fighting everyone else. It’s the iron law of victimhood-driven identity politics. Someone has to win, and everyone else has to lose.
Progressive identity politics ignores basic human realities. If you live authentically as yourself there will be repercussions. Not everyone will like you. Some people may even want you dead. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Man is the cruelest animal.” This is a fact of life and it is not changed by all the abuse and harassment policies in all of Silicon Valley. Progressives will never understand this.
Identity politics is universally attractive because it enables failures and weaknesses to be spun as the products of oppression and historical injustice. Personal responsibility is removed from the equation. Primary victims of identity politics in reality are the designated “oppressor class,” for whom it can be humiliating and deeply unfair.
The modern leftist movement has argued itself into a position where people can be discriminated against on the basis of gender, skin color and orientation. Take MTV’s White People, a “documentary” highlighting a handful of cherry-picked examples aimed to demonstrate “white privilege” in action. It’s an hour of television designed to produce discomfort in those with the wrong skin color. Or Netflix’s Dear White People, another pathetic dose of race-baiting.