WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT DONALD:

An astonishing 55 per cent of Americans now consider being white important to their identity. I don't count myself among them. All of greater Europe and its vast diaspora is too diffuse an association to do anything for me. I may be feebly interested in my German heritage, but should DNA analysis prove that my forebears were actually Bangladeshi, if anything I'd throw a party. ('Yay! I'm not white! Nothing's my fault!') I don't much care about being female or American, either. These are all attributes foisted upon me at birth that I did not choose.

Having little attachment to your race is a luxury, of course. Historically, African-Americans have had to consider their race important, because it was too important, in the worst way, to others. Yet luxuries aren't to be wasted, so I plan on continuing to be so-what about my skin colour. Progress, to me, involves us all becoming so-what about race -- but that's not the direction we're headed. [...]

The American left urges every race to organise, pull together, demand their rights if not special treatment, recognise their common experience, celebrate their people's separate history and separate accomplishments -- except one. If white people do the same thing, they're bigoted and beyond the pale. That mixed-message platform isn't politically saleable in the long term, isn't actually fair and is already backfiring big-time.

To be clear, I'm not arguing for white identity politics, but against identity politics of any brand. The movement insists that what we are is more important than who we are; that our lives derive their meaning from our membership of groups; that what happens to us isn't the product of our own decisions but of unequal power dynamics that are bigger than we are. Ergo, your complexion eclipses everything else about you. Identity politics are overtly and explicitly racist. In fact, by cavalierly characterising anyone who embraces a white identity as a 'supremacist', that NewsHour discussion was racist as could be.

Keep playing this game, get more white folks playing it, too. Some white liberals will continue to compete over who can seem more ashamed, in an effort to earn themselves out of their skin colour (sorry, guys--doesn't work, and anything nasty you say about white people still applies to you). But all the other pale faces won't necessarily tolerate being told that Caucasians alone cannot be regarded as a cohesive people, cannot experience solidarity, cannot feel communal pride, cannot fight back when slandered or stereotyped, cannot advocate for their interest and cannot ever, ever feel sorry for themselves. The sleeping giant of white identity politics? Thanks to misguided hard-left activism, it's woke.

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