Everything you needed to know about society you learned sitting in a 12th-grade English class.
Before Zoom I mean.
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High school days, Vincent Massey Collegiate, Winnipeg, 1982. I was never a back-of-the-class lurker but neither a front-row chirper who raised his hand whenever Mr Mann did that mild inflexion at the end of a statement.
It was not when ‘emotional safety’ was at the top of anyone’s mind or when teachers felt much restraint. I remember Mr Mann ripping up a student’s F essay in front of him after the student appealed his grade; I remember the French teacher jumped on my brother’s back to get him to kneel when he wasn’t showing enough reverence when the school loudspeakers piped out their daily morning “God Save the Queen” followed by announcements. The math teacher Mr Dyck had quite famously responded to a girl in math class asking, “What’s a douche?” with “Look in the mirror”, as well as one day climbing out the first-floor window and heading into the field for a smoke.
Our English class chirper could never contain himself. He would jump in every few minutes, offering opinions on everything from his views on Crime and Punishment to the Latin roots of a word we would never use in normal conversation without being punched.
Most people didn’t mind the chirper; after all, they didn’t want to be called out, and if the annoying kid diverted the teacher’s attention, it was alright.
But imagine this kid at a party. The back-row lads, beer in hand, watch as our over-enthusiastic front-row chirper holds court with the girls.
That day, something had gone wrong for our back- and middle-row lads. They got caught in the rain, and the boy whose grandpa had given him the 74 Ford Maverick noticed his baby was losing more oil than the Exxon Valdez.
Maybe one boy had just lost his job cleaning up at Ringers Hardware, but regardless, the back-row crew had lost their tolerance for the front-row boy. Tensions boil over. A scuffle ensues, and the front-row boy gets a fist-filled lesson in humility.
Society is that high school classroom. And identity politics? It’s the front-row kid. Annoying, self-righteous, and entirely unaware of the brewing discontent in the back that has spread and captured most middle dwellers. But here’s the question:
Is identity politics about to get its proverbial shit-kicking?
Let’s start with what identity politics has become. Once upon a time, the concept had noble intentions. It sought to address systemic inequalities and give voice to the voiceless. Feminism aimed for equal pay and suffrage; civil rights movements demanded the radical notion that Black people be treated like, well, people. It was a good fight, and it was worth having. But somewhere along the way, identity politics stopped being about justice and started being about dominance.
Consider the lexicon of modern identity politics: cis this, cis that, microaggressions, emotional violence. It’s a linguistic minefield where even the well-meaning are one misstep away from social annihilation. You misgender someone—boom, you’re a bigot.
You question the use of "they/them" for a singular person—boom, you’re a relic of the patriarchy. And heaven help you if you’re white, male, and straight. You’re not just part of the problem; you are the problem.
It’s a worldview that’s both exhausting and self-defeating. The constant competition for who’s the most oppressed—the “Victim Olympics”—has turned identity politics into a snake eating its tail. How does one reconcile, for instance, the intersectional hierarchy where a trans woman of colour might outrank a disabled white lesbian? It’s less about solidarity and more about scoring points.
In this game, self-hatred becomes a virtue.
If you’re part of a privileged group, the only way to atone is to grovel. Be like our soon-to-be ex-Prime Minister Trudeau, start to apologise for things you didn’t do, denounce your existence, and hope the mob spares you. Listen to word combos that don’t even make sense.
Ignore that they are just designed to shut down debate, like “settler colonialism” or“Islamophobia.”
Reality alert, humanity has been moving around and intermarrying for all of recorded history and thousands of years behind that, nobody has parked their ass in one spot since the dawn of time.
A phobia is a medical term with clear symptoms; it’s not the sin of believing something different about Islam than the annoying first-year journalism student who saw a four-minute YouTube video on how Islam is the religion of peace, love and female emancipation and is now an expert, even though he bailed on the video after ninety seconds.
And then there’s the moral relativism. In the identity politics framework, terrorists can’t simply be bad guys. If their culture involves executing homosexuals and dragging their corpses through town behind motorbikes, well, who are we to judge? This mindset requires a complex mental gymnastics routine that only happens when the user tries to put their heel on their metaphorical neck.
Yes, people keep lying to themselves when the little angel on their shoulder keeps saying they are full of shit.
But angels would say “poop.”
You can see this playing out live when, in the British parliament, MP Tahir Ali calls for the reintroduction of blasphemy laws - criminalising the “desecration of the Koran.”
It was Islamophobia month, but isn’t every month Islamophobia month or trans or pride something month?
It's another topic, but I’m bloody sick of awareness months.
The British PM waffles and offers a weak grovelling approval.
So PM Starmer, a former Human Rights lawyer, can’t bring himself to say,
“This is a free country; you can start a bonfire with Korans if you want; sit your fat ass down, Ali; if you want those laws move to Pakistan or Iran. Next question.”
The real tragedy is that such moral equivocation undermines the very causes identity politics claims to champion. By excusing atrocities in the name of cultural sensitivity, it betrays victims who deserve better.
Maybe we’re getting sick of running our society where the greatest fear and crime is being called a racist. How many thousands of girls were raped in Britain because politicians were so afraid of calling grooming gangs rape squads? The gangs were mostly Pakistani.
“Oh my Goaaaad”, I said ‘Pakistani’, I am a racist; get out the Twitter rack.
What politicians are saying is that it’s fine that thousands of young girls have been raped and that they will get no justice because it’s more important not to offend South Asian voters and to make sure that rather than an inquiry, we need a mandatory white male sensitivity training - if we do that maybe nobody will call us a racist.
Racist - the word is kryptonite for society, but only by choice; being called it by bad-faith actors does not doom Western civilisation. In reality the West offers up the least racist in history.
Which is more important, the South Asian vote, avoiding being called racist or justice for 12-year-old rape victims? This is a serious question, and no matter how many times British PM Starmer calls anyone who asks “right-wing extremists,” he can’t get away with putting votes over real victims.
It’s like we have cultural PTSD, where there is an automatic assumption that all cultures are equal, and we have been so traumatised by some blue-haired Starbux scold that we let fear control us.
So, the ones who think killing their daughter if she embarrasses the family by acting like a tart is okay? And the mum who wants her boys to be in Scouts, play hockey, grow up and go to university to become doctors is no better than the one who hopes her six boys can grow up to be Jew-killing martyrs? Really? Breathing humans believe that?
No thinking person can believe in moral relativism. At a cultural level, it is the emperor’s new clothes.
Someone mentions Islam or says “a Black man,” and everyone’s freaking out, and idiots are already tossing word bombs and acting like their thoughtless accusations take them across a moral finish line, and the race is over.
So don’t be racist, but don’t be paranoid about being racist.
Don’t react like someone in a deep sleep on the couch and just had their 90 lb Lab bark in their face. It’s not that bad. It’s not good for society to let the annoying front-row kid talk too much, and we have to stop caring so much about what others think.