Source of book: I own this
There are a number of books I have read that, despite their small size, have packed a real punch. Some authors are able to distill down ideas into concise and powerful discussions. A few I have read lately that fall into that category are Reconstructing the Gospel by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You by Augustin Fuentes. Those books, like this one, lay bare the unspoken assumptions that underlie the power structures and systemic oppression and injustice in our world.
Nesrine Malik tackles certain myths that serve to bolster the power of dominant groups and undermine efforts to create a more just world.
Let’s just say that every single one of these myths is believed by my right wing acquaintances and family members - indeed, these are their deepest beliefs, far deeper and far more rooted than any religious beliefs they claim to hold. These myths are, I would say, inseparable from their identity, just as they were for me for many years. While religion is obviously not necessary for breaking the hold of these myths, for me, my beliefs were instrumental in freeing me - I chose “love your neighbor” instead, and when I did that, I was able to see that the myths were in fact pernicious lies wielded as weapons by those in power.
The problem with basing your worldview on myths like these is that the whole structure crumbles once even one myth fails - something that is happening increasingly often these days, particularly for younger people, as the myths serve to benefit fewer and fewer people.
This book pulls no punches, and accepts no deflections. Like the two books above, this book is now going on my list of books I wish I could get my parents to read and understand, if their minds and hearts were open to positive change. Unfortunately, that is not the case at this time, and likely never will be. Other books on that list include American Amnesia by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz, and Jesus and John Wayne by Kristen Kobes du Mez.
There are six myths in this book: The Myth of the Reliable Narrator, The Myth of a Political Correctness Crisis, the Myth of the Free Speech Crisis, The Myth of Harmful Identity Politics, The Myth of National Exceptionalism, and The Myth of Gender Equality. I will try to discuss each of these in turn.
First, though, just a bit about Malik. I first discovered her through one of her columns in The Guardian, which is my current favorite source for British and European news and commentary. I am a bit of an anglophile (note my reading choices which include a lot of books by British authors), and I also believe that heritage that the US and Britain share - particularly the roots of our legal systems - mean that wisdom can be gained by seeing how we are alike and how we differ.
Malik was born in Sudan, and grew up there and in Kenya, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. She got her undergraduate degree in Egypt, then came to the UK for her post-graduate studies. Because of the difficulties in our modern journalistic industry, particularly for women and people of color, she spent a decade working a day job in private equity alongside her writing. (She discusses this in the book, by the way - the way that women and people of color are disproportionately expected to free-lance rather than hold salaried jobs in journalism.)
All of this background gives Malik a unique perspective on the issues she addresses - she isn’t just another white male of a certain generation rattling on about how persecuted he is. (I could name a LOT of names here.) She is a woman, she is black, she is an immigrant, and she is a muslim. All of which have meant she has been targeted for online abuse from the beginning of her career.
For a book of only 196 pages (plus notes), We Need New Stories contains a tremendous amount of substance, and is delightfully quotable. Malik is the kind of writer who seems to know the perfect way to say things, simple, succinct, and powerful. I took a lot of notes, so brace for a lot of quotes. And also, just buy the book and read it yourself.
The prologue establishes the tone, and also makes it clear that, while Malik will primarily talk about the UK and the US, she is also going to point out the universality of these myths, including in her native Sudan. She starts by talking about her family, including their family myths. (Grandmother: “the house I grew up in was so big tea got cold being carried from one end to the other.”)
I grew up in a household and culture swaddled in such myth. The first, most important foundational story was of a Malik family rooted not just in wealth, but in honor, grace, and quiet nobility of its women. It took a long time for me to realize that this was a trick. If the women focused on being comely and composed all the time, they would never focus on the fact that they were deeply unhappy and limited in their freedoms. It took even longer for me to recognize all the ways history, society, and family had leveraged this flattering sense of relative superiority to ensure that we, as women, not only did not question subordination, but competed at suffering it with perfect self-composure. The cultural myths we believed in imbued us with such a sense of exceptionalism that, even as our fortunes declined, we carried on with the same belief in our supremacy. Never trying to understand why we weren’t thriving, never even acknowledging that we weren’t…The myths had made us blind to our faults. Blinded by entitlement, we never questioned ourselves. Even as we gradually succumbed to bankruptcy, eviction, and public humiliation, the family remained pugnacious and scornful of others.
To a degree, my own family had this. We were never rich (although my parents probably qualify these days, thanks to Boomer privilege), but we certainly thought of ourselves as special. One of the losses I have had over the last decade was the crumbling of my conception of my parents and extended family. I thought we were better than that, but we clearly weren’t: so many fell for Trump just like any other racist white evangelical. Malik then talks about her “honeymoon period” after moving to the UK, before she realized that all the same ills were there, just in different manifestations. The same tribalism, the same misogyny, the same carefully constructed economic system of injustice, just in new forms. And the same myths.
Here were all the myths again, telling us that the West in general - and Anglo-Americanism in particular - was special, imbued with some essential virtue, and entitled to success and dominion over others, expecting them as some kind of birthright.
She really nails it in diagnosing the root of the malaise in both countries, which she saw as culminating in Trump, Brexit, and then Covid-19, where the US and Britain saw disproportionately high death rates compared to pretty much everywhere else.
The virus feasted on two countries whose governments had come to power through victories in culture wars, then once in power, let the machineries of state wither.
Indeed. The right wing in both countries relies on the culture wars for its power, and intentionally starves the parts of the government that would be able to respond to a pandemic. Just one example: on the eve of Covid, my wife participated in a training by FEMA, where they - first responders from a variety of professions - she is a nurse - took on a mock scenario of a pandemic.
At the FEMA facility in Alabama, there is a wall where the mucky-mucks have their portraits displayed. At the top was Trump and Pence. At the bottom was the person in charge of the FEMA facility. In between, there were…..empty spaces. Why? Trump and the Republican congress hadn’t bothered to fill those positions. They weren’t seen as important.
After all, Trump’s worldview is that disease comes from immigrants, not germs. Which is why he botched the response - keeping Chinese nationals out of the country, but allowing infected Americans to return without screening. (I know this because a friend was abroad when the virus hit, got infected, tested positive in Vietnam, told Customs this when he arrived, and was completely ignored. Fortunately, because he is a nice guy, he masked, and quarantined once he got home.) You could see more of this with Trump’s focus on “closing the border” rather than masking, quarantines, and vaccine mandates. You know, things that actually work.
Malik further notes that the myths are the core problem. Trump and the Brexiters wield these myths to gain power, not benefit the nation.
A malignant thread has been running through Anglo-American history, and it is made of myths. These are not myths that animate believers into a shared sense of camaraderie and direction. They are myths that divide and instill a sense of superiority over others.
Oh yes, that sense of superiority. I will add that this is literally the core value of Evangelicalism these days, and also a core value of Bill Gothard’s cult. We were trained in the art of looking down on others quite explicitly in that cult, but our culture trains us in more subtle ways.
For Malik, the various forms of resistance to evil are secondary to the rejection of these myths. We need to understand the context, the foundational lies that poison us, if we are to fight effectively against authoritarianism and supremacy.
My hope in this book is to tackle the ways in which history, race, gender, and classical liberal values are being leveraged to halt any disruption of a centuries-old hierarchy that is paying dividends for fewer and fewer people.
Now, let’s jump into the first myth, that of the Reliable Narrator. This is one that has taken me a long time to see and understand. Our culture carefully protects this idea that there is an objective perspective on things, and that this perspective is (in practice) white, male, educated, and middle class. Malik recounts her experience in journalism during the Trump election, which totally blindsided the media here and in the UK.
And it isn’t just the media, it is academia, the publishing world and more. It poisons every attempt to make a better world.
I start with this myth - the myth of the reliable narrator - because it underpins all the rest. Unreliable narrators from academia, the publishing world, and from the journalism industry have been a roadblock to addressing structural inequality. They are the main conduits for communicating all the other myths that prop up the establishment and defend it against movements for change. We believe in their neutrality and thus do not question the accounts of the world which they have recounted to us. These unreliable narrators present themselves as free of bias, of identity, of politics. Their moral and political miscalculations are not benign oversights or human error - they are harmful lies. Unreliable narrators dictate the popular accounts of mainstream history, how we talk about identity politics, and they give intellectual cover to our politicians. The role such narrators play in stemming the tide of change is paramount. We need new narrators to clear the path for change.
Not coincidentally, this is why the Ron DeSantises of the world are intent on book banning and banning entire ways of thinking (“woke” “Critical Race Theory” etc) - new voices are indeed challenging the myths, and those who benefit from the myths are losing their shit.
Narrators of myths use tools, a set of argumentative techniques that are tailored for each myth. Whenever marginalized groups ask for meaningful social transformation, these narrators wield specific tools to divert attention from grievances and discredit movements for equality.
This one is so true, and not just in politics. In my own birth family, I have come to recognize the specific tools used against me by my parents to divert attention away whenever I press for change.
Another thing I have realized over the last few years is just how far to the right the so-called “mainstream media” actually is. For so many years as a kid, I was told that mainstream media was “liberal,” but that only holds true in comparison to the increasingly reactionary right. Mainstream media supports the status quo, kisses up to power, and seems incapable of truthfully addressing systemic injustice.
Malik doesn’t believe this is intentional - she thinks most of those involved have good intentions (Fox News and its ilk excepted, of course) but simply have blind spots.
The main problem is homogeneity. Politically, the opinion-making class is overwhelmingly center, right of center, or right-wing. Demographically, it is overwhelmingly white, male, and upper class. The result is a worldview that is ideologically establishmentarian, unlikely to question government sources, and overly respectful to the offices of power…Instead of speaking truth to power, the media class speaks power’s truth.
This has had dire consequences, and it is infuriating that the media still refuses to take responsibility for its role in Trump and Brexit. Their malpractice was a key reason for these disasters, and media continues to make the same fatal mistakes. Malik specifically calls this out and notes that this is why representation is so important.
When journalists face no consequences for failing to do their jobs, when they are too aligned with power, when their backgrounds and networks insulate them from vast swaths of the population, myth reproduction becomes a risk. Representation is the first solution to this monopoly of ignorance. We need fewer white, male, and fewer affluent voices in the institutions that are tasked with reflecting the world back to us.
So why did the media get Trump and Brexit so wrong?
It is easy, in fact it was inevitable, that the media missed the rise of white right-wing terrorism - those who were affected by it, and in fact have been warning about it, are absent from its newsrooms and columns. Is it a surprise that the Brexit vote happened when immigrants, so lacking in positions of reporting and influence in the British media, could be presented as a threat rather than an integrated part of Britain? Is it a surprise that conversations about economic solutions to inequality are dominated by scapegoating of immigrants, rather than an examination of the economic system that created that inequality in the first place?
The media still continues to get this wrong, even in its self-examination. The problem, supposedly, is that the media is disconnected from “red state America.” That isn’t the main issue, although it can be a problem. The problem is that the media is far more disconnected from marginalized groups, and clueless about the problems actually faced by them.
This is how you get discussions (and I have been part of so many) where the only argument is whether immigrants are good for the US (generally, liberals) or bad for the US (generally, right wingers) - missing altogether is the question of whether immigration is good for immigrants, which should be every bit as important.
Apply this to literally every political discussion, because the tool of deflection us wielded even by many leftists. I was thinking a lot about this in relation to my broken relationship with my father. A significant precipitating factor was some really obvious and explicit racism, but on so many other issues, the question of whether those in need of basic things like health insurance or housing should even be considered kept arising. The voices of those with needs were never really welcome, just the voices of those who do not wish for any taxation.
Because the voices of those in need are absent, fruitful discussion remains impossible, and “we can’t talk about politics anymore” as my dad said. No, we can’t, because without those other voices, we will either just be airing our bigotries to the likeminded (what my dad wanted) or someone like me was going to push back and call things what they were, and that included calling racism, racism, and social Darwinism, social Darwinism.
Next up is the Myth of a Political Correctness Crisis. Hoo boy. The chapter starts off with a story that hits really close to home for me, yet continues to recur.
A right-wing media source runs a story about a girl being assaulted by a transgender girl in a school bathroom.
Except, as it turns out, the assault never happened. The incident was totally fabricated. (As it turns out, there are far more assaults in public bathrooms by Republican politicians. It’s all projection…)
These outright lies and fabrications, however, are common. They keep happening. They aren’t retracted, either.
Malik notes, however, that, as bad as the defamation of transgender people and the stirring up of hate and fear against them is, the real story is that these fabrications are being used for another purpose:
What headlines were telegraphing was that there was a danger, a threat to our well-being that is posed by the excessive political correctness of institutions. For the purposes of this chapter, political correctness, or being “PC,” is defined as the attempt (just the attempt) to create a framework of equal treatment, of opportunity, and of respect for all.
[Note: this came out before Ron DeSantis’ lawyer defined “woke” for us. “The belief that there is systemic injustice and the need to do something about it.” Which is literally what Malik is talking about here.]
The deflection here is pretty obvious: rather than talk about the legitimate persecution of transgender people by bigots, now we talk about why the school was wrong to try to give a student a safe place to pee.
I won’t repeat it here, but Malik goes through the history of “political correctness” as a term with a useful meaning, before it was co-opted by the Right to use as an epithet. A similar thing happened to “woke” and “virtue signaling” - all of which are used by the Right to discredit attempts to address injustice.
Today, alongside “woke” as a derivative insult of PC sits “virtue signaling” (i.e. motivated by showing off one’s correct politics) as a criticism. But I can tell you from personal experience that these words and phrases are also dog whistles. I didn’t quite understand why I, as opposed to others of different backgrounds, was accused of these things. Relatively little of my writing is on race and identity, but it is assumed that I am a race grifter, someone who pretends to be discriminated against for money. The same is assumed of other writers and journalists of color whenever they make the most rudimentary of noises about inequality. The point of these accusations is to portray people of color as essentially immoral and talentless, so they must advance their careers and cases by claiming victimhood.
One of the things Trump did is bring this out into the open. It isn’t just dog whistles anymore, but looking back, yeah, pretty much every right winger I know used these terms this way.
While I am sure I have experienced far less of this than Malik, I did want to mention that the last time my father and I had any communication, he accused me of “virtue signaling.” This was, among other things, a solid indication that he was back on the drug of Fox News and other right-wing agitators, because it was never a term he used before it became a thing on the Right.
But also, it was in direct response for my calling him out on nazi-level racism - calling the existence of other ethnic groups in our country a “problem” that he was glad Trump was “finally doing something about.” Even a rudimentary pushback against bigotry gets the deflection of “you’re just being politically correct.”
This of course was Trump’s whole appeal. He railed against “political correctness” - red meat to his followers who don’t want to have to actually manage their speech and behavior to take into account the feelings of other people. Which is literally something all of us do every day to function in society.
Trump was right. The country didn’t have “time” for political correctness. The impatience and frustration in not having time is a reaction to the demands made on people to be decent, to respect their fellow citizens, to put in the effort and the time to learn how to treat others with dignity. It is a rejection of that expectation. A stamping of the foot. Others should remain othered. They should remain in their place and not presume that they have the right to change how Americans talk, think, or behave. There is an implicit anger of insult in not having time for political correctness, perhaps even of humiliation. Those who reject political correctness with such vehemence are reasserting their status in a country where their status has been a given for far too long. Political Correctness to the PC rebels is a threat, a window into the future where their failures and inadequacies will no longer be neutralized by their privileges. And so, the rebels dismiss and smear those who demand that they give up their unearned equity.
Malik goes on to look at the Covid response in light of this, because they are connected. After all, why would people reject basic public health measures in ways that harmed themselves as well as others? It is the same tantrum, the idea that they should have to consider others. This has spilled into anti-vaccine agitation now as well - my parents have gone all-in on the anti-vaxx hysteria (more like testeria…) and conspiracy theories. It is toxic fruit the whole way down.
The myth of a political correctness crisis serves many purposes. It dampens efforts for change by repackaging these efforts as assaults. It gives people license to disrespect rational guidance and behave selfishly in social crises such as pandemics. But its most valuable purpose is its moral shield, a get-out-of-jail card for those who hold intolerant views but who do not wish to be held accountable for those views, or even to feel bad for them.
This is why “you can’t say anything anymore” is such a frequently deployed defense by those who make prejudiced statements. Their argument is not that their opinions are bigoted, it’s that they have been wrongly stigmatized.
And that really is why I can’t talk with my dad about politics. For perhaps the first time in his life, someone refused to coddle his privilege and called him out, and he ended the relationship with his firstborn child over it, citing “virtue signaling” as the reason.
Honestly, this is a weapon that has been used against me since my teen years. Any pushback, and it becomes about me being mean, not the underlying issue. I see the same thing in lost relationships with right wing former friends too. The minute I push back on the bigotry, I get accused of political correctness, or not saying things nicely enough.
The book quotes Ed Kilgore from the Intelligencer blog, who noted that the continued wins of the hardest of the hard right as showing that Trump’s base - and arguably GOP voters generally are “motivated above all by the desire to go back to the wonderful days when a white man could without repercussions tell a racist joke, ‘tease’ women about their physical appearance or sexual morals, and mock people who in some way (say, a disability) differ from one’s own self. At some point we may all come to understand that it’s not (except in some scattered college campuses) the politically correct who are imposing speech norms on the rest of us, but the politically incorrect who won’t be happy until offending the less powerful is again recognized as among the principal Rights of Man.”
Polly Toynbee (another Guardian writer) noted that the myth of a political correctness crisis is “coded” cover for those who “still want to say Paki, spastic, or queer.”
EXACTLY.
The “you are just virtue signaling” was one hundred percent cover for “I want to be able to dehumanize minorities and immigrants without consequences.”
The next chapter is on the Myth of the Free Speech Crisis.
I found this one to be fascinating, and also one that made me rethink how I think about speech. It is easy as a cishet white male to lean toward “free speech absolutism” without thinking it through.
First, of course, there have always been limitations on free speech - we lawyers studied this. You can’t falsely advertise your product (at least unless it is a “nutritional supplement”), you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater, you can’t use “fighting words,” and you can’t tell deliberate and harmful lies about someone else. These limitations are necessary for a society to function.
And those are just the legal restrictions. There are also - and always have been - socially policed restrictions.
Malik starts off with describing her experience as a writer in the internet age. She, like many women and minorities who write, find themselves on the receiving end of hateful and vicious abuse.
Over the past ten years, many platforms in the press and social media have had to grapple with the challenges of managing users with increasingly sharp and offensive tones while maintaining enough space for maximum expression, feedback, and interaction. Speech has never been more free, or less mediated. Anyone with internet access can create a profile and write, tweet, blog, or comment, with little vetting and no hurdle of technological skill. But the primary losers in this growth of expression, have been women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people.
She also mentions the tangible threats of violence and stalking which are directed primarily at women.
And guess what the response has been? Well, to complain loudly whenever a bigoted, hateful voice is given even the slightest consequence.
The cause of this, it is claimed, is a liberal totalitarianism that is the result of intolerance and thin skin. This tyranny is allegedly fascist in its brutal inclinations to silence the individual while acting as a refuge for the weak, the easily wounded, and the coddled. Instead of reckoning with the rise in online abuse, hate speech, and hate crimes against minorities and women, we spend much of our time panicking about a fictional cancel culture that in many cases is just “consequence culture.”
I bet you can see where this is going…
This is the myth of the free speech crisis. It is an extension of the political correctness myth but is a recent mutation more specifically linked to efforts or impulses to normalize hate speech or shut down legitimate responses to it. The purpose of the myth is not to secure freedom of speech, that is, the right to express one’s opinions without censorship, restraint, or legal penalty. The purpose is to secure the license to speak with impunity; not freedom of expression, but rather freedom from the consequences of that expression.
Malik argues that speech should be free, but not absolute, which is a distinction that bigoted asshats like Elon Musk appreciate.
Free speech, like public dress codes, is not an abstract notion, it has a purpose; it is a regulator of interaction, rather than an end in itself. It sets specific parameters.
In its most pure form freedom of speech serves two purposes: protection from state prosecution when challenging authority or orthodoxy; and the protection of fellow citizens from the damaging consequences of absolute - completely, legally unregulated - speech such as slander.
My freedom ends where it impinges on yours. And you have a right to be free from abuse and denigration. This is what is meant by fighting words, by the way. This wasn’t controversial when applied only to white men. It is only now that women and minorities have insisted on the same freedom from abuse that it has become a “free speech” panic.
Malik discusses Milo Yiannopoulos and his fall from popularity. Notably, it was fine for him to abuse and even doxx women and minorities. But he crossed the line and finally lost his publishing contract when he advocated for pederasty. That should say a lot about the real values of our society, shouldn’t it?
This is the dirty secret about freedom of speech; rather than being an ideal, it is a litmus test of a society’s prejudices. Milo’s case proves that, very bluntly, many saw the harassment of women and people of color as inoffensive, or at least as an opinion that can be tolerated, and, where his publisher was concerned, an opinion that could be sold. When Roxane Gay says the red line was breached when it “hit too close to home,” this is not just a turn of phrase. “Home” in this scenario is anything that the powerful forces in a society consider to be their own. The sexual exploitation of children is something anyone can abhor, but other races, religions, sexual orientations are just that - “other,” not “home” - and so are fair game. That is the honest appraisal of why people like Milo are indulged, and not because of any cant about freedom of speech.
I appreciate how Malik frames the discussion, the way we should be discussing speech issues.
The first question when any freedom of speech issue comes up shouldn’t be about whether speech is being restricted, it should be about who has the most power. Is it the speaker, or the spoken about?
…
The problem with the marketplace of ideas theory (as with all “invisible hand” theories) is that it doesn’t account for a world in which the market is skewed and not all ideas receive equal representation, because the market has monopolies and cartels.
…
Claims about the free speech crisis entirely omit the element of power. We are told that power lies with some abstract “mob” of marginalized identities and their smooth-tongued allies. But where does the real power lie? Who gets to make legislation about speech? Who gets to enforce it? Who gets to benefit from it and who has the profile and the platforms to wield it? A general rule of thumb when you are trying to figure out who has the power in any given free speech situation is to identify which party is the most vocal about being silenced. Chances are, they have the most power. The media landscape is so skewed that those you can hear complaining about being silenced are, by definition, those who have the access to enough platforms to make that noise. What they are really saying is My views, which I am expressing here, are not as universally accepted as they were before, and that’s just not good enough.
Indeed.
Freedom of speech is not a neutral, fixed concept, uncolored by societal prejudice. The belief that it is some absolute untainted hallmark of civilization is linked to self-serving exceptionalism, a delusion that there is a basic template around which there is a consensus uniformed by biases. The recent history of fighting for freedom of speech has gone from noble, striving for the right to publish works that offend people’s sexual or religious prudery and speaking up against the values leveraged by the powerful to maintain control, to attacking the weak and persecuted. The effort has evolved from challenging upward to punching downward.
This too, by the way, is at the heart of local disputes over Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. A handful of far-right professors, in addition to making false accusations against their more centrist or liberal colleagues, have claimed “free speech” for things such as throwing the Seig heil in class, claiming minorities are inherently inferior, and promoting the “curse of Ham” as a legitimate justification for slavery. (My own kid’s experience in that class from hell.) It’s all about punching downward, reanimating all the old bigotries and justifying all the old hierarchies.
This naturally leads into the next chapter, The Myth of Harmful Identity Politics.
This is another one that I have heard for years from my right-wing friends and family. “Everything is being ruined by identity politics.” Which is, as Malik points out, bullshit.
Malik points out the obvious: the biggest and most powerful identity politics group is….white identity politics. I mean, that is literally Trumpism, but it dates back a lot further than that.
How else do you justify enslaving people based on their skin color? How else do you justify segregation? How else do you justify the 150-year history of openly racist immigration laws? (Chinese Exclusion Act, anyone?) Likewise, right now, the biggest terrorist threat is that of white right-wing terrorism. (That’s not just me: that’s the official statement from the FBI.) The bottom line is that there is indeed white identity politics, and it is the single biggest driver of politics in this country.
But somehow, the idea of a widely practiced white identity politics which is hostile and aggressive is not an established part of the modern political discourse. Even when white identity politics is manifested in coordinated violent acts its threat is minimized as the work of lone wolves and bad apples. A strange oversight, considering that exclusionary white identity politics has been a cornerstone of domestic and overseas American politics for the last two centuries. Other identity-based political movements such as the Black Lives Matter movement ask merely for equal treatment, yet they are swiftly defined as identity-driven and are roundly condemned and pathologized.
This double standard is applied to all political activity that is based on racial identity. There is a lacuna, a color blindness so to speak, to acts of politics committed by white people, or in the name of whiteness, as compared to those committed in reaction to the wielding of that white power. This is the myth of harmful identity politics: that group behavior to secure rights denied on racial grounds is corrosive, restricted to non-majority white groups, and is offensive, rather than defensive.
The harmful identity politics myth creates an exception for whiteness, promotes racial entitlement via dog whistling - the wink - and grievance flipping, and is sustained by appeals to universalism. Constant denial that race is relevant to how white populations behave politically helps prop up the myth that only other races are motivated by identity.
Malik draws the distinction between two kinds of identity politics. There is “defensive” identity politics - the effort to secure rights denied on the basis of identity. And there is “offensive” or “aggressive” identity politics - seeking domination based on identity.
Easy enough to see the difference here. Jim Crow was aggressive identity politics - whites dominating blacks on the basis of color. The Civil Rights Movement was defensive identity politics - seeking equal access to society regardless of color. Once you start to see it, you can’t unsee it. Same thing for feminism versus anti-feminism, same for LGBTQ rights. This next passage really hit home for me.
Critics see defensive identity politics as a disruptive influence that divides the electorate. Implicit in this critique is some notion that the group seeking change is being disruptive for no reason - and the rational reaction to this kind of violent disruption is to support a law-and-order or populist candidate. But defensive identity politics is in fact a reflexive movement that is responding to both the constant subordination of the non-mainstream identity and the recent, aggressive pushback against equality. It is a response against the dominance and ubiquity of a white identity. As Hannah Arendt wrote: “If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew.” When you are attacked and threatened because of your identity, you respond in terms of your identity.
The implications of this go beyond American domestic politics. At the macro end, it can be applied to many conflicts around the world, most recently perhaps in the endless unrest in Palestine. The answer clearly isn’t “more force” because that has continually failed to work for decades. “More justice” is the answer, just like it is here in America when it comes to racial unrest.
On the micro end of things, I think this is something a lot of parents (definitely mine) fail to understand. A child, adult or otherwise, doesn’t tend to lash out and cause unpleasantness just because they want to be disruptive for no reason. Maybe a toddler needs a nap. Or maybe an adult child protests because of actual mistreatment or favoritism.
The book clearly lays out another core believe undergirding this belief.
Crucial to the pathologizing of non-white identity politics is the belief that whiteness is the default. So much of mythology is due to this defaulting of certain identities - being white, a certain sort of masculine, hailing from a certain class, and being a specific form of straight - as base case, neutral, unmotivated by anything as vulgar as color or gender. The assumption that these identities are simply standard and correct, rather than merely powerful, underpins the need to create myths. These myths continue to approach resistance to this defaulting as a revolt against the natural order of things, rather than an attempt at correction.
This belief in a default is inseparable from a belief that one deserves special privileges. Again, Malik pulls no punches.
“White vulnerability” and “racial resentment” are in themselves euphemisms - political correctness is sometimes not a myth, you see, when it comes to refusing to call prejudices what they actually are. Both terms imply that Trump voters’ motivation was legitimate and understandable - these people were just vulnerable and resentful. “Racial entitlement” would be a more accurate and less unnecessarily forgiving descriptor. White people who do not want to share the equity they have in society will view demands for more social or economic capital by other racial groups as an encroachment on what rightfully belongs to white people. And so, they vote for candidates who promise them protection of that racial equity. White entitlement is not about economics, it’s about status.
Saying this out loud earns you a rather vicious reaction. Calling someone racist is worse than actually being racist, after all. Calling it what it is shatters the denialism.
White, aggressive identity politics is maintained by nailing this implausibility and promoting an agenda of restoring national and racial purity, without making this aim explicit. Such identity politics can only attain mainstream traction by sustaining deniability about fundamentally racist goals. The purpose, the sweet spot of this politics, is to achieve a state where a white person can believe that they are good, while also believing that discriminatory policies against non-white people are either acceptable or non-existent. This moral absolution of racism while aggressively building and maintaining racist systems is a duality that exists at the heart of Anglo-American history.
This is why Malik concludes that not only is defensive identity politics not the problem, it is literally the only way forward.
Next up, the Myth of National Exceptionalism.
I was taught American Exceptionalism from childhood. America was the greatest country in history, in the world, and we were a universal blessing to the rest of the world.
This was, of course, horseshit on a stick.
But notice that the Right Wing is pushing this idea - this myth - ever harder. Why might that be?
Malik opens the chapter with a pair of quotes that are so good, I have to repeat them.
“What we choose to forget often reveals the limits of justice in our collective imaginations. What we choose to memorialize reflects what we actually value.” ~ Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
“If you take down monuments to evildoers, people will forget the dark parts of history, which is why nobody knows who Hitler was.” ~ Philomena Cunk
Worth pondering. The opening of the chapter is also fire.
There is no mainstream account of a country’s history that is not a collective delusion. The present cannot be celebrated without the past being edited. For the United States to believe in its American dream, in its land of opportunity, where all men are equal before God and able to achieve whatever they wish through toil and virtue, it cannot be acknowledged that it was built on the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans and Europe’s poor. If the United Kingdom is to have a sense of pride in its contemporary self, there is no way it can be acknowledged that the country was built on global expansion, resource extraction, and slavery. For Sudan, my country of birth, to believe that it is a unique blend of African and Arab tribes that have thrived by the River Nile for millennia, it cannot be acknowledged that it has been engaged in ethnic warfare for the better part of a century.
Every country has its airbrush. Some airbrushes are universal banal fictions; others are central to a hubris that is internally corrosive and externally predatory, feeding domestic division and global aggression.
And later:
The whitewashing of the history of colonialism and slavery is integral to the belief that there is something inherently noble about ex-colonial Europe and the US. The myth of a virtuous origin is the strongest, most corrosive myth of all. Nations fail to reflect on themselves when they believe there is something special about them. Countries repeat disastrous mistakes when they are convinced that their essence is fundamentally sound. There is a straight line that runs from this belief and another: that there is an essential moral superiority about a white race that has managed to create material wealth by virtue of its own enterprise, rather than the leveraging of poor and black labor both in their home countries and imported against their will.
How about another quote, this one from one of the most evil men in history, one viewed by black South Africans as their version of Hitler, namely Cecil Rhodes?
“In order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.”
Yep, that’s how you address the social unrest from brutal inequality stemming from the industrial revolution. Just go fuck some countries belonging to people of color up a bit to relieve the pressure.
The US has its own imperialism, of course. We didn’t magically come to use a grossly disproportionate amount of the world’s resources.
The stress on individual liberty as the motor of American exceptionalism only works if society is free and flat. The whole idea of America does not work if slavery, both synthetic in the form of indebted Europeans and actual free labor from Africa, becomes too central to the story. Much like Donald Trump, America is not a self-made man, it is a country that benefited from a trust fund gifted to it by cheap labor and exploitation, a trust fund that created such low-margin wealth that its dividends are still being distributed today.
If you wonder what the fights over how we teach history are really about, there you go.
Speaking of myths we all learned, do you remember the one about Americans spitting on returning soldiers from Vietnam? Oh, you didn’t know that was a myth that never actually happened?
In reality, anti-war activists and organizations saw returning vets as victims of the war, and supported them. It was the propaganda efforts of the Nixon administration that created the myth, in order to deflect blame away from the disastrous government policy that led us to an unwinnable war. If you actually look at the evidence, even the anti-war cultural monuments that came later were not anti-soldier, but anti-government, a crucial distinction. The trauma that so many Vietnam vets experienced is better attributed to moral injury, the knowledge that they not only lost a war, but did evil in fighting it. If you think about it, this is one reason our country has tended to abandon our vets to homelessness, suicide, poverty, and self-medication. To truly take responsibility would be to admit that we harmed them in furtherance of a morally indefensible imperialist war.
America’s education gap is a function of a wider state of arrest. Unable to move on, to go through its own [reckoning], the country remains stuck in a loop of recurring racism-related violence, a stubborn and flourishing white supremacist movement, and bloody, pointless foreign interventions in faraway places. Unable to face up to the sins of the past, unable to atone and adjust for them, America’s belief in its historical virtue is a near-perfect example of how, when taken too far, myths lead to self-harm.
Malik spends some time on the two gulf wars as ways of distracting from domestic ills, but there is also an unexpected anecdote. Something most of us have forgotten. Do you remember that time Bill Clinton had an aspirin factory in Sudan bombed? I didn’t. And he did it just after Monica Lewinsky’s testimony to a grand jury, although the World Trade Center bombing was given as the reason. Gee, any connection?
[Note here: even though I haven’t voted Republican in a long time, and particularly hate Trump and all he stands for, I still hold a loathing for Bill Clinton. Which I think is justified, despite a few good policies he enacted. He militarized the border with Mexico, race baited as much as anyone of his era, and treated women like shit.]
Anyway, Malik, as one born in Sudan, and living there at the time, had an understandable reaction.
It’s a hard lesson to forget. To feel the earth move beneath your feet and know that your entire life and world are collateral damage, a stage for a man far away, a man who was feeling helpless because of a bombing that your country had nothing to do with, and cornered because he abused his power by having an affair with a young intern, then was caught lying about it.
So many other great lines too. It is hard to select which ones to quote.
America’s account of its history is a fiction that serves only to uphold these irreconcilable contradictions between its perception of itself and its reality - a nation built on domination abroad and structural inequality at home. The call to make America great again, by voting in a man who stands for none of its alleged values and embodies all of its hypocrisies, is the inevitable culmination of that fiction. Americans continue to pay a heavy price for these false beliefs, caught in a permanent state of domestic discord and unnecessary wars. All the while romanticizing an era in the past that was simpler, because the natives, either imported or invaded, were less restive.
That’s gold right there. The history we were taught could not possibly explain our present. So we lie harder, thinking we will get the result we crave. I could apply that to my birth family as well. The lies my parents want to believe about us require forgetting the damage caused by Gothard and Dobson and others, but the present fracturing of our family could not be created by the mythological fantasy of what we were. (Hence why it is all my fault, of course.)
There is the danger of reaching to the past to cast a flattering light on the present - the nostalgia informs action and ideology. The past is a simple place; it provides simple solutions to complex, intractable problems. In a sense, there is no again, whatever the country or people. There was never a moment in time where a specific culture thrived because it had struck on some golden formula for prosperity and equality. Whether it was the Islamic empire, the Ming dynasty, or the Roman empire, none flourished without slavery, disenfranchisement, oppression of women, and authoritarianism. Most civilizations are, in relative terms, more advanced than the last in technology and law, but not more advanced in absolute terms. What all civilizations share is a denial of the fact that empire-like dominance is achieved at high costs to the less fortunate. America’s economic strength today is another version of accomplishment secured at the expense of the poorly paid, the uninsured, and those whose labor rights have been slowly but relentlessly chipped away. There is no again for America, or any other nation.
This problem of nostalgia, this belief in a mythological golden age, infects not merely our politics. It infects our religion, which fights scorched-earth culture wars in the name of restoring the glorious past. It infects my birth family, many of whom still believe that the key to godliness is a return to a hierarchical past.
Because this glorious past was both mythical, and to the extent it ever existed, was built on the backs of the oppressed, there is a constant need to deflect blame.
Doublethink is a strong feature of what is required to sustain a myth. One of its main features is the ability to maintain a grievance of humiliation that does not, however, dent a belief in self. The way to sustain this contradictory state of defeat and superiority is to avoid confronting the heart of the failure. And so, it is easier for a white American to blame immigrants for their impoverishment than his own government’s economic policies. It is a choice between “I am poor because I am unfortunate” - a wretched state - “I am poor because of a rigged capitalist world order” - a trapped state - and “I am poor because of others less deserving, external governments, and politicians who are too weak to stand up for me” - a victim state. In the last case, something can be done. You can’t change the fact of capitalism, you can’t change the class and economic state you were born into. But when you are a victim of the “other,” it’s not your fault. Your misfortune is not a by-product of immutable political patterns, you have volition to change the politicians who conspire against you, leave global treaties, kick out foreigners, and be great again.
It is an uncomfortable discussion to have about the past when it comes to past figures as well. I wrote a bit about this a while back, and Malik challenges my own thinking quite a bit.
It is so easy to say, “they were a product of their time,” but that all too often misses something crucial. “They thought what everyone thought” is just as myopic as the all-white newsroom. If you think that “everyone” approved of slavery, you leave out the voices of the enslaved, who very much didn’t approve. Those voices were just ignored.
The “it was a different time” fallacy is used to excuse all sorts of bigotries both in the past and in the current day. It takes for granted that there is always such total consensus around prejudice, that people just couldn’t possibly have known that racism was wrong. It washes even less if applied in the present. A small-town homophobe or racist grandparent cannot claim ignorance: they are just choosing not to learn.
That line: “choosing not to learn.” Good god, that is the most accurate description of my parents over the last 30ish years. It wasn’t that they “didn’t know any better.” I protested loudly, softly, and however I could without getting punished too strongly. They heard. They just refused and continue to refuse to learn. There is no excuse at this point for their racism, for their insistence on the subordination of women, for their rejection of their LGBTQ grandkids. They just refuse to learn.
And where does all this take us?
One of the dangers of the myth of a virtuous origin is that it drags everyone into balance-sheet thinking. History is not a story, despite that being implied by the very word. It is not a narrative, not a discussion, not a debate. It is a matter of facts. What is important is that they are presented, rather than relitigated.
The final chapter is The Myth of Gender Equality. And this one is a real sore point for me, for many reasons, not least of which is the decade and a half battle my mom waged against my wife over gender roles. (It ended when my wife chose to leave the field of battle altogether.)
Of all those caught on the sharp end of mythmaking, none is told as quickly and as impatiently that they are asking for too much, for more than they deserve, than a woman who is asking for her rights.
Malik was not, shall we say, great at cosplaying gender roles. She was a constant source of frustration for her parents, who weaponized religion, physical punishment, and threats of being withdrawn from school in attempts to make her behave how they believed she should.
Damn.
Yeah, that happened to me too, Nesrine. And unlike you, a normal college education was withheld from me, in part as a retaliation against my failure to be the kind of child they wanted. And yes, this is more common for women than men. I’m a weird outlier.
For my father, the problem was not that I could not be free to be who I was, but that I could not embrace the freedom that only my “natural” role in life could provide. The only way to find any peace was to accept the norms of a society that I did not understand nor saw any logic to, and to try to be really good at them. The only way was to give myself up and excel at performing.
There you go, the expected role of women in a patriarchal society. While I resonate with the “get better at performing” thing - good god I had to pretend a lot to survive in my birth family as a teen and young adult - the idea that only acceptance of the “natural” role of women in society is acceptable, is definitely a gendered thing. It is exactly what my mother demanded of my wife, and punished when my wife refused.
This was discussed a lot in Race, Monogamy and Other Lies, of course, but it is also discussed in this book: the lie that gender roles are somehow “natural” and “biological” rather than cultural and power-based.
Complementarity is the belief that much of what women complain about cannot be legislated away because it’s just human nature. The shrugging default to the rules of biology is universal across cultures - almost comfortingly so. To object to anything from forced marriage in Omdurman, Sudan, to the ubiquity of sexual harassment in the workplace in the City of London is to be met with this defense. And with it a demand that a woman makes the biggest trade-off of all - to accept that inequality is a function of biology. The only way to avoid the wild’s reddened tooth and claw is to never step outside the bounds of nature’s purdah. Biology is our destiny.
But of course, the history of this shows that it is bullshit. Women couldn’t ride bicycles because the wombs would fall out at that speed. (They don’t) Women can’t do [insert literally anything] because they menstruate. [They can.] The list goes on.
Malik runs through some of the modern neurobiological stupidity as well - or better yet, the way smoke and mirrors are used to make studies “say” what they do not in fact say. A 2018 study, for example, purported to be able to determine a person’s sex from the difference between their scores on “empathy” (already a fuzzy idea) and systematizing - understanding rule-based systems.
What the study ACTUALLY showed is that these scores predicted autism pretty well, but NOT sex. Journalists, of course, ran with the wrong lede. This is a problem that Malik notes throughout: male-dominated journalism seems determined to somehow find biological reasons for that gender imbalance.
These are not reactionaries, provocateurs, or trolls. They are mainstream journalists across the political divide. What they are exhibiting is a typical response to the challenging of a deep-seated myth, that biology is destiny, by resorting to deflection and hyperbole. If we are going to stick with the obsessive commitment to biology as explainer for all behavior, a helpful way to look at this phenomenon would be to see these people less as thinking individuals with agency, but more as organisms on top of a food chain reacting with instinctive self-preservation to what they perceive to be an existential threat. Judge by biology always, and you will be judged by it inevitably.
As Malik points out, any attempts at change are deflected with “it used to be worse.” Which is not really a defense.
These setups develop, like sentient straw men defensively scrambling to prevent any real discussion, in order to preserve the way things are. A system of inequality must create its own illusion of justice, through which it is sustained. It is a common impulse, not unique to any culture. Setups are stabilizers, low-key propaganda that things simply are not that bad. The starker and more graphic the injustice, the louder and more feverishly it is normalized and excused.
The argument of progress can be used to mask the fact that advances are always relative, rarely absolute. Just because things were worse yesterday does not mean that they are ideal today or should not be improved upon. The argument also ignored the reproduction of social and cultural norms that continue to hold women back. When any complaint can be dismissed as ungratefulness, it is impossible to secure any further wins.
This is also used as a threat: shut up or they will be worse.
A particularly interesting point that Malik makes is that white people like to look down on places where there are honor killings. But in our own countries, women are most likely to be killed by intimate partners.
If these are not considered honor killings, then no uncomfortable examination needs to be conducted into what lies beneath. But they are honor killings, in that they are committed in order to avenge a slight to a man and restore the honor that a woman’s disobedient behavior has taken away, because a woman is the property of her partner. The only difference between Western and Eastern honor killings is that the latter are sometimes perpetrated by extended male family members and sometimes mothers, but all that tells us is that in Western societies a woman’s ownership has been transferred from her family to her male partner.
This is spot on. And yes, the only difference is in how we view ownership - who is the true owner of a woman. (It never is herself, of course.)
I remember all too well a conversation with my father - one that was later used as an example of “we can’t talk politics anymore” - where he said straight up that feminism had ruined everything. This is an example of the backlash against equality. “Sure, things needed to change, but now they have Gone Too Far™.” In our family context, of course, this was a bit of a passive-aggressive dig at my wife, who was clearly a person ruined by feminism, or she would be staying at home full time with the kids, and would be camping with me and the kids rather than staying home (or working) on her own. Malik takes this one on as well.
All myths assume challenges are overcorrections, but when it comes to feminism, the “going too far” accusation has been the most consistent and aggressive barrier to equality. Overcorrection is the assumption that feminism will guilt society into creating another system of unfairness, one which will steal from the industrious and deserving rich (men) and give to the feckless poor (women). Ironically, implicit in this response is the concession that a correction does need to be made. The system is so skewed in one party’s favor that if there is an opening for change there is a risk of a deluge…Feminism has been going too far from the very moment the first woman asked for a basic right that a man had been afforded by birth.
Unfortunately, misogyny is so widespread that it transcends pretty much every boundary line. You can find nasty sexual harassers across the political spectrum, for example. And too many men still assume housework is for women, meaning they should get special rewards for doing some themselves.
[M]isogyny has no politics, ideology, or religion. It is why we constantly fail to make the connection between male violence and any cultural or social norms that give men a sense of entitlement over women and their sexual compliance, the “honor killings” that are so easily identifiable in other cultures.
This too has been a source of futile discussion with my former religious tribe and with my family. When religious leaders (hello, Southern Baptist Convention) make keeping women out of leadership roles a core value of the faith, it creates a cultural and social norm where women’s voices can safely be disregarded, and their safety and well-being ignored. Likewise for my birth family, where my wife’s voice was considered irrelevant. These are not benign cultural preferences, but a way of thinking about the value of women - or their lack of value - which directly contributes to the continued inequality of the sexes in our society.
The book ends with a conclusion chapter, which I think also serves as a manifesto for a better future. While the main body of the book can be depressing - our world is nowhere close to where it should be - Malik dares to envision a better one. We need more people like that, not content to just perpetuate the injustices of the past or double down on them, but eager to show that the myths are keeping all of us back.
First is a quote from Hanif Kureishi, which I think encapsulates the message that my parents and their generation of white retrogressives need to hear. And even if they don’t the future is coming, despite their demands that progress stop.
“No one knows what a more democratic and inclusive culture would be like. It is fatuously omniscient to assume it would be worse than what we already have. The attempt of reactionaries to shut people down shows both fear and stupidity. But it’s too late: they will be hearing from us.”
Malik points out that patriarchy hurts men too - they aren’t exactly thriving as a result of toxic masculinity, between suicides, substance abuse, and gun violence. To say nothing of mental health challenges directly related to walling off “feminine” emotions.
As I have noted elsewhere on this blog, as have others, MAGA isn’t benefiting its supporters. There was an iconic moment (described by the author) from 2019, when the Republican Party shut government down to…well, their goals have never been particularly clear - they can’t even agree on them, other than to throw a toddler tantrum and break their toys - when a Trump supporter complained that Trump was hurting her, not “the people he needs to be hurting.”
Yep, that’s the MAGA political goal in its purest form: to hurt “those people.” But that’s how myths work.
He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting. That in a nutshell is the boomerang effect of the myth. If a political program is based on empowering its supporters by appealing to their sense of superiority over the marginalized, it will come for its own believers at some point.
Those who rail against “political correctness” will find that they will be the next target of the Right Wing’s insults. Alex Jones moved quickly from targeting minorities, women, and LGBTQ people to making a career out of harassing the parents of kids murdered in mass shootings. White identity politics are literally killing MAGA supporters. We continue to involve ourselves in senseless foreign wars to make ourselves feel powerful. And the list goes on. Ultimately, only the obscenely rich and powerful benefit from the myths.
Myths are hierarchy stabilizers; they keep power structures standing, creating the illusion of status by concentrating on relative status. If attention can be maintained on how you are better off than someone below you, it can be diverted from the fact that there is someone above you who is either exploiting you or enjoying more unearned privileges than you. If attention can be maintained on how those below you are coming for your resources, then your eyes are fixed downward, never upward. By their very nature, hierarchies only have one small group at the top. Believing in a myth is sort of like taking part in a ponzi scheme. You are constantly being told that your stake is accruing, sometimes you might even get a dividend, but ultimately only the scheme owners make any real money. There is no real value created, the scheme eventually collapses, and the money winners abscond with the spoils.
That really is the truth about hierarchies and the myths that support them. It is the central lie that MAGA tells its followers, it is the central lie that organized religion tells its followers, it is the central lie that my existence challenged in my birth family. And ultimately, challenging that central lie is what got Christ murdered - and what he preached against.
And change is possible. We no longer accept slavery as an acceptable part of life, and even the MAGA backlash is a sign that the foundations of the myths are crumbling. Dagon has fallen on his face, and his screaming followers scramble ever-harder to stand him up again.
The myths that subvert freedom work hard to prevent change from happening. They are powerful. But they are not all-powerful. They depend on killing anger and suffocating the fire of justice denied. They work by bamboozling you with all sorts of logic that makes you think maybe your complaint is unreasonable. Maybe things aren’t that bad. Maybe there are other priorities…[but] everything is important when you are fighting for equality.
And yes, this is going to make the current cultural and political gatekeepers uncomfortable. (Just like it made my parents uncomfortable.)
Some members of our intellectual elite are so steeped in the fear of change, so wired by toxic myths that make them suspicious of revolutionary movements that they do not lead or have a role in, that they took one look at the largest global movement for equality in a generation, and the only thing they saw was a threat to “open debate.” They looked at a world where, rightly, hitherto immune editors finally faced the consequences for irresponsible exercise of free speech that puts others’ lives at risk, and the only thing they saw was a threat to the jobs of an anointed class of narrators. They looked at a world where, for the first time, a large number of people who had no way of reaching that anointed class of narrators finally gained the digital means to feed their opinions back, and all they saw was a baying mob. So effectively had grass roots movements, students, youth, and identity activism been smeared over the years that instead of welcoming change, our narrators fear it. The language of mythology, and its concepts and classifications have become so widely distributed, so deeply entrenched in our popular culture and discourse, that instead of freedom fighters, we see vandals. Instead of moral courage, we see virtue signaling. Instead of kindness and sensitivity to others, we see safetyism. Instead of accountability, we see cancel culture.
It is easy to see why this freakout is occurring too:
The good news is that one of the reasons these myths are strong and getting stronger is that the causes they are fighting are also getting stronger. There are more of us fighting for freedom and equality. And there are more of us in places where we have previously not been allowed. There are more women, more people of color, more LGBTQ+ people in public life, and more allies turning up for us. We are writing books, we are being elected, we are filling newsrooms and boardrooms and swelling the streets of our cities with protest and demand and a sense of ownership and entitlement that cannot be undone. We are a threat to those who have always had an advantage over us.
The times they are a’changin’ - and the older generations aren’t getting any younger. I feel deeply that, although there are still plenty of younger racist assholes, they aren’t as widespread (the research bears this out.) So much of the Culture Wars™ are also a war against the young, against their ideas, their values, their demand that they are as valuable as the older generations who have hoarded economic privileged and then denied it to their grandchildren.
It saddens me that my parents’ generation seems willing to burn democracy and their grandchildren’s future to the ground in order to cling to the illusion that they still have control of the world and the narrative. Just like it saddens me that my parents threw me away as soon as they lost control of our family narrative, when I stood up and demanded public accountability for their behavior, and a change to our family hierarchy.
I’ll end with Malik’s powerful ending.
The new stories we need to tell are not just the corrections of old stories, they are visions, certainty that we have a choice, belief in the fact that for societies to evolve and old order must change. We cannot pick and choose the elements of progress that suit our own demographic or preferences because that eventually breaks down the whole machine. We have to be unapologetic about the reality that for civilizations to advance, their societies and political processes must be updated and refreshed. Ways of life that do not modify themselves to live up to their ideals will inevitably disintegrate. The only way to preserve the good that exists in our societies today is to allow it to wreck the bad.
So let them mock our wokeness, our safe spaces, our trigger warnings, our virtue signalling, and our cancel culture. Be strong in the knowledge that all these smears come from a place of fear. Rest assured that you are the latest in a long line of people who over the years have asked and been denied but never gave up until they secured the rights you enjoy today. Seek comfort in your allies in a movement for equality that is strong and large and gentle with its members and resolute. Be confident in the belief that our fight is necessary, that our goals are noble. Remind yourself, when the counterinsurgency gets in your head, that what you seek is not retribution, but justice, equality, freedom, and peace for all.
We will get there. It will not be easy, and it will not happen overnight. But one thing is certain as far as the keepers of the status quo are concerned: it is already too late. They will be hearing from us.
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