“Identity Politics”

October is Women’s History Month. It’s also Latin American Heritage Month. And German Heritage Month. And Canadian Islamic History Month. And 2SLGBTQQIA+ History Month (though this has not been recognized by the federal government — yet). Some provinces recognize this to be Canadian Library Month .

It’s a fairly busy time in our modern update to the old liturgical calendar. Instead of numerous saintly feasts, we get cultural awareness months, remembrance days and the like. Paradoxically, there are now so many of these observances that they don’t seem particularly worth observing at all. Everyone is special, so no one is.

Major lending programs for Black entrepreneurs have quickened their paces after a slow start, with Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce approving $8.5-million in loans and grants and Ottawa authorizing about $35.1-million in loans so far.

After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, the federal government, major financial institutions and Black community groups spent months discussing how to knock down some of the barriers that Black businesses disproportionately face in accessing capital. Ottawa and major banks almost came together to launch a new national lending initiative, but the banks walked away to run their own programs.

h/t Mauser

The cult of victimhood is inflaming tensions between ethnic-minority groups.

A scuffle in a south-east London shop wouldn’t normally be headline news. But in our age of racial identity politics, Peckham Hair and Cosmetics has been thrust on to the frontline; a clash between an angry customer and a cack-handed shopkeeper has been transformed into a damning indictment of ‘white supremacist’ Britain.

That neither of the two players in this sorry story is white didn’t dent the narrative. Protesters gathered outside the shop, on Rye Lane, on Wednesday afternoon, after a video went viral, showing a middle-aged Asian man – the shop’s owner – violently restraining a young black woman, as she tried to bash him over the head with her basket. At one point in the clip, he appears to place his hands around her neck.

Comedian Jimmy Kimmel opened the 2023 Academy Awards with a quip that — excuse the bad pun — punched above its weight: “When I look around at this room I can’t help but wonder, is Ozempic right for me?”

He was referring to a weekly injected drug that increases the production of insulin, thereby reducing appetite with generally tolerable side effects. The pounds fall away without the feeling of deprivation that accompanies other forms of dieting.

We need to stop saying identity politics, wokeness, or whatever else we want to call it, is progressive. We need to stop referring to the people who are actively reviving racial, misogynistic and homophobic thinking – under the guide of being ‘racially aware’ and ‘trans inclusive’ – as left-wing radicals. They are anything but. These people are reactionaries and bigots. And it’s high time we started naming them as such.

Equity was born in an ideological graveyard

We live in a time of ideological exhaustion. Our doctrines and ideals lie broken in pieces all around us and never fit into a whole. Jagged bits of Marxism and anarchism, nationalism and liberalism, clutter the landscape, tear at our feet and impede our way as we stagger onward in search of some promised land. Yet there can be no promised land, no future, no past, in such a psychotic jumble of first principles. All we can muster is rage at the structures around us, so inexplicably shattered, and the urge not to repair but to obliterate them totally — to negate them into dust.