Lurking behind this woke slamming of blacks who have the ‘wrong’ views, and behind the racialised animus heaped on Thomas in recent days, is a very ugly idea: that blacks belong to ‘progressives’. That blacks should be woke, or at least Democratic or Labour, in their outlook, and if they aren’t then there must be something wrong with them. They must have been ‘got at’, whether by their crazy white wives or by their own ‘field nigger’ instinct to please their mastahs in the elite. This is deeply demeaning to black people, whether it’s everyday voters or Justice Clarence Thomas, who, contrary to the racial prejudices of the woke set, are perfectly capable of coming to their own conclusions about politics and morality. It is an intrinsically racist idea, given it reduces an entire race of people to a monolithic bloc who must all think and behave in the same way. And if they don’t, they’ll be called the n-word.
A broader problem has been exposed by the overturning of Roe – the extent to which identity politics has corroded progressive politics as we once knew it. Battles that would once have been political in nature, and reasoned and rational too, have become petty, vindictive stand-offs motored more by identitarian grievance than by moral conviction. So alongside the racial shaming of Thomas, there have been protests outside the private residences of Supreme Court justices. The protesters used megaphones to call the justices wicked and hateful. These home protests that tended to focus on the justices’ alleged character flaws spoke to the shrinking of the political landscape, to the replacement of a clash of principles with increasingly personalised spats over who is good and who is evil. Even the pro-Roe set’s insistence that the new ruling will hurt women of colour most of all confirms that nothing can now be spoken of at the level of ideas, or of the state, or of the nation. No, everything must be reduced to race, to identity, to yet another tussle in the Oppression Olympics.
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