The De-Humanizing Effect of Identity Politics

Steyn on the Oakley Show
April 12, 2018

https://www.steynonline.com/8578/the-de-humanizing-effect-of-identity-politics

On Wednesday afternoon Mark checked in with John Oakley at Toronto's Global News Radio 640. Among the topics discussed were the Zuckerberg testimony and where social media is heading; the left's ongoing campaign to narrow the bounds of free speech; and the Saskatchewan bus crash and how identity politics can wind up de-humanizing you. Click below to listen:

If you're one of that small, brave band who prefer Steyn on camera, he'll be back on TV tonight, Thursday, south of the border with Tucker Carlson, live at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific, with a rerun at midnight. If non-visual formats suit you just fine Steyn-wise, Mark will also be here in audio this evening with Part Seven of our latest Tale for Our Time for Mark Steyn Club members, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

For more information on The Mark Steyn Club and becoming a member, please see here - and don't forget our limited-time Gift Membership. As our first anniversary approaches, we are grateful for the support of all our friends around the world, and look forward to welcoming many more in the years ahead.

© 2020 Mark Steyn Enterprises (US) Inc. All rights reserved.
No part of this website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied, modified or adapted, without the prior written consent of Mark Steyn Enterprises.

If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club and you take issue with this article, then have at it in our comments section.

receive the latest by email: subscribe to steynonline's free weekly mailing list

Comment on this item

Submission of reader comments is restricted to Mark Steyn Club members only. If you are not yet a member, please click here to join. If you are already a member, please log in here:

Member Login

28 Reader Comments

PK33 • Apr 13, 2018 at 08:36

Speaking of identity politics, have you seen the new Cover Girl makeup ad campaign? No more, "Easy, breezy, Cover Girl". The new slogan is, "Cover Girl. I am what I make up."

Seems about right.

P. Gao

PK33 • Apr 13, 2018 at 23:57

Ouf! Isn't that a new category of vapid or what? While on the other hand, the very same crowd is hanky-twisting about not enough girls go into the 'hard' degrees of math and science. Can't 'make up' laws of physics - have to learn them and then how to apply them. That'd be 'work' and 'hard work' not the current school culture of 'play' and 'fun.'
One must challenge the youth; which direction to take on the road to true success? Fake facade or solid core? Disengenuous flattery or genuine accomplishment?

P. Gao • Apr 13, 2018 at 01:05

Debate over. they strangled it. Defund the university departments that produce this disengenuous junk and it'll get real quiet and civil real fast. Taxpayers are being fleeced to support this build-a-mob under the auspices of 'higher education'. Meanwhile, the economy is begging for more engineers, pilots, doctors, skilled managers. Not only is the 'white' pretense a cartoon so are the supposed other 'cultures' or 'races' to which they so pompously defer. It's all fake culturalism made up in university classrooms and professors' workshoppy conferences.
Had to deal with a prof teaching 'cultures' based on her deep experience of a one week tourist in India. 1/4 of the class was student visa Indian, 1/3 student visa Chinese and the rest a mishmosh of so-called 'whites' from the Commonwealth. Everyone had to get stupider to pass the exams through a semester of that university 'enlightenment.' The diploma'd professor didn't notice how the Indian students stayed aloof from the Chinese students because China invaded India a few years back and grabbed part of India's territory. Sore subject. A class of national cliques huddled apart from each other but it's all the 'whites'. Unbelievable vapidness and ignorance in supposed 'institution of learning.'
Learning what? - Toe the line or else? And the idiot students are actually PAYING for this - intensely encouraged by the unis to sign on for decades of debt slavery. But the 'profit' companies are BAD. Feh. This stuff is ALL subsidized. Defund. Back to skills-focus and COMPETENCIES. Gah!
:)

Elizabeth Lorenz

P. Gao • Apr 13, 2018 at 15:18

I agree. I wonder if the 'white privilege' professor would like to address the plight of the 'white' population in South Africa. It seems their privilege to survive is being rapidly dismantled.

P. Gao

Elizabeth Lorenz • Apr 14, 2018 at 00:08

Yes. To expand the thinking... Don't forget the plight of the South Sudanese who were and are still routinely called 'cockroaches' by the Sudan government, two million died as a result of the genocidal policies of the Khartoum government against the southerners during the Sudan Civil War. Just to look at them, an outsider might not be able to distinguish much if anything between a 'northerner' and a 'southerner' but boy howdy THEY can. Same with Rwanda... how many outsiders could look at and speak with a Hutu and a Tutsi and see any difference at all? Yet THEY knew exactly who was who, to the tune of over 800 thousand slaughtered in only 100 days.
Honestly, outside foreign meddling is not mentioned in any of these cases, but it is highly relevant in ALL of them.:(

Elizabeth Lorenz

P. Gao • Apr 15, 2018 at 13:51

Good points. The purveyors of gun control might want to consider that a vast number of the Hutus killed on Rwanda were hacked to death with machetes, and none of them were armed to defend themselves.
It's interesting to note that the Rwandan radio stations were busy calling the Hutus cockroaches and promoting songs that glorified killing them prior to the genocide. The college professor promoting the idea of 'white privilege' should read the book 'Shake Hands with the Devil' my Romeo Dallaire. Is she promoting a genocide of white people in western civilization? She can throw her hat in with pol pot and mao and all the other wretched mass murderers. Her ideology is no different.

Marc Swerdloff • Apr 12, 2018 at 20:44

The intellectual left has not had humanity for a long time.Note the lack of indifference to Kulaks in the Ukrainian famine, Great Leap Foward casualtiies or the 500k deaths in Syria today. Only when deaths serve a useful political purpose are they magnified and pseudo-mourned.

BallBounces in Phoenix • Apr 12, 2018 at 20:11

Persons who cry white privilege do so assuming the functional superiority of white societies. This is indistinguishable from asserting white supremacy. Not only is this what they would call racist, so is their antidote -- the verbal degradation of people based on skin colour. IOW, they are the most racist people in town.

Sol Cranfill

BallBounces in Phoenix • Apr 13, 2018 at 00:29

I think the average person on the left would not understand what you said, but would sense that you were making some kind of near-approach to reality, and counterattack with some clichés.

Nicola Timmerman • Apr 12, 2018 at 19:57

This so-called journalist with her hateful tweet obviously doesn't realize that lots of First Nation young boys play on these hockey teams. I don't think there were any on this team, but that was just chance. But who cares - they were young men in the prime of life and now a young woman trainer who has died of her injuries.

Sol Cranfill • Apr 12, 2018 at 17:39

Possibly the creepiest thing I have seen from Canada is video of a seminar last month at Trent University in Ontario, by Regina University Assistant Prof Michael Cappello, teaching a room full of white people that not only is it ok to be against whiteness; it's practically a duty. The please-flog-me, wide-eyed crowd soaks it up like cult hopefuls yearning to be programmed.

The leader of the "Heaven's Gate" cult near San Diego, in the 1990s, convinced his 38 followers to put on athletic shoes, dark clothes, and commit suicide together, lying in beds in a mansion. All 39 died. The mindset of someone who could make such a comment about the bus crash in Saskatchewan is not far from elevating immolation of oneself, on the pyre of diversity, to martyrdom.

Robert Orr

Sol Cranfill • Apr 13, 2018 at 07:22

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/03/21/faith-goldys-talk-at-wilfred-laurier-was-cancelled-and-a-damn-good-thing-too.html

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/04/05/free-speech-fear-mongering-is-the-elite-equivalent-of-its-ok-to-be-white-posters.html

Hi Sol,

These articles can maybe top the creepiness of the actual video ..... Shree Paradkar is clearly a "white" woman, maybe the beneficiary of generations of "white privilege" in India. Someone should check it out.

A country whose main, Indo-EUROPEAN, language was brought in by invaders from the north .... H m m m ... and the caste system .....

Crude, and serious Indologists would tear their hair out, but the likes of Shree Paradkar have been asking for this.

P. Gao

Robert Orr • Apr 14, 2018 at 00:34

Can attest to how Africans are treated by Indians in Africa and for those Africans who work there, by Indians in India. Quite appalling. Idi Amin cynically exploited this resentment in Uganda when he grabbed power, booting out all Indians from Uganda (originally brought in by the British a century prior). Crashed the economy- oops - as they owned all the businesses. See, the Indian businesses are family-owned and Africans can only hope for menial jobs in them. Since it's family-owned, Indians have an extended family influence and motivation to make sure no upstart African business can compete. Same with Arabs. They keep it in the family and shut out by all sorts of undermining and blocking any African competition. Where do Africans get the experience of higher management that gives them the training and experience to start their own companies if they are only allowed the lowest positions in their own economy?

Indian caste is color-based. The darker one's skin, is the lower the caste. So, it's preposterous to be lectured by an Indian about 'racism.' Love'em, great people on all sorts of other things, but it's their reality and absolutely affects their decisions on how they live. In the current environment, they'll use it to grab jobs over someone else, of course. They will then hire only family members, shutting out anyone else, no matter what color.

Fran Lavery • Apr 12, 2018 at 15:06

John Oakley is wonderful. Another one of those lucky people persons who was probably born for one thing. Ever since he "appeared" weekly at the club site with our First Day Founding Founder, Mark Steyn, I look forward to the mid-section of my week. It's hard to shout out to him from this end but at least here, he has some US fans. Hats off to Mr. Oakley!

John Shuba • Apr 12, 2018 at 14:19

During the Middle ages I imagine that you could make a good living in the universities of the time by being an expert in Astrology, Phrenology, Palmistry or the reading of animal entrails. That's sort of what we have today with our legions of academic specialists in "White Privilege", "Diversity Studies","Race and Gender Studies" and "Advanced Intersectionality." However, unlike their medieval counterparts, this "New Apocrypha" is consuming virtually everything in what used to be called "The Liberal Arts" and is setting it's sights on he hard sciences and fields like engineering. I doubt is you can have a discussion of "Hamlet" anymore without someone pointing out that Shakespeare was a white guy and the court of Elsinore "lacked diversity." Lets not even get started about the raw deal that Othello got.

Michael Bledsoe • Apr 12, 2018 at 13:11

Mark turns a phrase colorfully enough that he qualifies as a "writer of color." Sometimes though the situation calls for clear unambiguous language ("...her stupid tweet..."). Either way, Mark has all the bases covered.

James Morphew • Apr 12, 2018 at 13:07

I wish to locate and attend a seminar on White Privilege. I seem to have misplaced mine, haven't enjoyed it in quite a while. Paying too much in taxes, insurance, legal fees, child support, still can't get anything for free. Seems more like a burden than a privilege. Maybe I'll ask around at the Yacht Club.

Michael Bledsoe

James Morphew • Apr 12, 2018 at 16:34

I've never understood why so many of us squander our White Privilege washing dishes at Waffle House or shelving merchandise at WalMart. Those are honorable jobs but hardly what you'd expect with those huge reservoirs of Whiteness.

Roy A Crocker

Michael Bledsoe • Apr 12, 2018 at 17:51

I'm still wondering why my white privilege didn't get me out of the draft during the Vietnam war. Glad that I served by the way.

Fran Lavery • Apr 12, 2018 at 12:00

Happy you mentioned that part about how the greatest joke of the century would be if it were shown that it was FB that caused DJT to beat out HRC, the predestined glass-ceiling crasher! That's the one outfit that didn't get her blame scrutiny. That's where I saw a good to rich sampling of Hillary-and-camp jokes. Oh, this is all more Grand Kabuki going on. People eat it up, too.

Brian Taylor • Apr 12, 2018 at 10:47

I normally agree with Mark Steyn, but this has always been where we disagree, and it's the whole ball of wax: The most diverse countries may be in the typical West now. However, the West is simply following the course set by Central and South America, which used to be more diverse than the West, but they have little diversity now since everything has run together (Indians and Spanish have disappeared). And, soon, the West will join them in losing their diversity (Whites will disappear). So, while Mark's right that non-Western countries discriminate, we disagree that this is bad since I think it's positive discrimination (to use a British phrase in a different manner than they use it), and it's what preserves diversity in the world. Indeed, their identities saves their races, ethnicities, and cultures for the world to enjoy, so it's the most important thing (although it's harmful when identity is used in a racist way to lessen people as Mark noted in this interview). I hope to contact Mark Steyn in a couple of months about a website that I've been developing for years to preserve diversity, so I hope this doesn't anger him, ha!

Fran Lavery

Brian Taylor • Apr 12, 2018 at 12:26

Maybe it will supplant FB, Brian. Who wants homogeneity in anything but their milk? As long as you avoid the trap of deleting anything that resembles free speech, gun talk and religious conversation, you might be fine. Accept all races and genders and see where it goes. Also add the fine print about not threatening anyone or using all caps. If you can do all of that and pay everyone a percentage for joining, you might have something.

Ian Cory

Brian Taylor • Apr 12, 2018 at 15:31

So, on the basis of your argument, we need to ensure then that Western countries, like non-Western countries, are more assertive in their cultural and social discrimination to preserve their identities for the world to enjoy! But wait, isn't that what has happened? The West has been so successful in this that most of the rest of the world, in spite of its ethnicity, wants to live in or like "Western" countries. Mass migration and all that! In which direction does that move?

Craig Davis

Brian Taylor • Apr 13, 2018 at 14:55

Brian, I respectfully disagree that Latin America has fully integrated Native Americans and Spanish people people. While the divisions are not obvious to non-citizens, they are obvious in the class structure that has been preserved these hundreds of years. While living in El Salvador I noted stark differences between the most poor people in the most wealthy people, with the most wealthy people more closely resembling typical Spaniards. I do not think that the societies are fully integrated at all. I also suggest you study the treatment of blacks in the south and central America in the 19th and 20th centuries. These do not seem to resemble colorblind societies at all to me.

Matthew McWilliams • Apr 12, 2018 at 09:31

Mark,

I always enjoy your weekly interviews with John Oakley. So my question is, when are you going to interview him for the Mark Steyn show? I for one would be interested to hear John's point of view on free speech from north of the border, particularly how he navigates the what I presume to be a much more restrictive environment in Canada when it comes to his show.

Dave Anderson

Matthew McWilliams • Apr 12, 2018 at 11:47

Or we could hear from Laura Ingram or Kevin Williamson how they "navigate the environment" south of the border. I agree, though, John Oakley would be a great guest on the Mark Steyn show.

PK33

Dave Anderson • Apr 13, 2018 at 08:37

Kevin Williamson was navigated right out of the Atlantic. It would be interesting to hear his perspective on that and I suspect we'll read about it soon.

Dave Anderson

Dave Anderson • Apr 13, 2018 at 22:47

Laura Ingraham, not Ingram. Sheesh. As Bugs would say, what a maroon.