Inanity Of Identity Politics Exposed At Canadian NDP Convention
The recent convention of the Canadian New Democratic Party (NDP) became a microcosm of the inanity of identity politics found in forums ranging from politics to higher education.
Participants were given familiar “equity cards” as literal card-carrying members of groups demanding preferred treatment. The problem is when one identity group demands preference over another. The result, as seen in Winnipeg, was calamity and quickly became comedy.
Many in education have long pushed equity cards and “identity markers” to get students to define themselves by their race, disability, gender, or other criteria. Even computer science teachers are told to tailor their lessons to identity markers.
Such markers are treated as essential to creating “Identity safe classrooms.”
There are even DEI games where children are encouraged to “match” their identity groups.
At the NDP convention, people were given equity cards to give preference to certain identities over groups such as males or whites. The problem is that the cards create an entitlement that can clash with others’ claims to speak first.
The cards were based on identity categories, including gender, race and ethnicity, LGBTQ+ status, and Indigenous status. You were supposed to be able to jump ahead of others because of your priority identity.
One video shows a person holding up their green gender equity card to claim the right to speak first as another woman waves her pink race equity card to speak.
What followed were objections to people not yielding to those with greater priority or right to speak with one noting that cards for people who identify as Black women “have no value outside of this space.”
Then there was the speaker who called out another delegate for the sin of misgendering the speaking who identified as “non-binary.”
The collapse of the equity house of cards is due to the inherent myth that identity politics produces equity. It is, in fact, a separate system of privilege and entitlement. It is used to marginalize other voices in the name of amplifying other voices.
The greatest impact is to balkanize a population or party rather than emphasize common identities.
The alternative is to enforce uniform treatment of any speakers based on such novel devices as a line to speak.
Under this cutting edge approach, people are guaranteed to speak in the order in which they line up to speak. It may be a radical experiment for the NDP, but it has been shown to have some success in other areas.
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