This is what happens when two intractable ideologies collide
College Fix reporter Matthew Stein reported this week on a bizarre, almost comical fight taking place at the University of California, Santa Barbara: apparently the school’s LGBTQ constituency is at odds with its feminist vanguard, the former of which has accused the latter of “perpetuating violence” and promoting “white supremacy.”
Well, sure: the current going craze is to identify “white supremacy” in as many places as one possibly can, and if you can’t find any actual white supremacists—already a doubtful proposition at a flagship California university—then surely you’ll have to start looking elsewhere. The crux of this baffling strife actually turns on the demands of the LGBTQ mob: they agitated for, and were eventually granted by the university, a doubled budget and a dedicated building for something called “the LGBTQ Resource Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity.” But the fight was apparently inspired in no small part because the women’s studies officials who were overseeing the resource center were allegedly white power-ish types. Which seems a little doubtful, but hey.
Progressive identity politics of this variety are almost hilariously self-contradictory. Liberals, particularly campus liberals, are supposed to be among the more “woke” members of society, conscious of every social dynamic, hyper-attuned to the political actualities of everybody and everything around them—and yet liberals are also the ones who are most likely to accuse hardline feminist academics of being latter-day Nazis. Something seems off here.
One hopes that this bitter struggle will end soon, and that both sides can make peace with each other. Then again, it is entirely likely that activists will find a new “white supremacist” with which to target their ire—the disabilities office, perhaps the women’s health clinic, maybe even the African American Studies department. The wild thing about campus progressive politics is that it is, by-and-large, an equal-opportunity accuser: it doesn’t matter what you do or what you believe, you’re probably guilty of racism and sexism and colonialism anyway. They’ll get around to accusing you eventually—and if they can wring an even bigger budget out of it in the process, all the better for them.
MORE: Forget Intersectionality: At UCSB, feminist and LGBTQ factions at war
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