I once dated a feminist activist, who later went on to complete a doctorate in women's studies. She was everything one might expect in an activist: articulate, intelligent, well educated, fiercely ideological. She had read all the right books and she gave no ground in debate. She was a Gloria Steinem, only prettier (and yes I know that's sexist).
I'll never forget one of our many walks, this one on a beautiful autumn evening, in her white, upper-middle-class neighborhood. She had again been telling me of women's struggles and of the assorted fresh strategies that might someday overcome. I listened patiently and as sympathetically as your average insensitive male brute could. I hoped to add something, maybe something of some value, for I sensed something was missing. I wished to be supportive. So out it came. "Your strategy seems rather isolated," I observed. "What if feminists were to make common cause with other oppressed groups — perhaps join African Americans in their civil-rights activism?"
You would have thought I had suggested, in contemporary terms, that Bernie Sanders join the Tea Party movement. She was dumbfounded; aghast, almost beyond words. "Oh no. No, no. We can't do that. Blacks," she responded, "haven't experienced nearly the oppression that women have experienced. One cannot make common cause with anyone but the similarly oppressed — and no one in America has been abused and oppressed as women have."
I was stunned, near speechlessness myself. Yet I soon collected my wits — however brutishly insensitive they were — and reminded her that America had practiced genocide on its native population, leaving behind a decimated scattering of alcoholism, mass unemployment and cultural despair; that African Americans had been subjected to slavery and Jim Crow and relentless discrimination; and that many Mexican Americans, also subject to discrimination, now inhabited lands they once owned, and which we — white American men and women alike — gleefully stole. There was plenty of pain to go around.
She would have none of it. I wasn't a woman. I couldn't possibly know the pain of womanhood, nor could any privileged white man or privileged black man or privileged native-American man or privileged Hispanic man. We were all clueless. We didn't "understand." Our ignorance, while somewhat amusing to her, was also tragic. Her cause, women's cause, as she saw it, was sui generis — and supreme. The woes of gender trumped the woes of race every day, and that men — whatever their color — couldn't see this was merely all too typical of our blind privilege.
I should have expected her response. How I didn't see it coming I'm not sure, although I was drinking quite a bit in those days. The reason I should have seen it coming is captured in two words, above: she was fiercely ideological. She had not only read all the right books; she held all the right, group-approved views, which had been neatly laid out for her in a bubbled framework constructed by the contemporary feminist herd that brooked no dissent. Even the suggestion that others suffered as women suffered was inconceivable to her. Decent sort that she was, she didn't abhor me. She felt "sorry" for me, just as she felt sorrow for all my benighted brethren.
Last night, a reader tweeted a kindred sorrow - "I'm sorry you don't get what #BlackLivesMatter means & that economics is important if you're alive." Excepting my consumption of prescription narcotics, I saw it this morning stone sober. Hence I instantly gathered that #BlackLivesMatter trumps, with a hashtag of course, AllLivesMatter — male, female, young and old, prosperous and impoverished, white, black, brown and red — and that if one wishes to be accepted by The Herd and The Herd's approved views, then one will damn well chant as the herd chants.
I wish no such acceptance.
Normally I would counter that I do indeed "get" what "black lives matter" means. For insensitive as this blockheaded white-with-a-touch-of-red male brute is, I nonetheless believe that human life matters, every last one. But why bother? That's not the approved chant; a countering, thoughtful exposition of class-based socialism (which is hardly "fiercely" ideological these days) would require hundreds of rolling tweets; and emotional activism doesn't lend itself to intellectual complexity. Just query any tea partier, or, ask any of the rude protesters who shouted down Bernie Sanders.
And somewhere out there, there's a professor of women's studies who is sorry that the Tweeter & Co. doesn't "get it." Such is the "solidarity" of identity politics.