I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

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Many or most of them one would likely personally despise—just as, on the other hand, one would "love" many people belonging to a "different group. One might argue that in this chapter Finkelstein's profound contempt for the "Elmer Gantry in blackface" at the head of this gaggle of amoral mediocrities gets the best of his prodigious literary gifts, since the ruthless mockery goes on and on and becomes somewhat tiresome, but it can't be gainsaid that it's all well-deserved.

Finkelstein seems to take particular pleasure in disemboweling this (as he says) non-scholar and non-activist, for his critique/massacre is a full 110 pages long and features withering juxtapositions with a titan, DuBois. In a long, scathing chapter, Finkelstein analyzes the cult surrounding Barack Obama, which he reveals as the ultimate product of identity politics. As Finkelstein says, Kendi embraces the woke conceit that, over four hundred years, "African-Americans haven't registered any progress in the struggle against racism. He considers it, or dominant tendencies within it, to have degenerated from soaring moral and intellectual heights with Rosa Luxemburg, W.

One difficulty with the book is that it has a sprawling and meandering character, consisting variously of memoir, brutal polemic, dense argumentation, forensic dissection of texts, scores of long quotations, innumerable long footnotes, and very funny ridicule of everything and everyone from Michelle Obama to Bari Weiss, from the New York Times to woke terms like Latinx ("why would an ethnic group want to sound like a porn site? This week, however, we have chosen a more unconventional expression to show you: “ I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it. His "economic reductionism," according to Angela Davis, prevented him from "developing a vocabulary that allows him to speak…about the persistence of racism, racist violence, state violence. Every year we publish a selection of books and pamphlets that address the key issues facing activists and trade unionists. Aside from Obama himself, the most satisfying skewering, I found, was of Samantha Power, the "Battleaxe from Hell…downright evil…[whose] conscience only bestirs at the suffering of victims of official U.

The intelligent reader will not be tempted by such facile judgments but instead will engage with the book's substance, because it has important things to say. S. history from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is the author of Worker Cooperatives and Revolution and Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression. Instead, the real purpose of identity politics is to derail a class-based movement bent on radical change. woman—is, in its parochialism and vitiating of solidarity against capitalism, not what a real left politics looks like.One of the more memorable passages in the book is when he imagines, in some alternate universe, a Robin DiAngelo who actually does care about fighting oppression of blacks and not only grifting off a culture's pathologies. After Finkelstein's devastating exposure of Kendi's countless inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and idiocies—his woke dismissal of the Civil Rights Movement in favor of the macho Black Panthers (who, by comparison, achieved almost nothing); his (in Kendi's words) "striving to accept and equate and empower racial difference" even as he argues that the idea of race is a "mirage" that was invented to rationalize exploitation; his insistence that all racial disparities in society are purely a result of racism; his valorizing of racial differences (e. Second, one would certainly not love all the individuals who are alleged to constitute "one's people.

Issues of online content moderation, too, come into play in any debate over censorship, and Finkelstein doesn't say much about these.Moreover, the very idea of being "proud" of what group one happens to belong to—proud of being black or a woman or gay or trans—is puzzling. Human dignity is not possible without the ability to pay for a roof over one's head, clothes on one's back, and food on one's table. It's ironic that many self-styled anarchists advocate increasing the power of unaccountable bureaucrats to control what is said and what isn't. The fight against racism must focus…not on the intangible, impalpable, unchangeable, invisible, or unprovable, but, instead, on what's substantive, meaningful, and corrigible. Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, I thought early on of Obama's joke at the expense of Rahm Emanuel: "he's one of a kind, and thank god he's one of a kind.