Leftist politics uses people of color as pawns

On the neo-racist politics of the affluent

Jun 30, 2024

I already know this one will get me in trouble, but no matter. A surprising amount of people from the identitarian left have read my essays. To them: I think you already know, based on the title, that I won’t convince you. Please read at your own risk; it will trigger strong emotions. You may even want to level ad hominem. I’ve been called many names, and every instance thickens my skin, so thanks in advance for adding layers.

i. Deference politics: reversing and reifying hierarchies

Of all the pillars of authoritarian leftist politics, the politics of deference is the most difficult to demolish. This is because it cannot be addressed without opening oneself up to an accusation of racism and misogyny. What these words now mean is anyone’s guess; pinning definitions down is like trying to keep water in your palm.

Deference politics is the imperative to elevate the victims of social injustice to be the authorities on how to fix it. Not only that but people with marginalized identities are said to have access to knowledge others cannot. The more oppressed identities one has, the more authoritative the knowledge. This mode of social organization demands that we elevate people with ‘marginalized’ identities in a particular order, flipping the hierarchy of oppression that the professional-managerial left sees as permeating all social relations. In the process, they reinforce the hierarchy they’re trying to dismantle.

The philosopher Olúfemi Táíwò explains it thus in his book Elite Capture:

This particular politics of deference emerged out of a theoretical orientation of standpoint epistemology, which became popular in feminist circles in the 1970s [emphasis mine] and has continued to contribute to the thinking of many activists and academics since. Standpoint epistemology comprises three seemingly innocuous ideas:
knowledge is socially situated
marginalized people have some advantages in gaining some forms of knowledge, and
research programs (and other areas of human activity) ought to reflect these facts.1

In this essay, I will focus on the second point: the idea that people of color, particularly women, have access to knowledge through their experiences that is unavailable to people of other sexes or races.

This hierarchy of victimhood has been the death of critical thought among the left. If you have to defer to someone based on race and gender, the quality of their arguments and their integrity don’t matter. This creates an opening for narcissists to claim social clout because they know they’re guaranteed a privileged position. It should be noted that both white women and the women taking the position of sacred victims have agency and benefit. The victims let themselves be used because they know that this is one of the few ways to gain social capital in white professional circles. They prey upon white women the same way they see white women preying on them by using them as shields. I’ve never heard anyone discuss this mutually beneficial arrangement in the open. To acknowledge it would be to open oneself up to expulsion from the group. One does not name the games we play as women to one-up each other. This is not about justice but personal advancement.

Ostensible victims’ claim to authority is based on arbitrary circumstances of birth. No one else’s arguments or preferences are considered, which is authoritarian behavior; it has taken over the party that supposedly cares about personal liberty. Giving someone a position of power based on immutable characteristics also elevates people who may not have the temperament for leadership. It also provides a cover for narcissists to destroy organizations from within, which we have seen in spades among progressive groups, driven primarily by women because it is mainly they who staff them. I’ve even personally known a white woman committed to gender justice who was kicked out of her prominent position in a progressive organization for being insufficiently deferential to black women who wanted things she never had the power to deliver. She was still their scapegoat, and they negatively affected her career forever because the internet has a memory beyond a person’s death.

The hierarchy of oppression categories is race followed by gender and sexuality. Class position is invisible, so that’s never considered. Deference politics is the provenance of the elite. You’re not going to see a bunch of working-class people of any race create a social hierarchy the way elites have managed to construct. It is an exact reversal of the hierarchy they see everywhere. They work counterproductively to reverse it, instead reinforcing the original. Coleman Hughes has called this ‘neo-racism’ in his book The End of Race Politics, in which he argues that white people are treating black people like children without agency; they end up seeing themselves as children. This is similar to how colonizers treated their subjugated populations as childlike and irrational. Today’s elite are white saviors against their better judgment. A reader commented on my last essay that there can’t be one group responsible for it all, and yet the overwhelming white guilt driving all these impulses can only point to one group. However, to address this critique, I must also explain the agency of people of color in this framework and how we benefit.

ii. How do people of color benefit from deference politics?

I think it’s no accident that the least represented group in the critiques of identity politics from the left are women of color because we stand to gain the most from it in the form of social capital. We get a privileged position in the context of already privileged people because of white guilt and their need to hide the bullshit politics behind our race-based oppression; this allows them to omit class entirely. We are, after all, members of the managerial class conditional on white acceptance.

I pointed out in my last essay that the furthest left group on race, further than people of color, are affluent white people with degrees. This group (women) always finds an oppressed person to elevate, and that person benefits while having zero expectations for decency as a person. Case in point, I did not like who I was when I was participating as a sacred victim. I look back and am disgusted with myself for how I treated people, white and otherwise. I also knew that I was acquiring social capital by playing my part in the white psychodrama by merely existing in the space. I was getting a kind of affirmative action while they felt good about elevating a person with melanin. Never in a dominantly male context did I get treated like a victim, which is yet another point in favor of my theory that women are primarily responsible for the unfalsifiable ideas and groupthink now permeating elite society. Our ancestors from previous feminist waves didn’t fight for us to then foist illogic on society and destroy people who think for themselves.

As Táíwò points out, one has to be in the room of elites to be a beneficiary in the first place. One must have a college degree and work in the knowledge professions. The people in the room must be of a similar economic class for these hierarchies to form based on immutable characteristics. If you work with your brain rather than your hands, you have far more time on them to make up a novel way to gather and confer capital.

Leftist, educated white Democrats are engaged in a class supremacist project with the veneer of an anti-racist, social justice project that is authoritarian. Deference politics is necessary for identity leftism to survive. If they can make this hierarchy reversal stick, with black people on the top and white on the bottom, being white becomes ok, even though they still have most of the resources (shh!). This would be the case if any other group were dominant; white people happen to be the majority of the managerial class, and the guilt is theirs.

We don’t have to discuss how you’re only in the room if you have money. No one is asking about the class origin of the people in the room, nor has anyone proposed making a working-class affinity group in any place I’ve worked for obvious reasons. Even if people did want to out themselves as having not come from money, the professional class is composed mainly of people from the same class of parents. If you’re born to wealthy parents, you’re unlikely to fall, and those born to poor parents are unlikely to rise because the people in power don’t care about economic mobility, as they claim. If they did, they wouldn’t make many decisions based on maximizing their property values and would send their children to public schools. But we care more about things like student loan forgiveness, which is nothing other than an upward transfer of wealth.2

iii. How does the politics of deference manifest socially?

The politics of deference show up in interpersonal, organizational, and larger political contexts. Interpersonally, this meant that in a social group of women, I had to defer to the one with the largest count of identities deemed oppressed. Perhaps this is the logical conclusion when intersectionality meets social media. You get a point for each label, and stating them at the outset is a kind of talisman for maladjusted people to prevent anyone from criticizing their shitty behavior or irrational arguments. When a black woman was present, we considered her the oracle of good behavior and opinions. Meanwhile, in the background, the white woman leader consolidates her power under the guise of virtue granted by her black friend. This isn’t about justice but power struggles among women and between the sexes.

White people are so guilty they insist that we must defer to people of color in an order they call ‘Progressive Stacking.’3 Black women come first in this stack, followed by Latina and Asian-American women (we aren’t usually mentioned at all). Race is at the top, followed by gender identity, sex, sexuality, ability, and class. It is supremely telling that class comes last. These racial categories, by the way, are bullshit and live in the minds of white people who have imposed them on the rest of us. As I argued in the previous essay, the categories of Latino and Asian-American, especially, are imposed on those populations based on arbitrary classifications that came out of the immigration acts of 1965. Census categories do not define us. The acronym BIPOC further erases those of us who are not black or Indigenous by privileging those groups in the conference of social capital.

When I was alone in a group of white women, I played the victim they had to protect. I coveted it because of the small amount of power I could gather in a social context that was otherwise hostile to me due to my disagreeable personality. It also stoked narcissism and self-absorption, and it prevented me from doing the necessary inner work to solve my depression. This feeling of victimhood created an external locus of control, such that I thought events happened to me and that I had no responsibility for my emotions. This, of course, is also encouraged by female therapists, and that is why I’m never going to see a woman for therapy again unless she’s a clinical psychologist. Therapy has been ideologically captured.

In the political arena, identity-based deference is exemplified by the argument that the democratic socialist candidate who had built the most significant movement since Obama’s coalition could not be president variously because his opponent was a highly qualified woman (2016) or because black people preferred a particular candidate (2020). We also saw this when they irrationally dismissed Sanders for paying insufficient attention to race and gender, which was a feature; if you are going to build a mass political movement, you can’t foment division based on race, or people will not organize based on their shared material interests.

The professional class’s most compelling and false argument against Sanders in service of their white corporate candidate was that his movement was racist. There was an early incident in 2016 during which BLM activist women seized the microphone from Sanders, which I find to be both authoritarian and bullying behavior. It was as though he was just a white man whose Jewishness and class origin didn’t matter. At the time, we were supposed to cheer that move and to question it was racist. The progressive stack allows the already privileged to hijack power in a group with the authority of their victims, in this case, black women. This is what Hillary bots did to people like me, even though I am a brown woman and first-generation American of working-class immigrant origin. People like me are inconvenient for the narrative, and I fall at the bottom of the stack.

A mass political movement cannot be built based on a coalition fractured by race and gender, which should be obvious. Deference politics is how the party was captured, and this process was hidden behind people of color. For example, many Latinos voted for Bernie in the 2016 primary and even more in 2020. But I suppose they’re lower than black people in the white-created hierarchy, so their wishes were studiously ignored in the conversation at the time; they were inconvenient. The white woman who regularly visited Goldman Sachs was the anti-racist candidate in 2016. Girlboss politics, reinforced by the incentives of Instagram, has been our ruin.

To back up their dismissal of class politics, the college-educated have created a hierarchy of political preferences according to race. The preferences of black people are at the top, implying that every other ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ group in the coalition must defer to their preferences regardless of our own needs from the political process. Our votes are still expected for Democrats, even if our interests are fundamentally misaligned, such as the interests of Asian Americans in meritocratic processes. Affirmative action is an example that pits groups against each other and privileges one group over others. We saw this in how the liberal justices ignored the impacts of affirmative action on Asian Americans in their minority opinions.

Affluent white elites use black women, in particular, as a source of legitimacy and a shield for their desires, thus treating them as props. I don’t deny that black women exercised their agency here, too, but that doesn’t make them the arbiters of everyone else’s political choices; I was not allowed to say this back when I cared about social acceptance. One group’s political decisions are not inherently more morally correct than the preferences of any other group if we are claiming to want fairness.

Indeed, leftist white women hide their authority in same-sex groups behind black women (or trans women, when available, with great irony), nominally deferring to them but still hoarding power behind the scenes. I saw this happen in a group of liberals and leftists who are prominent in politics, media, and non-profits. There was a hierarchy, and a specific type of white woman was at the top, along with a black woman to back up her authority. My position therein was contingent on my accepting the speaking order and occasionally playing the part of their sacred victim when no black or trans women were around to do so.

iv. Why is this a result of the feminist project?

I insist that this is a problem created by women, the understanding of which is essential if we are to argue well against it. The theoretical foundations of intersectionality and queer theory, the de facto frame of the college-educated, are rooted in gender studies and academic feminism of the second and third waves. Standpoint epistemology also originated from that discipline, which is the basis of progressive stacking. This origin story is obfuscated because it would reveal the whole thing as the political project of women that made its way to the broad web through Tumblr.

The illiberal leftist project would crumble without feminism and feminism without deference to sacred victims. Men are always perpetrators. The idea that we should defer to a sacred victim of social injustice is invoked every time women demand to get their way through emotional blackmail or tantrum-throwing, and I include myself in this indictment. My writing is animated by how I benefited from the left’s cult-like nature. Maybe this is also my way of working through my guilt as a conditional member of the PMC. But, I move through this social context through self-censorship in polite society. Their level of disdain increases if you’re a woman of color questioning their logic.

White women have been conditioned to think of themselves as immoral people for being privileged and white, which is akin to being born a sinner. Men seem less susceptible to this self-regard, perhaps because they’re less concerned with maintaining social cohesion and tend to be less agreeable than women. Women are also more religiously inclined than men on average, so it follows that someone like Robin DiAngelo would have an easy time finding converts to the Church of White Guilt among women.4

I was immersed in the world of DEI as a warden of woke before I, ahem, awakened to the idiocy that I had taken as gospel. I’ve led inclusion groups and pushed for DEI training before it was en vogue. I worked on Google’s first-ever diversity recruiting team in 2014. But leftist men are also along for the ride, and many ardently believe it. Suppose women suddenly snapped out of it tomorrow. In that case, I don’t think men would be independently leading an effort to reverse the oppression hierarchy to place themselves at the bottom out of religiously tinged guilt.

White women reckon with their whiteness through the church of DEI, imposing their religious worldview on everyone else as ‘anti-racism.’ This is further reinforced by the view of gender as both innate and mutable at any given moment, also incoherent. Black and brown women back this up tacitly by making race and gender their primary lens for seeing the world, as I once did. But, white women are using women of color as pawns in their class project, the existence of which they deny.

This origin must be considered when arguing against these irrational ideas; emotional weaponization and reputation destruction are essentially feminine impulses to maintain social order. On the one hand, the educated left wants to smash hierarchies; on the other, it reinforces them zealously. Where is Antifa when you need them? Oh, right, they’re busy doing nothing of value while backing up the worst aspects of this political malaise. This emotional terrorism has become normalized in the name of justice, and it must be resisted.

v. Call them on it

I don’t have any prescriptions for what to do here other than to use your voice to fight for class-first politics. They depend on our silence and take it as approval. There are no easy answers because politics has become exclusively about correct rhetoric as the basis of action. This will mean awkward and contentious conversations.

People who insist on race and gender coming first accuse class-first leftists of racism, but this is a straw man argument used to shut down debate. While I insist that class comes first, I’m not blind to the dynamics of race and gender in affecting outcomes. Class is the most effective means for social analysis because it reveals the material impacts of race and gender discrimination where they exist. Measuring levels of material deprivation is the most accurate proxy for measuring inequality of opportunity.

Race and gender-based conclusions cannot be falsified as they’re based on self-reported attitudes and individual psychology. Falsifiability is essential to making a rational argument in favor of one’s political project. They count on the rest of us not calling this out.

Taking the party back means defeating deference politics and showing the worldview of leftist women as utterly incoherent. To do this, we must speak honestly about these absurd imperatives that we should defer to people in a particular order and the idea that knowledge is socially constructed. We may be called racist and misogynistic for this, but these two ideas must be confronted if the sane among us prevail. I particularly call on the sane white people who are troubled by the direction of the party to reclaim their voices instead of deferring to the bullies out of a desire to avoid the conflict. It is unpleasant, I know. It may even mean losing friends, as I have. We have to develop emotional teflon to turn the tide.

I also call upon the broad group of Asian Americans of all origins to fight back against the equally preposterous idea that we are white-adjacent because we strive to class climb as any other group would do. We are being punished for having ambitions. Many of us have internalized the false notion that we are the tools of white supremacy, as evidenced by the division among us regarding affirmative action. They depend on people of color allowing ourselves be used as props for the social capital we are granted in return. They also require Asian Americans to be silent about our place at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. This is no different from colonial-era Orientalist narratives.

The politically active bourgeoisie have focused on internal ‘work’ people need to do to transcend their inner racist souls, which distracts from external work that could be done, such as fighting to change zoning laws, making childcare accessible, or introducing a public health insurance option to compete with the insurance companies. This, alone, would do so much to lift people, especially single mothers who Democrats claim to champion.

White men being told to sit down and shut up has meant sending them toward Trump and third parties. We don’t have to share the same values as all those in our coalition, and I’ve argued elsewhere that we must stop thinking of social conservatives as immoral if we’re going to win elections by more than a few thousand votes. An enduring coalition cannot be built without working-class white people, full stop, especially men. We see right now that the leftist project has swallowed the discourse but has no legitimacy beyond a small slice of people.

Putting us back on the right track requires, as I heard recently from the commentator Josh Slocum, telling women no and that they’re wrong. I know I’m inviting an accusation of misogyny by writing these words. I can’t do anything about it, and the point is that those of you who agree shouldn’t care, either. My argument for the importance of class is not original, but it has been effectively shut down because the people who voice them happen to be white men mostly. They are too easily dismissed, of course, because of their characteristics. It’s even more critical that those with ‘marginalized’ identities speak up; our rejection of these ideas is more meaningful because we stand to lose the most social capital. Without us, this project would collapse.

I hope I’m slowly encouraging some class traitors to fight back.