Power clusters around certain identities which are culturally constructed but those power dynamics become a reality because people believe them and perpetuate them in their understanding of society and in their speech because they speak from where they are situated.
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Again this has more than a grain of truth in it but the problem is the way it is tackled. They want to deconstruct racism & sexism & that requires seeing it everywhere in language and attitudes & drawing attention to it - perpetuating it, in fact.
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And this is where the ophobophobia comes in. No-one wants to be seen as perpetuating the prejudiced assumptions because of their unconscious racism/sexism and the best way to seem not to do this is to be the one to spot it first & object to it.
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Obviously, this feeds the perception that society is racist & sexist to its core as more & more of it gets 'uncovered' which in turn feeds a pushback in which people are unwilling to see racism or sexism anywhere coz they've taken up an oppositional position to this.
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Whereas a rational, universal liberalism which objected to racism & sexism was steadily eroding it, If people thought racist, sexist things, they kept them to themselves in public and so the prejudices were not part of mainstream discourse and were steadily decreasing.
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I think they could have been all but eradicated in my lifetime except for a few die-hard extremists if it weren't for intersectionality making identification of supposedly prejudiced attitudes an everyday occurrence again - bringing race & gender back into mainstream discourse.
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And the disproportionate responses embolden the bigots. If anti-racists are going to be pilloried for saying 'coloured' rather than 'black' or 'of colour', actual racists might as well say black people are inferior. When every white person is racist, the actual racists can own it
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"the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day." Steve Bannon
End of conversation
New conversation -
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And underlying all of that is the desire for at least illusory control, because of general phobias (ie, death). It's one reason I now emphasize reading pre-20th C. primary sources because, IMO, they had a healthier amount of "eh, fuck it. it's out of my control."
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