A long essay in which the role of Kimberlé Crenshaw in popularizing the concept of intersectionality leads to an examination of earlier articulations of the same ideas.

Lindsay brings up the the Combahee River Collective.  I've mentioned how Mary Eberstadt traces the origin of identity politics to the late seventies when this group first published its manifesto:

At the beginning of that time period, historians agree, came the founding document of identity politics itself: "The Combahee River Collective Statement," a declaration that grew out of several years of meetings among black feminists in Massachussetts.

The key assertion of this manifesto, which prefigures the politics to come, is that "this focus on our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics.  We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end someone else's oppression.

And who is the "someone else" to whom the document refers?  Men.  "Contemporary Black feminism," the authors explain, "is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters [emphasis added]."  When men are mentioned in the Combahee document, it is largely as adversaries with "habitually sexist ways of interacting with and oppressing Black women."  Similarly: "The reaction of Black men to feminism has been notoriously negative.  They are, of course even more threatened than Black women by the possibility that Black feminists might organize around their own needs."

The founding document of identity politics, in other words, reflects aspects of the world as many African American women would have found it in the 1970s-- and they had become the canaries in the coal mines of the revolution.  Ahead of other groups, they were early witnesses to the transformations that are now the stuff of daily conversation and reality for all: a world in which men have become ever less trustworthy and reliable, in which relations between the sexes have become chronically estranged and consumerist, and in which marriage has become thin on the ground.  African American were-- and still are-- disproportionately affected by abortion, out-of-wedlock births, fatherless homes, and related metrics. ...

... The year of the document's publication--1977-- was a watershed of a sort.  The preceding year, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for black Americans had just "tipped" over the 50 percent mark.  This rate kept climbing to its current high of 70-plus percent in 2016.  At the same time, other measures indicating the splintering of the nuclear and extended family expanded too.  By 2012, Millennials-- women who were then under the age of thirty-- shared for the first time the out-of-wedlock birth rate of black women in 1977 (i.e., over half).  Millennials, of course, are the demographic backbone of identity politics.

-- Mary Eberstadt, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics (Templeton Press, 2019)

On the mass conversion of our institutions

... The National Archives in Washington, D.C., today places warning labels on the Constitution, because reading it may induce unpleasant sensations in some identity groups. Universities like Princeton now publish “antiracist toolkits” to instruct the faithful on how to “move beyond diversity” and into identity heaven. Nike, which makes sneakers, demands of its customers: “Don’t pretend there’s not a problem with America. Don’t turn your back on racism.” The Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins, two time-honored sports franchises, for their identity sins have had their names stripped away. I could extend the list unto boredom—it would range from prestigious media institutions like the New York Times to local bodies like the San Francisco school board.

Tyler Cowen, nobody’s idea of an identity enthusiast, has declared that “wokeism”—a popular tag for the cult—“will rule the world.” “Winners win! And woke is right now one of America’s global winners,” he writes.

What, specifically, are the values that the identity creed promotes? The terms that the critics use, such as “woke” and “cancel culture,” don’t impart much information. I tend to avoid them. The words used by true believers, like all attempts to describe the ineffable, are shifting, ambivalent, and opaque. One must be initiated to grasp how many letters should go into LGBTQIA and why the damned thing keeps growing.

Wesley Yang, a critic, sees the cult as the “successor ideology” to liberalism and, more recently, has referred to it as a “successor regime” whose “year zero” began in 2021, after the electoral triumph of progressive-minded Democrats. The objective of the successor ideology is to dismantle the citizen-based ideal of equality and replace it with an identity-based system of justice and government. Here are some of Yang’s examples of how it has worked in practice:

The Small Business Administration prioritized emergency Covid grants to restaurants by race. The Department of Agriculture prioritized funding to black farmers. The state of Vermont allowed BIPOC [“Black, Indigenous, People of Color”] residents early access to the vaccine. The state of California mandates diverse representation on

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