Diversity worship only divides us further, by Janet Albrechtsen.
“BBC CHIEF STUNNED BY SECRET SEX SURVEY.” The headline blaring from Britain’s Mail on Sunday one balmy morning in London a few weeks ago was irresistible. And the news report didn’t disappoint. “Can someone have a guess at how many people we’ve got who have disclosed they are transgender at the BBC? Ten? Anyone else? Twenty?” asked the BBC’s director of diversity at a social policy forum last month.
“I’ll put you out of your misery. We’ve got 417 people within the BBC who have said they are transgender, almost 2 per cent of the organisation.” …
Oh very trendy.
Extrapolating from the diversity director’s comment that “what gets measured gets done”, the next advertisement for a BBC job will logically need to seek a candidate with the following qualifications: must be able to write, have proven reporting skills, work effectively in a small team and be a lesbian. And how do they check the veracity of a candidate meeting that last stipulation? If only this were a facetious scenario. …
In their lust for power, the postmodern graduates are reversing the Enlightenment:
When anchored to group identities, this new diversity project becomes the antithesis of the liberal model that emerged from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The timeless ideal that all individuals are revered as equal regardless of colour, creed and gender is being turned on its head. …
The more we label and encourage people to join smaller identity groups defined by being transgender or black lesbian or Muslim gay, the “other” — the outsiders — grow larger in number. There are more people outside the group to be suspicious of, to fear and even loathe. …
Tribalism for everyone but white cis-gender straight Christian men:
People gathering in groups, associating with tribes, preferring their own kind, is as old as the history of mankind. As English philosopher Roger Scruton said as he watched the 1968 Paris protests — when middle-class students turned out to protest without really knowing what they supported — craving membership is “a deep adaptation of the species”.
Whereas people in previous centuries joined or were born into religious communities, in the modern secular West the search for meaning is leading people to seek out different group identities. It raises the real threat of a new and different form of sectarianism as politics and policies … encourage people to be defined by smaller and smaller group identities, fracturing along sex, sexual identity, race, colour, creed or other such traits.
The dilemma for whites: demand identity and in-group preferences like everyone else, or demand there be no group identities or in-group preferences for anyone???
Revering diversity encourages an ugly backlash, too, attracting opportunist grandstanders such as Canadian woman Lauren Southern, who arrived in Australia wearing a T-shirt that read “IT’S OK TO BE WHITE”.
Just for the picture:
It’s not smart to answer toxic identity politics with tit-for-tat toxicity, where people treat their pale skin as a badge of honour. Southern’s white identity politics marks a low point of the new sectarianism. We are regressing further and further from the liberal project that treats all humans as equal regardless skin colour.
I’d prefer no group identities for anyone, but that’s not how the situation is developing. Good one lefties, we have no choice. If someone punches you, you’re in a fight whether you like it or not.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
