The Women’s March marchers continue to march — into battle.
With themselves.
First we heard that a Women’s March event was canceled, and that at least a couple of chapters dissolved or broke off from the national organization, over its leaders’ anti-Jewish statements. Now comes news that yet another march was canceled, this time because the attendees would have been, well, just too white.
As American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson writes, “The American left is becoming a visibly racist, anti-white movement, despite the fact that its membership tends to be predominantly Caucasian. This is not a strategy that promises electoral success, but it does offer self-gratification for non-whites and self-hating Caucasians, who evidently enjoy feeling more enlightened than their fellow People of Pallor.”
“This is hardly surprising,” Lifson continues, “since the left embraces the twin notions that America is an inherently racist country and that an individual’s identity as a member of a racial group is more important than any particular achievements, attitudes, and characteristics that person may carry.”
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This brings us to the immediate story, about which KRCR-TV reports:
The organizers of the annual Women’s March have decided not to hold a rally in Eureka [California] on Jan. 19, as previously planned, because they say participants do not represent the diversity of the area.
“This decision was made after many conversations between local social-change organizers and supporters of the march,” organizers said in a press release.
They said organizers will continue to meet and discuss how to broaden representation to create an event that represents Humboldt County.
“Up to this point, the participants have been overwhelmingly white, lacking representation from several perspectives in our community,” the press release went on to say. “Instead of pushing forward with crucial voices absent, the organizing team will take time for more outreach.
While it evokes no cry of “Eureka!” from the Left, the 2010 Census informs that the city of Eureka is 88.5 percent white. So as Lifson notes, “Having a march that is not ‘overwhelmingly white’ would mean having an unrepresentative cross-section of the community. But what the organizers seem to mean with language like ‘lacking representation from several perspectives in our community’ is that they haven’t recruited enough token non-white marchers to make themselves feel good about themselves.”
In fact, all remedying their Diversity™ problem requires is that leftists move into non-white neighborhoods or move non-whites into theirs. Yet this presents issues, too.
First, media now openly applaud the “browning of America,” as they sometimes put it, and any talk of preventing this demographic disruption by altering our immigration regime is called “racism.” Likewise, non-whites’ entrance into predominantly white neighborhoods is hailed as blessed diversity.
Yet whites’ movement into a non-white area may be demeaned as a “bleaching out,” to quote the esteemed New York Times’ 2015 reporting on the “gentrification” of San Francisco’s Mission District neighborhood. Never mind that the area was once occupied by the Ohlone Indians and, later, was primarily white. Our betters will decide what demographic shifts are positive when.
Then, white leftists love diversity — just not in their own neighborhoods. Consider the controversy over plans to integrate primarily white schools in Manhattan’s posh Upper West Side and Brooklyn’s Dumbo section (yes, really), liberal bastions both. One Dumbo parent actually said, “It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children.” My, do tell.
Most interesting here, however, is the deeper philosophy underpinning the “crucial voices” argument. It once was understood that the only crucial voices are those speaking Truth. But then moderns descended into relativism and stated there is no Truth, only “perspectives.”
Thus (mis)informed, leftists can’t logically draw qualitative distinctions among perspectives; their explicit claim then becomes that “all perspectives are equal” and deserve a place at the table. (In practice, though, their emotion holds sway and they prejudicially favor certain perspectives.)
Moreover, being identity oriented, they naturally emphasize the notion and importance of group-specific (e.g., racial, ethnic, sexual) perspectives.
Of course, this makes as much sense as considering the statement “2+2=4” somehow more significant — or the claim “2+2=5” suddenly worth serious consideration — if uttered by the right-color lips.
The marchers’ march toward division also illustrates the limits of the Left’s “intersectionality,” which, translated simply, essentially means that the various grievance groups’ interests intersect with the alleged common oppressor they all must vanquish: the straight, white (and often Christian) man.
This “enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy has logic. A common foe (or scapegoat) can unite disparate groups, with our WWII alliance with the vicious Joseph Stalin a prime example. But such unity is always temporary because it’s artificial; the common enemy’s defeat means the alliance’s dissolution.
So it is with today’s Left. It could be said that if leftists succeed in quashing traditionalist dissent’s last vestiges (e.g., as effected via social-media censorship), they’ll ferociously turn on one another, as leftists always have. But the fissures are already apparent.
As pundit Pat Buchanan put it last week, “In identity politics, loyalty to race, ethnic group and gender often trump the claims of party. The diversity Democrats celebrate is one day going to pull their party apart, as the social, cultural and racial revolutions of the 1960s pulled apart the party of FDR and LBJ.”
Yet, delving deeper again, division is also is a function of the Left’s relativism. When all is seen as relative, everything ultimately becomes relative to oneself, the result being millions of fractious people all marching to a different drummer’s beat. They then not only won’t unite around the Truth; they won’t even unite around any one lie.
Except when, finally, tyranny’s iron fist unites them — again artificially.
Photo: Yevhenii Dubinko/iStock/Getty Images Plus
