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And so now the Left is riven by a pointless debate between a supposed “class-only” Left and an “identity” Left. There are valid criticisms to make of “identity politics,” the most obvious of which is that it tends to toggle between being a theory of everything and being a set of simple commonsense …

The scholar Noel Ignatiev had a beautifully simple and hard solution to the problem of whiteness. White workers must simply refuse to be bought off, even when this means, for example, that a union must turn down an informal “first-in, last-out” deal with management. White workers must respond to an…

I have taken to using the term “shit-eating allyism” to describe these sorts of emotional display. Shit-eating allyism has two main manifestations. On one hand, it consists of simpering declarations of deference, testaments to the oppressed groups’ superior and hitherto historically unexampled virt…

The third most common response, among the people designated “white,” to the radical critique of whiteness—the most common is to dismiss the whole issue or to fly to the defense of the assailed white man—is a wholesale adoption of this way of defining it: as a kind of shared sin. Because the concept…

In more mainstream forms, such attempts to define whiteness as pathology often focus on the character traits that accrue to “unearned” privilege. (As soon as we say “unearned,” we have baked in the idea of meritocracy—which is some white bullshit.) The white person, especially the white man, is ine…