Book completed

[eve_prime]

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, by Yascha Mounk. Well. I feel pretty ambivalent about this book, and rather frustrated. Mounk is making the case that wokeness, or what we used to call political correctness, has become its own ideology, which is interfering with the values that we place on doing well by all of our people and treating everyone fairly. I firmly agree in the alternative he proposes (the type of political liberalism that's common across most of the political spectrum - our standard beliefs in free speech, individual rights, and an ideal of equality, as something we would like for everyone despite their ancestry, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, etc.). And I also firmly agree that there's something wrong with the examples he gives of different types of wokeness, or what he calls the "identity synthesis" - for example, if a few white children are invited by their Nigerian teacher to wear traditional Nigerian clothing to school for a special event, they obviously should not be disciplined by the school for doing what their teacher asks.

However, his arguments aren't sufficiently nuanced - he doesn't ever express concern that microaggression is a real thing, for example. He also argues against the supposed "identity synthesis" position that white people can never experience empathy fully for people of color, when I would say, duh, none of us can ever experience empathy fully for anyone else, even though there are many cases when we should try, and I would also say that of course there's a value for white people to realize that they get to take many things for granted that many people of color do not. He never really addresses how we should acknowledge the continuing challenges faced by people who are Black, gay, trans, etc. other than that we should work to make things fair for everyone.

Overall, it often felt like he was setting up straw man positions to argue against, and he was able to find examples to illustrate them because it's a big and complicated world, and examples are out there if you look for them. Maybe I'm just being naive, but I don't see this "identity synthesis" ideology as being as fully developed and entrenched as he claims.

Comments

[heleninwales]

Microaggression is definitely a real thing. I know that the constant jokes about "Welsh has no vowels", "Welsh is just like a keysmash on the keyboard", "sheepshaggers" etc. etc. are, in the greater scheme of things, relatively minor annoyances, but they do build up. I can hardly begin to imagine how a black person feels at all the little jibes and difficulties that come their way.

It does sound like an unsatisfactory book overall.

[eve_prime]

My longtime online friend Regina Rini wrote a philosophy book about microaggressions that's pretty interesting - I don't think she considered comments about other languages, though, which are obviously valid examples too. One of the most common ones here on the west coast of the US is asking an Asian-appearing person "where are you from?" and then being surprised when the answer is some U.S. city, or worse, telling them their English is very good when in fact it's their native language.

[kaishin108]

That book sounds odd and like he just touched on things by skimming the surface?

On another note, it seems like what some people call being Woke in a derogatory way is just people being decent and fair in the way they treat all people.

[eve_prime]

He actually went into great depth, and the author is a highly respected writer who has lots of great articles in The Atlantic, so I hoped the book would be better.

I think his main point is that being fair and decent in how we treat all people ought to be enough, but there are cases that he ignored or skimmed over where it isn't quite enough.

[kaishin108]

Yes, I agree. Like the difference between Black Lives Matter and all lives matter.

[eve_prime]

Oh, good point! Yes!

[eve_prime]

Also, on my Livejournal post of this, one friend posted that the first anecdote in the book was a total lie about something that happened in her own community. Good to know!

[kaishin108]

Whoa! That is awful that it was a lie. :(

[eve_prime]

I kind of had the feeling that some research assistant had the job of finding the most extreme examples of various things that people would react to emotionally - but fact checking should always be important!