The violent product of identity politics

Identity politics is turning violent. It’s been brewing for a while. Anyone who’s witnessed mobs of students threatening to silence white men or Islamists gruffly invading the space of secular women who diss their dogmas will know that, as with all forms of communalism, identity politics has a menacing streak. And at the weekend, in Charlottesville, Virginia, it blew up. That ugly clash between blood-and-soil white nationalists and people crying ‘black lives matter’ is the logical outcome of the identitarian scourge, of the relentless racialisation of public life.

Charlottesville was both shocking and unsurprising. It was shocking because here we had actual Nazis, waving swastika flags, in 21st-century America, the land of the free. That is deeply disturbing. But it was also unsurprising because in recent years, across the West, people have been invited, implored in fact, to think racially. To be ‘racially aware’. To think of themselves as belonging to a particular race, and to believe their racial make-up confers certain privileges or penalties on them — it shapes them.