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Thanks Andrew for your considered response to my article in which I claim identity politics is antithetical to free speech.

In defence of identity politics you cite the value of the insider knowledge that only those who directly experience life as a member of the relevant identities gain. This is a fair point. It is important to listen to and take account of such voices, and to ensure that they are heard.

The problem is that the identarian mindset, as it is nowadays manifested, seems incapable of recognizing that human beings may respond to the same situation in markedly different – possibly diametrically opposed - ways. So Sarah Haider, the young American from a Pakistani-Muslim background who chose to leave Islam and become a public critic of it, is subjected to vicious derision not just by Muslims, but by the thoroughly ‘woke’ progressives, her erstwhile allies. This is the consistent experience of people who make this choice.

Likewise, the ideology of identity politics insists that indigenous cultures must be celebrated, that notions of dominance and hierarchy were absent before Westerners arrived on the scene, that all was harmony between people and between them and their natural environment.

But what if this is not true? I suggest you read my most recent article ‘Identity Politics harms the oppressed’ in which I point to devastating evidence of the harm wrought by these romantic delusions drawn from the lived experience of some courageous and articulate aboriginal women as well as the research of anthropologist and linguist Peter Sutton. The women who spoke up, breaking a silence imposed by activists and ideologues for decades, have been at best ignored, but more frequently savagely vilified, by ‘progressive’ opinion.

The same applies to the Black Lives Matter in the US, where black people who dare to suggest this movement might be ineffective – indeed seriously counter-productive if the goal really is to minimize violent deaths of young black men – are treated in a like manner.

So identity politics is not the guarantor of free speech for the members of oppressed identities. Such freedom is subject to the speaker staying safely within the confines of the approved narrative for the group in question, and woe betide anyone who goes beyond the prescribed boundaries.

In the identarian mind, dissidents need to learn that criticizing your own culture is a privilege extended only to ‘white people’.