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Thank you Catherine. I think you make excellent points. Your observation that:

‘…a middle class, tertiary educated citizen who is or identifies as a Asian Muslim or Christian homosexual feels entitled to consider themselves seriously disadvantaged and in need of media attention and government intervention. This may well be their opinion, and one shared by many, but this trend has shifted the focus away from the basics of inequity and power relationships.’

… calls to mind the posturing by Senator Kamala Harris in the Democratic Primary debates last year when she invoked the victim card as she tried to taint Joe Biden as a racist because of his opposition to busing decades ago.

She said something along the lines (I don’t have the exact transcript):

‘Back then in California there was a little girl who was bused … that little girl was me’

Poor little Kamala! In reality, she was the daughter of two Stanford professors. You don’t get much more privileged than that.

You make the point that identity politics creates added competition for scarce resources for the disadvantaged, and I agree. However I think it is worse than that.

The thing I find striking about some campaigns and interventions motivated by identarian ideology is that they are not just ineffective – they are positively counterproductive. Even worse, I sometimes get the sense that consequences of policy are not just neglected, for some ideologues they are strictly irrelevant.

Take indigenous policy in Australia. Several years ago I read a sobering, to put it mildly, book by the anthropologist and linguist Peter Sutton, of how policies informed by an unrealistically benign, indeed romanticized, understanding of traditional aboriginal culture have resulted in some communities, especially in remote areas, not only not progressing but going backward.
https://www.mup.com.au/books/the-politics-of-suffering-paperback-softback

Sutton has had a close association with indigenous communities extending over thirty years. He was a key advocate and researcher supporting the aboriginal position in some of the most important native title cases. No-one can challenge Sutton’s bona fides as a committed friend of the aboriginal people and advocate of their causes, and as an outstanding scholar of aboriginal culture.

The book paints an horrific picture of what has happened over the past few decades. It describes how communities that forty years ago were poor but liveable have become disaster zones of violent conflict, rape, child and elder assault, with what he terms Fourth World health conditions.

Sutton is extremely distressed and angry about this, and derisive of the use of anodyne terms like ‘aboriginal disadvantage’ that are typically used to describe it. He prefers to talk of the ‘levels of sheer suffering’ of indigenous people today.

That this should have happened despite one well-intentioned policy initiative after another, the granting of land rights, the setting up of autonomous aboriginal governance and service delivery structures, and the spending of billions of dollars annually on both mainstream and indigenous-specific programs, is especially perplexing.

Sutton argues that the deterioration has occurred not just despite the policy shift but was in large part caused by it. His argument is complex and subtle but can be summed up by what he terms the Coombsian contradiction - a policy framework

‘Built on a willingness to publicly ignore the profound incompatibility between modernisation and cultural traditionalism in a situation where tradition was, originally at least, as far from modernisation as it was possible to be.’

Here is what Sutton has to say about the relationship between violence and traditional culture:

‘My unqualified position is that a number of the serious problems indigenous people face in Australia today arise from a complex joining together of recent, that is post-conquest, historical factors of external impact, with a substantial number of ancient, pre-existent social and cultural factors that have continued, transformed or intact, into the lives of people living today. The main way these factors are continued is through child-rearing. This issue is particularly important, and controversial, in the area of violent conflict.’

This perspective is echoed by a number of aboriginal activists, such as Jacinta Price (daughter of Central Australian activist Bess Price),one of a group of women who demand the truth be told about how traditional culture perpetuates violence within these communities. In an event at the National Press Club in 2016 (with Marcia Langton and Josephine Cashman) she opened the proceedings with this powerful reality check drawn from her own lived experience:

‘Traditional culture is shrouded in secrecy, which allows perpetrators to control their victims. Culture is used as a tool by perpetrators as a defence of their violent crimes, or as an excuse or reason to perpetrate. It is not acceptable that any human being have their rights violated, denied and utterly disregarded in the name of culture.’

In an earlier speech, Jacinta Price spelled it out even more clearly:

‘Growing up in and knowing my culture, I know that it is a culture that accepts violence and in many ways desensitizes those living the culture of violence.’

She is scathing about the response from virtue-signalling brigade. Referring to a cultural practice that could potentially result in the killing of aboriginal women, she notes:

‘The public reaction was deathly silence… there was no reaction from the hypocrites in our southern cities. No complaint from anybody: no human rights lawyer, no feminist, no activist, no one made it into the media with a word of concern that women could be executed in the Northern Territory for even accidentally walking on to a ceremonial ground.’

For the virtue signallers, nothing must be said or done that casts indigenous culture in a negative light. After all, they insist reversion to traditional culture as the key to solving the problem of aboriginal disadvantage.

Price pleads for a fundamentally different approach, one that acknowledges the right of indigenous people to escape their cultural prison:

‘Why is it that we should remain stifled and live by 40,000 year old laws when the rest of the world has had the privilege of evolution within their cultures, so that they may survive in a modern world?’

Instead, Price and her colleagues were given the standard treatment reserved for ideological heretics: abuse, vilification, suggestions of dark treachery, with the added element of credible death threats.

That is one important reason I think identity politics stinks.