I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

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This week, however, we have chosen a more unconventional expression to show you: “ I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it. We hear, since emancipation, much said by our modern colored leaders in commendation of race pride, race love, race effort, race superiority, race men, and the like… [But] I recognize and adopt no narrow basis for my thoughts, feelings, or modes of action.

The latter attitudes are more likely to yield calm composure and willingness to give opponents a hearing because you know you're able to refute them. Collins Dictionary, again, defines the phrase as dealing with a problem or a difficult situation when it comes up and “not to anticipate difficulties”. One might connect Finkelstein's lengthy discussion of academic civility with his book's focus on woke politics by pointing to something his targets have in common: a preoccupation with policing language and thought at the expense of more substantive concerns. But he goes much further and questions whether it should even be seen as a professional obligation that one always use civil language in one's scholarship (which Finkelstein didn't when writing about the Holocaust industry and Alan Dershowitz's lies).After Finkelstein's devastating exposure of Kendi's countless inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and idiocies—his woke dismissal of the Civil Rights Movement in favor of the macho Black Panthers (who, by comparison, achieved almost nothing); his (in Kendi's words) "striving to accept and equate and empower racial difference" even as he argues that the idea of race is a "mirage" that was invented to rationalize exploitation; his insistence that all racial disparities in society are purely a result of racism; his valorizing of racial differences (e. The mob's desire to silence, attack, and destroy comes from feeling threatened, not from being rationally certain and confident. In his new book, Finkelstein focuses his keen forensic eye on the canonical texts of identity politics. On the widespread fascination with transgender people: "the first day of a graduate seminar, students used to describe their intellectual interests. Shouldn't one aspire to transcend the 'inevitable' part—the color of one's skin—so as to be judged by the 'free part'—the content of one's character?

I might also note that giving authorities the right to suppress or punish certain kinds of speech, and even encouraging them to do so, will soon lead to their suppressing speech you like. The binary, balkanizing drawing of lines between groups and near-contempt for the "oppressing" group—white vs.To what extent should a regime of free speech reign on the university campus, and under what circumstances should an academic's "offensive" speech in the public square result in disciplinary action? One might argue that in this chapter Finkelstein's profound contempt for the "Elmer Gantry in blackface" at the head of this gaggle of amoral mediocrities gets the best of his prodigious literary gifts, since the ruthless mockery goes on and on and becomes somewhat tiresome, but it can't be gainsaid that it's all well-deserved. This phrase is what is sometimes known as a malaphor or a mixed idiom, which is a phrase that blends two similar figures of speech to create a new one, that may or may not make much sense. He is the cool Black dude who is also the reliable—in Professor Cornel West's words—'mascot of Wall Street. So, when someone says that they will “burn that bridge when [they] get to it”, they expect to deal with an upcoming difficulty badly which will result in permanently cutting ties or alienating other people involved.

A connection that binds will be forged by you, united in the heat of battle facing a common enemy, each marching beside the other, each lifting the other, each protecting the other. As Finkelstein says, "When the 'hour of serious danger' to the status quo struck during Bernie Sanders' class-struggle insurgency, the 'true nature' of woke radicalism—not just its opportunism but, even more, its rancid, reactionary core—was exposed as each and all of these erstwhile 'radicals' enlisted under the banner to stop him. woman—is, in its parochialism and vitiating of solidarity against capitalism, not what a real left politics looks like. Moreover, if the "harmful" speech is socially marginal such that hardly anyone believes it, what's the great danger in letting someone say it now and then?But John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is the text he primarily grounds his argument in, and he quotes from it liberally in his chapter on the right of even Holocaust deniers to make their case in public forums such as a college campus. He considers it, or dominant tendencies within it, to have degenerated from soaring moral and intellectual heights with Rosa Luxemburg, W. Aside from Obama himself, the most satisfying skewering, I found, was of Samantha Power, the "Battleaxe from Hell…downright evil…[whose] conscience only bestirs at the suffering of victims of official U.

Too much identification with some imposed identity such as race is exactly what leads to irrational racial hostility (including against whites), sexist hostility (also against men), and other divisive social forces.That is to say, we need hundreds of left intellectuals with the courage and intelligence to think for themselves and never sell out, to refuse to compromise—even to risk alienating fellow leftists by publicly repudiating woke culture and the more vacuous forms of identity politics in favor of an unstinting adherence to class politics.