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

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Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, I thought early on of Obama's joke at the expense of Rahm Emanuel: "he's one of a kind, and thank god he's one of a kind. 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. As Finkelstein translates, "if you want to rationally hug your certainty, you must first meet the challenge of every naysayer.

Critiquing everyone from Robin DiAngelo to Barack Obama, Finkelstein delivers a rigorous argument for free expression along with a death blow to leftist hypocrisy. Finkelstein is aware that the identity politics of the left isn't quite the same as the identity politics of the Democrats, but he is right that they overlap, and that such a politics is more conducive to being neutered into empty symbolism (statues, token representation in the corporate class, electing a vapid con artist like Obama) than a Bernie Sanders-style—or more radical—class politics is. That unshakeable commitment, that willingness not to conform, combined with intellectual power, is chiefly what has set Finkelstein apart from most of his peers.

On Robin DiAngelo's morbid obsession with diagnosing "racism": "She is the monomaniacal Captain Ahab in pursuit of the White Whale. Whites," says DiAngelo, "control all major institutions of society and set the policies and practices that others must live by.

When teaching, should professors strive for "balance"—presenting with equal force all sides of an issue so that students can make up their own minds—or should they teach only their own perspective? 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. G. Kelley, have written competent defenses of identity politics, and Finkelstein certainly isn't arguing against the necessity of incorporating anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, and other such "woke" agendas into popular movements. It is likely they couldn't have had such a destructive impact had the FCC's Fairness Doctrine not been repealed in 1987. This issue bears, of course, on Finkelstein's own career, but he is hardly the only academic to have been disciplined in recent decades for alleged "incivility" or taking unpopular political stands.Eugenics and forced sterilization were once considered a very enlightened movement, being supported by progressives like Bertrand Russell, Helen Keller, Jane Addams, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The binary, balkanizing drawing of lines between groups and near-contempt for the "oppressing" group—white vs.

It should be clear from what has been said here that I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It is an unusual book.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. That such a person can be widely considered to be more or less on the left is a crushing indictment of the state of the left. Second, one would certainly not love all the individuals who are alleged to constitute "one's people.