This was the year that social media caused identity politics to reach absurd new heights that future generations will find much easier to laugh at than we do. It was the year that the Spectator’s James Bartholomew coined the neologism “virtue signalling” to describe the act of asserting one’s moral superiority by expressing right-on opinions, usually online. The hashtag #Refugeeswelcome was the slogan of the year.
Virtue signalling is at least as old as the Bible. It’s a form of Phariseeism. But in 2015, where our social status is so tied up with an online identity that follows us around, it’s arguably more necessary to publicly profess the “right” views than it was in previous generations.
Identity politics emerged in the 1960s, and while it was thought that it had peaked in the early 1990s, social media has given it fresh life. In America, this year saw the spread of “safe space” campaigns at universities to protect students from upsetting ideas, while there were campus protests at Yale and Missouri universities over the most trivial of subjects. At Yale, it was the failure of the dean to take seriously a warning that students could be wearing “culturally insensitive” Halloween costumes which led to quite aggressive protests. Resignations followed.
Elsewhere, Glamour magazine gave its Woman of the Year award to Caitlyn Jenner, aka the Olympic men’s decathlon winner Bruce Jenner, even though Caitlyn is anatomically (still) male. The father of six was hailed as a hero by the media after announcing he now identified as a woman and appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair. That very same day Jenner’s Wikipedia page was edited to state that “Jenner came to international attention when, while identifying as a man, she won the gold medal in the decathlon at the 1976 Summer Olympics held in Montreal.”
One or two cynics pointed out that, if Jenner was indeed a woman in 1976, then she should not have been allowed to compete in the men’s decathlon. But the Guardian insisted that Jenner had “always been a woman … even when … ‘fathering’ children”. Yes, “fathering”.
Not everyone was so pleased with Jenner’s transformation into a living saint. The widower of a previous Glamour Woman of the Year, a policewoman called Moira Smith who died on 9/11, handed back the award in disgust.
Meanwhile Rachel Dolezal, an anti-racism campaigner at the National Campaign for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), told Vice magazine it was a shame that society was more accepting of Jenner than of her, despite Dolezal’s own transformation. Dolezal, you see, had come to prominence as a leading woman of colour – but it was revealed this year that her ancestry is entirely European, a mixture of Czech, German and Swedish. In childhood pictures she rather resembles Heidi.
She was not the only prominent campaigner suspected of changing her identity. Shaun King, leader of Black Lives Matters, the most high-profile racial justice movement of 2015, was also accused of being white. King, who looks a bit like the comic character Ali G, insisted that he did not know who his real biological father was, and that, anyway, questions about his ethnic make-up distracted from the social justice cause.
You may also remember the case of “Clock Boy” Ahmed Mohamed, who is suing his Texas school after his “home-made clock” was mistaken for a bomb (it certainly looked like one to me). Like many of the other prominent stories of the year, it was a trivial local incident that blew up around the world because it had an identity politics angle.
In Britain, identity politics brought us Bahar Mustafa, the Goldsmith’s College, London, “diversity officer” who was questioned by police after tweeting the hashtag “#killallwhitemen”. We had the case of Professor Tim Hunt, dumped by UCL after a joke about women in the workplace.
The most visible expression of identity politics in Britain was the proliferation of “no platforming” at universities. In the most-high-profile case Germaine Greer was prevented from speaking at Cardiff University and received the most horrendous abuse. Greer, of course, was one of the most prominent figures of the sexual revolution in England; her 1970 work The Female Eunuch was read by most women at the time. But that was the equivalent of 1789.
Now, with proliferating numbers of identity groups competing for power and resources, the revolutionaries have turned on each other and we are at the Reign of Terror stage. For those of us still loyal to the Ancien Régime the whole thing is vaguely amusing. Here’s to 2016.
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