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

Product Information

You must be living an awfully precious life," he goes on, "if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns. Finkelstein knows cancel culture from the inside, and it is unsurprising that he resolutely opposes it. Wokeness is what happens when the destruction of the labor movement proceeds so far, and social atomization becomes so all-consuming, that even the "left" adopts an individualistic, moralistic, psychologistic, censorious, self-righteous, performative approach to making social change. Similarly, the idea of "loving one's people" is odd, first in that it amounts to "loving one's self writ large," which, in its narcissism, hardly seems like a noble thing.

It can at least be said for Finkelstein that he practices what he preaches: his book, to put it mildly, does not shrink from uncivil words.S. history from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is the author of Worker Cooperatives and Revolution and Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression.

One problem with Kendi's and our culture's promiscuous, indiscriminate use of the label "racist" is that the concept becomes diluted: "to be a racist ceases to be what it ought to be: a scarlet badge of shame… [W]hat information is conveyed by a label that collapses the distinction between Frederick Douglass [whom Kendi considers a racist] and the Grand Wizard of the K. The vacuousness of contemporary identity politics is best expos He relates an anecdote from when he was a graduate student at Princeton in 1984: his work exposing a bestselling scholarly hoax on the Israel-Palestine conflict had gotten the favorable attention of the editor of the New York Review of Books and his friend (Arthur Hertzberg) at Columbia University, and he sensed that career possibilities were opening up for him.Second, one would certainly not love all the individuals who are alleged to constitute "one's people.