Identity politics is sometimes justified as a regrettable but inevitable overcorrection. In a perfect world, the argument goes, there would be no need for racist university admissions policies. In a perfect world, no one would be hounded out of public life for accidentally using the wrong form of words. But given our past, some overshoot is said to be a small price to pay. Canceling people on social media, pulling books from publication, unfairly firing academics — these things are lesser evils than slavery or segregation.
I’m not sure that argument ever worked, as wrongs can surely be righted without committing new wrongs. But in any case, the abuses now being carried out in the name of equity go well beyond cancellation. I argued here a couple of weeks ago that America’s obsession with racism blinded people to the much larger problem of police impunity and that it has taken abuses by black police officers to make people acknowledge that the balance of power between the police and the rest of the population is badly off.
