Interesting and true

I've always hated identity politics when they are based on ethnicity or the color of our skin. I find them counterproductive.

This whole thing about being different groups and victims of an oppressor just really doesn't go with me; I was never a fan of the victim mentality, and I abhor people who love to play victim. To me keeping people in the victim mentality is nothing more than taking the power away from a group to integrate and move forward. It's a subtle way of maintaining the oppression.

Klavan agrees and exposes his idea in a very concise editorial. My favorite quote is this:

Leftism, which sees people as victim groups rather than individuals, which sets us one against another according to the color of our skins rather than distinguishing us by the contents of our characters, which is so eager to manipulate our guilts and grievances in order to form bases of support for an ever-expanding state, has derailed the natural American movement—the natural human movement—toward assimilation and unity and replaced it with ghettoizing multi-culturalism and infantilizing “diversity.”

He is very right. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to say that every leftist is purposely doing this. I'd venture that some leftists honestly believe they are helping people by this. Just like not all rightwingers are racists. Some of them are.

Both sides love to paint the other side with quite a WIDE brush. This was most noticeable during the Bush years...and it's continuing during the beginning of the Obama years. Where the left finds an incessant necessity to paint the right as wackos and parody all their actions, and the right is going into ODS much like the left went for BDS.

Still, through all this, I agree that leftism is racism. And we need to address if we truly want to help disadvantaged groups become part of society.