The year the ruling class got woke

[Borchester]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9088273/BBC-director-cultural-diversity-June-Sarpong-insists-white-privilege-fact-life.html

I was reading a book a while back. Not Lark Rise to Candleford but something similar, although set a tad earlier in the mid 19th century. A sort of Thomas Hardy but with a few laughs. Buggered if I can recall the name, but apparently folk would get on with their lives, feeding and educating families and the like and then when they were a couple of quid ahead of the game they would say sod it, let us have a bit of a do. So they would get the kids and sometimes grandchildren cleaned up, get food and beer and fiddlers in for the party and go off to church and get married.

Meanwhile the media was having a fit of the vapours at the very suggestion of an uncovered table leg.

All this PC and Woke lark is all good fun, but mostly just the latest fashion statement and the real question is not how offended June Sarpong might be, but what on earth makes the poor silly cow think that the bulk of the population give a flying feck?

[Thomas]

BBC director of cultural diversity June Sarpong insists white privilege is a 'fact of life' - but backed reintroducing lyrics to Rule Britannia at this year's Proms and insists 'I'm NOT part of the "liberal elite

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9088273/BBC-director-cultural-diversity-June-Sarpong-insists-white-privilege-fact-life.html

[Borchester]

Watching thoroughly establishment politicians, House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to the fore, literally kneeling before the new woke politics was striking. It provoked so many questions, not least if Pelosi and Schumer (80 and 70 respectively) would be able to rise again unassisted.

That was the bit that really interested me 

US politics really has gotten weird. I have been on a site where they were having orgasms of delight because a rightwing something or other called Rush Limbaurgh has a terminal cancer, but should anyone call a spade a ********* then the roof would fall in.

(As indeed appears to be the case here, what with the moderators having a fit of the vapours over something or other.)

Never mind, it is a young country 

[Thomas]

The year the ruling class got woke

Identity politics has become the new secular religion. We need more heretics.

For me, the defining image of 2020 was also the funniest: that of Democratic lawmakers in the US taking the knee, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, draped in Ghanaian kente cloth.

Identity politics has become the new secular religion. We need more heretics.
Tom Slater
Tom Slater
Deputy Editor
26th December 2020
The year the ruling class got woke
Share
Topics Free Speech Politics

For me, the defining image of 2020 was also the funniest: that of Democratic lawmakers in the US taking the knee, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, draped in Ghanaian kente cloth.

Watching thoroughly establishment politicians, House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to the fore, literally kneeling before the new woke politics was striking. It provoked so many questions, not least if Pelosi and Schumer (80 and 70 respectively) would be able to rise again unassisted.

But this absurd attempt at virtue-signalling – which provoked mockery rather than plaudits, even among those it was meant to impress – made one thing clear: that wokeness is the new orthodoxy, and the old elites know this.

Identity politics has become the new secular religion. We need more heretics.
Tom Slater
Tom Slater
Deputy Editor
26th December 2020
The year the ruling class got woke
Share
Topics Free Speech Politics

For me, the defining image of 2020 was also the funniest: that of Democratic lawmakers in the US taking the knee, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, draped in Ghanaian kente cloth.

Watching thoroughly establishment politicians, House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to the fore, literally kneeling before the new woke politics was striking. It provoked so many questions, not least if Pelosi and Schumer (80 and 70 respectively) would be able to rise again unassisted.

But this absurd attempt at virtue-signalling – which provoked mockery rather than plaudits, even among those it was meant to impress – made one thing clear: that wokeness is the new orthodoxy, and the old elites know this.

Divisive, identitarian ideas around race, gender and sexuality have of course been gaining ground in elite circles for some time. The idea that Western societies are not simply affected by bigotry, but defined by it and built on it, had been gaining ground in academia for decades.

The rise of campus censorship and student intolerance is in many respects an off-shoot of this ideology, which holds that words wound and that free speech and reason are just covers for white domination – and which seems to generate Salem-like hysteria among its adherents.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/26/the-year-the-ruling-class-got-woke/

I thought this was quite a good article about identity politics.