"The white man’s path is a rut for the rest of us" — writes a privileged white woman...

.... Jennifer Palmieri, in a newspaper owned by a white man (The Washington Post, owned by mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos).

Where does Palmieri get the identitarian authority to speak for a group called "the rest of us" against "the white man"?

To her credit, she begins by showing her awareness that she really doesn't have the authority:

A few years ago, I would have dismissed as unhelpful the notion that I was a woman struggling to succeed in a man’s world. I thought I was doing great. I was working in Barack Obama’s White House. Hillary Clinton’s election as the first female president seemed to be on the horizon and....

Palmieri was Hillary's communications director.

But I no longer see it as self-defeating to call myself an outsider in a man’s world.

She'd have been an insider if Hillary had become President. But she's not saying she is an outsider, just that it's to her advantage — not "self-defeating" — to call herself an outsider.

Instead, I think the self-preservation of all marginalized people demands it.

All marginalized people need you — extremely privileged white woman — to call yourself an outsider. Their "self-preservation" depends on you claiming to be one of them?

Patiently waiting for things to improve has served only to sustain the very systems that keep women and people of color from obtaining real power.

Systems! You were communications director and your candidate lost. That's why you don't have power — and it would have been immense and real. Because your campaign fell short, you now posit "systems" that are holding you back in the same way they hold back women in general and "people of color." What were the "systems" that held back "people of color" when you were working in Barack Obama’s White House? Or do the "systems" come and go depending on whether Hillary Clinton blabbered about "deplorables" and didn't go to Michigan?

The white man’s path has turned into our rut.... This is, by definition, a man’s world, and we must declare our independence from it.... None of us should suffer from imposter syndrome, but if you are someone other than a white man, you are not wrong to feel like you are operating in a world built for somebody else.... There is nothing more we need to prove.

The time for establishing your proposition with evidence is over, she's saying. So convenient.

The problem is the man’s world no longer works for us. It’s time to blow it up. Man’s world, we’re just not that into you....

Oh, good lord. First, a bomb threat to the world. (Metaphorical:  It’s time to blow it up.) Then a coy witticism that acts as if the group containing all the women is in a relationship with the world and is turning the world down. (The cultural reference is "He's Just Not That into You.")

Real change lies in us all sticking together. It is marginalized populations divided against each other that prop up the old patriarchy.

And there you have it, people of all non-white minority groups. You need to get together with all the women, including the most privileged white women, who will be happy to speak for you in the white-man-owned pages of The Washington Post.

And we can say it aloud...

It's not for me to say, but I hear it in the wind...



What is she/we saying aloud?

And we can say it aloud: I am proud to declare that I...

If it's "we," why is it immediately "I"?!

And we can say it aloud: I am proud to declare that I have been a woman struggling to succeed in a man’s world and even more proud to declare my independence from it.

She wants to be the spokesperson for 70% of Americans. And she's proud of her ambition. But is anyone impressed?! It seems like a power grab to me — a privileged white woman making a big obvious move, and I think it's inconsistent with identitarian politics. Is she proud to declare her independence from identitarian politics? She seems to want to use it — but only to designate 30% of the population for some sort of destruction — "blow it up."

***

This is the first time I'm using the word "identitarian" on this blog (using it myself — it appeared a couple times before, inside of quotes). So I spent some time looking it up. It's in the OED. Interestingly, it had a completely different definition at one time: "A person who believes that seemingly unrelated people or things are actually the same." What a great thing to have a word for! But that's obsolete.

The word today means — as a noun — "An advocate or supporter of an ideology or political agenda specific to his or her particular social, racial, or religious group, nationality, etc." and — as an adjective — "Of, relating to, or characterized by an ideology or political agenda which seeks to defend or promote the interests of a particular social, racial, or religious group, nationality, etc."

The OED pointed me toward the usage of the word in this 2007 essay about theater:

It is hard to know whether that claim [that it should not be revived] can be made about “Radio Golf,” the August Wilson play that advances what is arguably an outmoded model of racial politics. “Radio Golf,” set in 1997, eight years before Mr. Wilson died, serves as the coda to his 10-part epic about African-American life and betrays a deep nostalgia for the ethos of the late 1960s. In the play Mr. Wilson regressively casts his lot with the identitarians of that period, who saw assimilation as the great potential undoing of black culture.

So... in 2007, it was considered nostalgic to oppose assimilation!  Identitarianism was a 60s thing. You have to keep track of the past and the way the past was thought about at different times in the past. You've got to know the history of nostalgia! But wait 13 years or so and the thing they're calling "regressive" and "deep nostalgia" may reemerge as just what we need lots more of today.

The story revolves around a yuppie mayoral candidate’s refusal to allow the demolition of an old house belonging to an elderly relative, one that stands in the way of a huge urban renewal project involving the construction of a Whole Foods. Prosperity is the enemy here, Tiger Woods a symbol of evil. History and soul are the virtues to be prized above all.

“The masses want leaders who are educated as well as trustworthy,” the African-American social critic Albert Murray wrote in the late 1960s, disparaging that popular point of view. They don’t see middle-class blacks as “tokens,” he argued; “they regard them as people who got the breaks — or were able to make the most of the breaks.” The rise of Barack Obama makes “Radio Golf” interesting if off-putting theater because Mr. Wilson’s perspective, in effect, demands that we greet the arrival of people who have made the most of their breaks as a cause for concern rather than victory.

The rise of Barack Obama... remember that? Those were the days... the days when Jennifer Palmieri's career path was swooping upward.