Introduction

We're living right now, as i speak to you, in a very reactionary moment. The movement for black lives and racial justice around the aftermath of george floyd's murder is a sort of back lash to what people on the right have appropriated for their own terms. But there is also a left critique of certain manifestations of this form of politics,. particularly the rhetorical levels. It roughly goes like this, institutions, people and entities with tremendous power are not at all interested in upending the basic hierarchies of power. So they use identity base liberation as a kind of rhetorical sop to avoid doing anything. I'm forty three years old. I've lived through a few of them.