“Identity Politics”

One of the weirdest things about identitarian activists is that they hate being asked where they’re from but they love telling you where they’re from. Politely inquire about their ethnic or cultural origins and they’ll damn you as a racist. ‘How dare you, I’m as British as you!’, they’ll yell, either to your face or in a column in the Guardian in which they’ll document at great, yawn-inducing length the horror of having some dim pleb ask about their family origins.

October is Women’s History Month. It’s also Latin American Heritage Month. And German Heritage Month. And Canadian Islamic History Month. And 2SLGBTQQIA+ History Month (though this has not been recognized by the federal government — yet). Some provinces recognize this to be Canadian Library Month .

It’s a fairly busy time in our modern update to the old liturgical calendar. Instead of numerous saintly feasts, we get cultural awareness months, remembrance days and the like. Paradoxically, there are now so many of these observances that they don’t seem particularly worth observing at all. Everyone is special, so no one is.

Major lending programs for Black entrepreneurs have quickened their paces after a slow start, with Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce approving $8.5-million in loans and grants and Ottawa authorizing about $35.1-million in loans so far.

After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, the federal government, major financial institutions and Black community groups spent months discussing how to knock down some of the barriers that Black businesses disproportionately face in accessing capital. Ottawa and major banks almost came together to launch a new national lending initiative, but the banks walked away to run their own programs.

h/t Mauser

The cult of victimhood is inflaming tensions between ethnic-minority groups.

A scuffle in a south-east London shop wouldn’t normally be headline news. But in our age of racial identity politics, Peckham Hair and Cosmetics has been thrust on to the frontline; a clash between an angry customer and a cack-handed shopkeeper has been transformed into a damning indictment of ‘white supremacist’ Britain.

That neither of the two players in this sorry story is white didn’t dent the narrative. Protesters gathered outside the shop, on Rye Lane, on Wednesday afternoon, after a video went viral, showing a middle-aged Asian man – the shop’s owner – violently restraining a young black woman, as she tried to bash him over the head with her basket. At one point in the clip, he appears to place his hands around her neck.