U.S. President-elect Joe Biden has appointed veteran transgender Shawn Skelly to the transition team that will evaluate the Department of Defense.
Shawn Skelly holds a master’s degree in national security and strategic studies from the Naval War College. She worked for 20 years in the U.S. Navy, where she held the position of naval flight officer and retired as commander. She worked in the military conflicts conducted by the United States in the Middle East, such as the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War. Between 2013 and 2016, she held the positions of executive secretary and special assistant in the Department of Defense, being responsible for meeting urgent requests from U.S. military personnel acting in military interventions conducted by the Obama administration.
Shawn Skelly’s appointment is a prime example of how identity causes are co-opted by U.S. liberals to interdict criticism and to clothe the most perverse aspects of imperialism with an air of progressiveness. There is certainly no shortage of trans professionals who excel in areas such as culture, education, health, and human rights who could coordinate positive initiatives for integration and emancipation. But the priority is to link identity politics and progressiveness to the idea of being able to send transsexuals to kill and die for the interests of the US plutocracy. It is an extremely effective way to block discussion of imperialism and interventionism and demobilize sectors of the liberal left and the identity movements, which prefer to turn a blind eye or even defend the agenda of interventionism if it is covered by the false varnish of identity politics.
What, did you actually expect a president and administration that can do so without contradicting itself ideologically not to take advantage of the modern identity-politics mess? Just my 2 Eurocents, but Biden is not a moron, that much we already have seen with him as Obamas man, He’ll cheerfully continue to bomb the middle east and coopt minority issues doing it, in a way he’s more dangerous than Donald Dump ever was.
To be honest, I didn’t expect too differently either. I was using this example as food for thought.
Very well said.
I think we should draw a line with between liberal identity politics and trans liberation from a communist perspective. But the problem is even more crucial: liberalism has no multi-faceted analysis of the problems that the people at large are dealing with. Often, we hear “race” or “gender” or “identity” but hardly do we hear about “class.” I’ve recently been reading a book called Caste by Isabel Wilkerson and while it has a lot to say about racism, it says that the issue of “class” can easily be rectified by hard work and “decisions.” And then it doesn’t touch on the subject again.
I understand that one shouldn’t be a “class reductionist,” but I find that liberals are essentially “identity reductionist;” there is no class analysis whatsoever.
Yeah, agreed. We need a proletarian identity politics. Because identity really only matters in the working classes.
The US even had Black slave owners. There were probably liberals back then trying to use them as examples of progress. Diversity within the bourgeoisie doesn’t help us.
We shouldn’t look at the enslavers, we should look at who’s enslaved. Don’t look at the bombers but who’s being bombed. Who’s being killed in prisons and concentration camps, who’s being killed by their water. It’s working-class POC every time.
Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.
Proletarian identity politics is about worker solidarity and worker emancipation. Getting diverse bourgeois imperialists to bomb the workers is the opposite of that.
The US has had blacks that supported apartheid in Africa like it was just another foreign policy decision in the name of fighting communism worldwide. I’m reading about this right now, actually, in a book called White Supremacy Confronted by Gerald Horne. I’m not saying that blacks and Latinos and Native Americans (especially Native Americans) and so on don’t have it rough, but I won’t accept the crocodile tears of a black Trump supporter, for example.
I understand that one shouldn’t be a “class reductionist,” but I find that liberals are essentially “identity reductionist;” there is no class analysis whatsoever.
Perfectly stated. This does not mean we shouldn’t take care of trans workers. It’s literally the opposite, we should actually take care of them, and bring them to our side, because their identity is being used to shield genocidal public officials from criticism. It’s an awful situation to be in.
In a way, identity politics in the US have become borderline “identity fascism” at some point. Just notice how certain liberals are quick to denounce working people as fascists for voting for Trump, while criticism against Joe Biden is quickly shut down. One recurrent aspect of fascism is the absolute lack of a safe space to criticize the current state of things.
This is why communists promote freedom to criticize.
“The Communist Party does not fear criticism because we are marxists, the truth is on our side.”
— Mao Zedong
