Irish State Imports American Identity Politics Into the Educational Curriculum
A conservative Irish news service, Gript, recently challenged Arlene Foster, the head of Ireland’s National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, to justify the notion, baked into the proposed new curriculum for “senior cycle” (ages 15-18) secondary students, that white students form a “privileged” class in Ireland.
What the draft curriculum says is that one of the “learning outcomes” for students in Ireland should be “(demonstrating) allyship skills to challenge unfair or abusive behaviours and support greater equity and inclusion.” In the glossary of the draft curriculum, it is explained that “allyship skills” involve “recognising and using one’s privileged status (for example as white or male or Irish person) to support individuals from minority identity groups.”
The notion that students in Ireland enjoy a “privileged” status on account of being born in Ireland, being white, or being male, probably sounds very familiar to an American audience that has witnessed up close the enthronement of identity politics in many parts of the educational system, especially on university campuses. It may not surprise an American to see the language of identity politics in a school curriculum, even if many Americans find the whole concept rather problematic. But if the concept is problematic in an American context, it is utterly alien to the Irish cultural context, and therefore even more surprising to see it colonising the Irish educational curriculum.
Click here to support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription.
Broadly speaking, identity politics encourages citizens to think of themselves as belonging to a social class which is either “privileged” or “oppressed,” and to engage in actions that level the playing field. Stated at this level of abstraction, it might sound relatively unobjectionable. There might, after all, be cases in which belonging to one social group or another does indeed entail privilege or oppression, in need of correction. A highly exploitative workplace might, for example, involve radically unfair and domineering relations between middle managers and low-level workers; and this injustice might cry out for redress.
However, in practice, identity politics attaches a social status of “privileged” or “oppressed” to highly generic and largely unchangeable characteristics such as a person’s sex, the colour of their skin, or their nationality, rather than to participation in a specific situation of injustice, such as arbitrary discrimination or harassment. Therefore, it encourages citizens to think that they are stuck in an oppressed condition, or automatically complicit in a “structural injustice,” just by virtue of an unchangeable trait such as the colour of their skin or their ethnicity.
Identity politics perpetuates an oppressor-victim relationship in which one group, just by virtue of being male, or white, or heterosexual, is permanently complicit in a “structural injustice” against another group, defined as victim, just by virtue of being black, or female, or homosexual. Those who buy into this narrative on the “oppressed” side are constantly making demands to be recognised and compensated for the alleged social injustices they suffer; while those who buy into the narrative on the “oppressor” side are burdened with a collective guilt that can only be expunged by raising up the oppressed, whether by supporting affirmative action policies (essentially, reverse discrimination practices), or by bowing the knee to them at a football game.
Now, in a country such as South Africa or the United States, with a history of unjust colonialism or slavery, the idea that historic injustices have set back the life prospects of certain racially defined groups indiscriminately, that whites should be treated universally as part of a historic oppressor class, and that following this logic, they must pay for the sins of their parents, even if questionable and highly implausible to many, at least has a history of racial injustice to prop it up. But in in a country like Ireland, which has been colonised for much of its history and has no history of racial oppression to speak of, the idea that “whiteness” is a form of “privilege” has no cultural resonance whatsoever.
What about the idea that Irish men form a privileged class? This, too, is very hard to make sense of. Obviously, there are wealthy and powerful Irish men; but there are also poor and powerless Irish men. The same goes for just about any generic category we attempt to associate with “privilege”: it ends up doing violence to social reality, which cannot be divided into dominating and oppressed classes in accordance with the fanciful constructs of identity politics.
Importing American identity politics, whether in terms of race, sex or ethnicity into Irish society is not teaching students to "care" for each other, or be more “inclusive,” as defenders of identity politics would have us believe. Rather, it is teaching students to think that race, or sex, or ethnicity inexorably defines their position and life prospects in society. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, since it instills in students a sense that they are either socially inferior or superior, just by virtue of their race, or sex, or ethnicity. In other words, identity politics teaches students to interpret the world and their experiences of it through a racist and sexist lens.