Panda La Terriere has written an interesting piece in the Spectator about whether Gen Z is turning against woke culture. Here’s an exerpt:
The other day, in a bar in London frequented by students of the infamously ‘woke’ Goldsmiths University, I met a young white cis-male who said that the English were to blame for his inherited trauma because of their historic oppression of the Irish. The only problem was, he wasn’t Irish – he was American and so were his parents and probably grandparents. “Pain lasts a long time,” he assured me.
What struck me about this encounter was not that it was typical of my Gen Z generation but that it was so obviously cringe-inducing – a sort of hackneyed pick-up line. Another student at the same bar – sporting an orange mullet and a thong as a T-shirt – tried to convince me my age was a social construct.
To me and many of my Gen Z peers, who were born after 1996, such talk feels increasingly silly: a millennial trend that’s got old and tired. The absurdity has become too glaring. If being distantly related to the Irish can engender self-compassion, could not my white Englishness be reframed as a form of victimhood? How can there be an end to oppression when the opportunities to be oppressed are so endless?
We feel as if we’ve run into a mental wall, and the whole woke business is running out of road. ‘Intersectionality’ – the academic word for the game of victimhood top-trumps which has dominated our discourse for so long – seems to have metastasised so much it makes no sense to anyone. New neurodiversities, new genders, new sexual orientations, new disadvantages are spawned every day.
She goes on to say that while Millennials were able to extract some cynical advantage from wokeness, Gen Z find themselves bumping up against the cold hard reality of the cost of living.
Millennials, such as Styles (and the other Harry, HRH, for that matter), were able to popularise and profit from woke. We, on the other hand, have gone further, turned it into a cultural revolution and traumatised ourselves. Fast-forward a few years and most of the older Zs find themselves disenfranchised within the movement. Many of them, having just flown the nest in an increasingly expensive world, are experiencing that one setback that the religion of woke won’t let them build a self-soothing identity out of, namely a shortage of cash.
To the outside observer it has always seemed that Gen Z are a mixture of the extremely woke, and the extremely ‘based’. La Terriere seems to confirm this.
The younger Z cohort, those who are still at university or school, are still dominated by radicalised nutters who enjoy the cerebral workout of building a case for their own insurmountable unhappiness. But the older Zs are jumping ship fast, en masse, and leaving the flags, the pronouns and the millennials in their dust.
Let’s hope she is right.
Worth reading in full.
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Once young people transition from being net recipients in society to net donors, their mood and perspective changes. Hence the move from the political Left to Right.
The Irish invented victimhood – always accuse others of your own sins to distract. The Irish raided, pillaged the North West coast of Britain and took slaves. The Romans stopped that in Cumbria but the absence of the Romans further North allowed the Irish… Scoti, as the Romans called them… to colonise the land – and be beastly to the locals – to which they gave their name.
Later the Irish decamped to the New World establishing themselves there, murdering pesky Red-Skins and eventually ruling parts of Boston and New York, dominating the police forces, running rackets and persecuting newer immigrants like the Poles.
But that’s only because they’re sort of almost white. Their original ancestors came up from Spain, so that makes them kind of Hispanic. But they turned white supremacist owing to being so near to England.
Being around 3/8 Irish myself, it’s a wonder I haven’t got a persecution complex, what with the whole world being against me. But I survive by being really nasty to people with my English 5/8.
“But they turned white supremacist owing to being so near to England.”
Who are you referring to when you say “they turned white supremacist”?
Bogtrotters.
You repeatedly refer to “the Irish” – like referring to “the Jews” – as if “the Irish” are all the same and all to blame for what was done by some Irish people or partly-Irish people (there is no pure race or pure nationality, we are all mixtures).
You really don’t ‘do’ humour, do you. Do you honestly think that we all think everyone is the same and therefore all to blame when we use common labels? I am half sheepworrier, a quarter tight fisted sweaty sock, and a quarter superior being. Welsh, Scottish, and (to my eternal shame) English. What other mongrel bits there are in my makeup I do not know. Nor do I care. I am me.
Agree. The point of my jest was that the woke youth with some proportion of Irish genealogy is echoing that strangely quaint racist intersectional idea that one drop of black blood makes you black, and therefore oppressed.
I received 95 upvotes for a humorous piece I posted a few days ago, and you say: “You really don’t ‘do’ humour, do you.”!
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/02/16/news-round-up-706/
But I admit I don’t see anything humorous about repeatedly referring to ’the Irish” in a derogatory way, as if this negative historical stereotype of “the Irish” is who Irish people are, and we are all the same. Perhaps you’d likely to explain the humour of it, which I have missed?
It reminds me of the way some Irish republicans speak – only in reverse – in a negative way about “the English” and “the Brits”, as if all “the English” and all “the Brits” are all the same and are all responsible for all Ireland’s troubles.
And becoming president.
I went to Goldsmiths Uni. I endured two years at postgrad level. One of the lecturers was a radical left winger from New York State. She loved using the phrase, “That is de facto racism!” I was also ordered by my course leader to do additional observations with ethnic minorities because, “as a white male I needed to experience oppression.”
Every week arriving at uni, there would be students giving out copies of the Socialist Worker
toilet papernewspaper. Students once rallied together to “occupy” the main library protesting about something or other. As a result they caused massive damage, with used condoms being found after they finally vacated.The problem with academia now, is that tutors exist within tiny insular bubbles, completely out of touch with the real world. None of them have any idea about economics, entrepreneurship, running an actual profitable business that generates wealth, and exist within an echo chamber that doesn’t allow hurty feelings in case somebody is offended. They are not progressive…they are regressive. I suspect university education will gradually become less and less relevant over the following decades. God forbid these people need go out and find an actual real job.
I am wondering which components that I studied in my electronics course would not longer be covered in a modern electronics course as a consequence of, for example, white privilege.
Would this result in modern electronic devices ceasing to function because their components don’t meet modern woke requitements?
It is all so silly. My mother was white English, from Norfolk. My father was a Parsi from north of Mumbai, but Parsis originally arrived in India from Persia, and don’t always look very Indian, being effectively of Middle Eastern origin. So I can describe myself as White British, White Asian mixed, White other and a couple more current categories. Doesn’t bother me. I choose the most appropriate on a form depending on the context, if I choose anything, and have never felt very persecuted, though the number of variations of spelling of my surname runs into a couple of dozen…