Elizabeth Banks: Wrong on Spielberg, Wrong on Diversity

Plenty of his films have been about women, but artists aren’t under any obligation to check the identity-politics boxes.

.. Is Steven Spielberg under some kind of moral or political obligation to make movies about women?

.. “I went to Indiana Jones and Jaws and every movie Steven Spielberg ever made, and by the way, he’s never made a movie with a female lead,” Banks said, bizarrely, adding, “Sorry, Steven. I don’t mean to call your ass out, but it’s true.”

.. The audience isn’t a constituency they need to reflect or to whom they need to appeal in their work. It isn’t their job to represent every group. Art is notable, in fact, for its spectacularly unrepresentative character.

The Problem With Intersectional Feminsm

The concept of intersectionality was introduced into academic theory and social justice activism in the late 1980s by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School and founder of Critical Race Theory.

It gradually became the dominant social justice framework. Crenshaw opposed the mainstream liberalism of the time for its aim to look past categories of race, gender and sexuality, thereby levelling the playing field and enabling all people to succeed by their own abilities. She felt this neglected identity and identity politics which she argued to be personally and politically empowering.

.. “We all can recognize the distinction between the claims “I am Black” and the claim “I am a person who happens to be Black.” She advocates the former as positive, powerful and celebratory and rejects the latter as striving for a universality that is less likely to be productive.

.. In reality, women of color, the LGBT and disabled people are to be found along the whole range of the political spectrum and subscribe to a vast array of ideas, whilst intersectionality is decidedly left-wing and based on a very specific ideology

.. intersectionals see themselves as radical reformers of a liberalism which was too mainstream or too centrist.

.. The problem with positioning an ideology on the far-Left and claiming it to represent women, people of color, LGBTs and disabled people is that this requires all members of those groups to be far-Left which they simply aren’t.

.. Americans identifying as liberal reached a record high of 24% in 2015 in comparison to the conservative 38%. [1]

Britons are almost evenly divided between Left and Right. [2]

  • Women are generally somewhat more likely to be left-leaning than men [3] but very many are not.
  • 47% of African Americans identify as liberal and 45% as conservative. [4]
  • In the UK, the Conservative party claimed 33% of Black and Middle Eastern voters in comparison to Labour’s 52%, with Black Britons being most likely to vote Labour,
  • whilst among the Asian community, Hindus and Sikhs are more likely to vote Conservative and Muslims to vote Labour.[5]
  • British LGBTs are as likely to be right-wing as left-wing [6]
  • whilst American LGBTs are much more likely to be left-wing,[7] almost certainly because of the religious nature of the American Right and its implications for LGBT equality.
  • There is nothing to suggest people with disabilities are more likely to identify with any particular political position.

.. Intersectionality, simply by positioning itself on the far-Left of the political spectrum, immediately closes itself off from a significant proportion of women, people of color, LGBTs and disabled people.

  • how many are intersectional feminists, how many are
  • radical feminists (opposed by intersectional feminists), how many are non-intersectional
  • liberal feminists (opposed by intersectional feminists) and how many
  • have no ideology of feminism but simply consider it the name for the gender equality supported by the vast majority of the population.

.. Left-voting people of color are significantly less likely to be supportive of LGBT equality than White Lefties.

.. in California, 70% of African American voters voted to ban same sex-marriage.

.. Large proportions of people from marginalized groups simply decline to be intersectional and this is a problem for an ideology which claims to listen to them and represent them.

.. This has resulted in bizarre situations in which Peter Tatchell has felt compelled to explain why it’s not racist to object to Black musicians singing about killing LGBTs [18]and Muslim and ex-Muslim feminist

.. We are, in fact, listening to a minority ideological view dominated by people from an economically privileged class who have had a university education in the social sciences and/or the necessary leisure time and education to study intersectionality, critical race theory, queer theory and critical analyses of ableism.

.. It is, of course, perfectly possible to support the rights of marginalized groups and campaign for their greater representation whilst accepting that they have a range of political views including those which contradict yours. However, this is not what intersectional feminists do. We are told repeatedly that intersectionality is the only way and that it is not optional.

.. Non-intersectional feminists are labelled “White feminists” and vilified furiously. It is important to note that not all “White feminists” are White. The term refers to any non-intersectional feminist.

.. Because inherent in those terms is a sinister implication: ‘if you disagree with how I think a brown person should think, you’re still a nigger’ – a slave subordinate to the interests of white people. ‘If you disagree with me, you can’t be thinking for yourself’ is the message.”

.. Intersectionality, by undervaluing shared human experience and rights — universality — and personal autonomy and distinctiveness — individuality — and focusing intensely on group identity and intersectional ideology, places individuals in a very restricted “collectivist” position previously only found in very conservative cultures.

.. The idea that if one is not an intersectional feminist, one is a misogynist, White supremacist, homophobic, transphobic ableist demands an utter ideological purity that few people can meet or wish to meet.

Instead, centrists, moderates and universal liberals of all genders, races, sexualities and abilities continue to oppose discrimination, promote equality and value diversity, independent of intersectionality.

  • .. It is regrettable that intersectionality in practice so often manifests in restrictive ideological conformity,
  • exclusionary tactics,
  • hostility,
  • tribalism and even racist abuse.

.. Until intersectionality respects diversity of ideas as well as of identity and supports every individual’s right to hold any of them regardless of their group identity, it cannot be said to represent anything except its own ideology.

Why does Donald Trump demonize cities?

Because they show that the liberal experiment works.

He persists in his efforts to slur cities as radioactive war zones because the fact that America’s diverse big cities are thriving relative to the whiter, less populous parts of the country suggests that the liberal experiment works — that people of diverse origins and faiths prosper together in free and open societies. To advance his administration’s agenda, with its protectionism and cultural nationalism, Trump needs to spread the notion that the polyglot metropolis is a dangerous failure.
.. The president has filled his administration with advisers who oppose the liberal pluralism practiced profitably each day in America’s cities. “The center core of what we believe,” Steve Bannon, the president’s trusted chief strategist, has said, is “that we’re a nation with an economy, not an economy just in some global marketplace with open borders, but we are a nation with a culture and a reason for being.” This is not just an argument for nationalism over globalism. Bannon has staked out a position in a more fundamental debate over the merits of multicultural identity.
.. The Census Bureau projects that whites will cease to be a majority in 30 years. Suppose you think the United States — maybe even all Western civilization — will fall if the U.S. population ever becomes as diverse as Denver’s. You are going to want to reduce the foreign-born population as quickly as possible, and by any means necessary. You’ll deport the deportable with brutal alacrity, squeeze legal immigration to a trickle, bar those with “incompatible” religions.
.. But to prop up political demand for this sort of ethnic-cleansing program — what else can you call it? — it’s crucial to get enough of the public to believe that America’s diversity is a dangerous mistake.
.. A new study of urban crime rates by a team of criminologists found that “immigration is consistently linked to decreases in violent (e.g., murder) and property (e.g., burglary) crime” in the period from 1970 to 2010. What’s more, according to an analysis of FBI crime data, counties labeled as “sanctuary” jurisdictions by federal immigration authorities have lower crime rates than comparable non-sanctuary counties.
.. regional separation in education and productivity “the Great Divergence.”
.. In 2001, the 50 wealthiest U.S. metro regions produced about 27 percent more per person than the country as a whole. Today, they produce 34 percent more, and there’s no end to the divergence in sight.
.. Trump took 2,584 counties that together account for 36 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Clinton won just 472 counties — less than 20 percent of Trump’s take — but those counties account for 64 percent of GDP.
.. Trump won a bigger vote share in places with smaller foreign-born populations. The residents of those places are, therefore, least likely to encounter a Muslim refugee, experience immigrant crime
.. places where Trump was especially popular in the primaries are places that face little import competition from China or Mexico. Trump’s protectionist trade and immigration policies will do the least in the places that like them the most.

.. But the redistribution-loving multicultural urban majority can’t be blamed for the inadequacy of the safety net when the party of rural whites has fought for decades to roll it back.
.. Low-density America didn’t vote to be knocked on its heels by capitalist creative destruction, but it has voted time and again against softening the blow.
.. Political scientists say that countries where the middle class does not culturally identify with the working and lower classes tend to spend less on redistributive social programs. We’re more generous, as a rule, when we recognize ourselves in those who need help.
.. An exclusive, nostalgic national identity acts like a cancer in the body politic, eating away at the bonds of affinity and cooperation that hold our interests together.