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.
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.
