The identity war has no winners

At a recent political talk in San Diego, I heard professor and scientist Dr. Gad Saad tell the story of a woman who, after being sexually assaulted by a Black man, justified the crime as a kind of “revenge” against the white supremacy she believed she was subject to. It was upon hearing this story that I had a genuine epiphany: identity warfare is causing a gradual, silent degradation of humanity.

Identitarianism is nothing more than a social and political mobilization for affirmative and protective actions on behalf of groups encompassing people who share aspects of their identity — whether race, sexual orientation, sex, or others. It was born in the mid-1960s with the rise of social movements such as feminism and the anti-racism movement. Today, it represents a social structure similar to Marx’s class struggle: instead of dividing society along economic lines, it divides along identity lines.

At its core, there is a legitimate intention of care and support for those who, at some point in history, suffered oppression and are, today, called “minorities.” Throughout human history — amid conquests, downfalls, rises to power, wars, and innovations — countless groups were oppressed, with the Holocaust and slavery being the most well-known examples. To close one’s eyes to this fact is not only intellectual ignorance, but moral ignorance as well.

What not even the political scientists of the last century anticipated was such a glaring escalation — to the point where excessive protection would promote the subservience of certain groups at the expense of others, since those groups supposedly owe a historical reparation, translated as a debt paid in the name of their ancestors’ choices. This is the real outcome being promoted by the modern left: an identity war that, under the pretext of protection, separates people and fosters gratuitous hatred between different groups.

Not even a Marxist like Nancy Fraser buys into this fairy tale. She herself acknowledges that the identity agenda hijacks the redistribution debate she advocates for — and may even deepen the inequality it claims to fight. According to her, these struggles don’t foster any real coexistence; they only harden group identities until they become prisons, fueling separatism, intolerance, and authoritarianism. If even the left admits this side effect, there’s little room left to dismiss this critique as a “right-wing talking point.”

Another adverse effect of modern identitarianism is its unmistakable promotion of a victim mentality among individuals belonging to “minority groups.” The result is the infantilization of the individual: he ceases to be the agent of his own life and becomes merely the product of external forces that only the State supposedly has the duty to correct. Every failure becomes proof of structural prejudice, never a circumstance to be confronted. Every hardship gets outsourced to “oppression,” never owned as part of one’s own journey.

Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, in The Rise of Victimhood Culture, already nailed the diagnosis: we live in a culture where victim status has become political capital. The more oppressed someone declares themselves to be, the more speaking power and moral legitimacy they gain in public debate — a perverse incentive that rewards complaint, not solutions. It’s no longer about resolving the conflict directly; it’s about displaying suffering to others and demanding they intervene. We are raising psychologically weak citizens.

Brazil’s legal framework is already riddled with laws protecting specific groups. And yet, we seem to remain in an eternal panic to protect more and more. As long as the political debate keeps revolving around pronouns, “tradwives,” and diversity quotas in public tenders, whoever dies waiting in line at the public health system (SUS) has no identity group — just the bad luck of being poor. Whoever loses a child to a disease preventable through basic sanitation has no acronym to represent them — just an open sewer.

Brazil’s problems run deeper. But it seems political leaders are more concerned with keeping the identity war at a boil — men against women, Black people against white people, straight people against gay people — than with solving what actually affects the majority of the population. After all, a resolved debate is a spotlight turned off. A divided society is worth more to them than the natural course of cooperation and harmony. We have much to fix before this gradual, silent degradation becomes irreversible.

Originally published in Portuguese by Crusoé.

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