Identity politics arise because certain groups are discriminated against or marginalized. While it’s perfectly legitimate to use identity as a means of social mobilization to push back against marginalization, identity politics becomes problematic when one’s fixed identity becomes the most essential thing that one knows about somebody, when judgments about people are made simply on the basis of their membership in a group and not what they’ve accomplished as individuals.
Racial inequality was one of the first and most basic civil rights issues for which identity politics developed; and it became a pattern for other groups: for women, for gays and lesbians and transgender people to assert their rights.
On the political left, wokeness sometimes drifts into wokeism—a system of thought and behavior characterized by intolerance, policing the speech of others and proving one’s own superiority by denouncing others.
Wokeness -- awareness of unfairness in the treatment of others -- not only makes the world a better place and us better people, it creates a culture in which the marginalized receive empathy instead of blame. But every movement is susceptible to becoming the thing it despises. Nietzsche said it best, perhaps: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Power theory teaches us that every system develops a subsystem that initially makes rules that are good for the system, but, eventually, that governing subsystem makes rules that are good for itself. George Orwell ended Animal Farm with the disgusting image of pigs imitating their human oppressors.
If it's wrong to assume you know a black woman's experience based on her gender and skin color, it's wrong--for exactly the same reasons-- to assume you know a white man's experience based on his gender and skin color. Hatred is encouraged when those around us take expressions of hatred, such as wokeism’s humiliation of white people and men, in stride, desensitizing the group to the maltreatment of others. As expressed by Aldous Huxley: “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
Nietzsche put it like this: “Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology.” Thinking unconditionally, or un-contextually, characterizes wokeism. Behavior is condemned regardless of its reasons: if you feel offended (and you’re not a white guy), you were offended.