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This is a book from the so-called “culture wars” in the US in which minorities and liberal whites have been slugging it out with “middle America” over identity politics. At least it looks like this viewed from across the Atlantic. Here the 2015 attempt by students at Cardiff University to “no platform” non-politically correct intellectuals like Germaine Greer for her views on transgender identity has been a rare but “celebrated” example of what in the US is apparently commonplace. Greer had argued that it was not possible to change from a man to a woman. But in an age when “trans issues” have become the frontier for a certain kind of progressive activism her stance was seen as sufficient to lump her in with other “no platform” figures such as holocaust denier David Irving, even though the talk she planned to give at Cardiff had nothing to do with trans issues.
The Greer incident probably occurred during the publication of Schwartz's book otherwise I am sure he would have included it as one of his case studies along with the case of imaginary bullying at South Hadley High School, hoax racism at Oberlin College, and “Halloween oppression” at Yale. What all these cases have in common is the use of language and the expression of opinions in ways that are deemed to give offence. In its more extreme forms “political correctness” holds that such acts do not just “give offence” but are acts of violence that threaten the psychological safety of minority groups. Viewed from this perspective to be a minority is to be permanently vulnerable to the linguistic violence of the oppressor. Earlier writers on North America's culture wars, writers like Robert Hughes whose Culture of Complaint was written in 1993 just as the phenomenon was getting off the ground, thought of all this in terms of “the politics of the victim”. According to Hughes, in some weird inversion of social norms the victim was becoming the new hero, a powerful figure in American society. As he put it, “it's as thou