“It’s a quick step from there to discounting the lesbians, or for that matter anyone who refuses to slip quietly into a ‘post-racial’ future that resembles all too closely the racist past and present, as ‘identitarian’—when it’s actually the listener who cannot get beyond the identity that he has imputed to the speaker. Calling the speaker ‘identitarian’ serves as an efficient excuse not to listen to her, in which case the listener can resume his role as speaker, and then we can decamp to another conference... and shame the unsophisticated identitarians, all at the feet of yet another great white man pontificating from the podium, just as we’ve done for centuries” (Nelson, 54). This passage stood out to me immediately because its analyzing something we know all too well which is weaponizing academic posturing to silence people who have actually lived thorugh the experiences being debated about. Nelson writes about Judith Butler’s frustrations that a book (Gender Trouble) written to deconstruct identity politics was reduced to a token “lesbian” piece exhibiting the lesbian identity. Nelson then pivots to the point that there is an obsession with dismantling identity when it works against marginalized people. What makes this passage great to me, too, is how Nelson writes about the hypocrisy of the academic listener. She points out that they are never really listening and instead waiting to slap labels on things like “post-racial future” instead of acknowledging actual systemic racism. Identitarian is the word she uses to critique how the label is used to say “this is not a person we should listen to”. The listener projects an identity onto the speaker, accuses her of being narrow-minded or theoretically simplistic, and then uses that shame to shut her down therefore reclaiming their power as the speaker. I find this critique powerful because I am all to familiar with the feeling and I know many others are too. It reveals how easily intellectual spaces can replace human reality. Scholars may demand people who are surviving in marginalized spaces to transcend race or gender, stripping away their value and social weight of those identities. Real discrimination, then, is treated as an intellectual puzzle that “enlightened intellects” have moved past. The critics, after picking apart a real human experience. In Section 34, Descartes realizes that his consideration of physical bodies helps him better understand the non-physical self. “I have now finally got back to where I wanted. I now know that bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone” (p.22). This argument validates intellectual scrutiny as Descartes’ primary philosophical tool. Ultimately, this foundation grants