The thing that bothers me about the decisions of the NUS, however, is that in both cases there is an attempt to resolve these complexities through a kind of identity absolutism. The premise appears to be that there is an authentic identification rooted in a real, collective lived experience which is being purloined inauthentically by groups who, lacking that experience, do not have a legitimate claim to that identity. This actually goes against the grain of the current, growing common sense that race and gender are social constructs (whatever social construction is taken to mean) rather than being fixed essences; that balkanised cultures are impossible to sustain, and that hybridisation and fusion are the norm; that identities are not absolute, and are always exceeded by forms of difference - something that those fighting Islamophobia have been compelled to emphasise over and over. And I would say that this is the better side of the emergent common sense, the side that we should fight to keep
