An incident that occurred at Harvard this past weekend may be the perfect political metaphor of our times.

A number of Harvard undergraduates received an email Sunday urging them to fight “white genocide” by voting for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

There is a dangerous double standard at the heart of the Left’s approach to identity politics.

While most of the students who received the email apparently ignored it, the Harvard College dean called for a police investigation into the email. Declan Garvey, president of Harvard’s undergraduate Republican club, called the email’s contents “repulsive and hateful.”

This episode speaks to the toxic rot at the very heart of contemporary American politics. Modern progressive identity politics leaves some whites feeling under siege, fueling anti-globalization, anti-immigrant feeling, and anti-multicultural feeling — and leads them to express overt white nationalist sentiments.

Modern progressives in turn freak out, cry racism, and try to suppress white nationalist sentiment, which then only increases those whites’ feelings of being under siege. It is a vicious self-perpetuating cycle that won’t be broken until identity politics is put to bed.

The email — sent by a group called “Educators and Students Against White Genocide” — while certainly provocative, hyperbolic, and polemical, draws attention to the stunning hypocrisies of the modern Left.

“Massive immigration and forced assimilation is called genocide when it’s done in Tibet. When it’s done in White countries it’s called ‘diversity,'” reads the email. “Diversity is a code word for White Genocide… Anti-racist is a code word for anti-White,” it states.

While it’s highly unlikely that the average college professor or campus diversity coordinator is actually dreaming of herding white people into concentration camps, they do sort of have a point. There is a dangerous double standard at the heart of the Left’s approach to identity politics.

Liberals only seem to champion diversity in historically white, Christian countries. It’s commonplace to hear progressives criticize American TV shows, films, and even entire suburbs for being “too white,” yet one never hears these self-proclaimed champions of diversity complain about Japanese society, culture, or entertainment being “too Asian.”

The liberals who raged apoplectically at the casting of Matt Damon as an ancient Chinese warrior, and are celebrating the upcoming “Mulan” live action film for featuring an actual Chinese woman portraying the title character, are the same liberals who praise the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” in which the country’s very British, very white Founding Fathers are portrayed by blacks and Hispanics.

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Contemporary progressive discourse is rife with talk of “white privilege,” without the slightest recognition or consideration of the fact that what liberals call “white privilege” is just the reality of white people being the founding stock and majority of the country. It is no different from the “privilege” Japanese people have in Japan or the “privilege” Arabs have in Jordan.

The average progressive also accepts and promotes the bizarre idea that only white people can be racist — and that America is not just systemically, but also fundamentally, racist against non-whites. If modern progressivism is a religion, its foundation myth is apparently original white sin.

This has created a situation where blatant anti-white prejudice, if not hatred, is not only permitted by liberals but frequently endorsed by them as well. “White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it,” reads a completely serious Salon headline from December 2015.

“Dear White People: Here’s a List of Things We’d Wish You’d Stop Doing,” reads an article from the magazine The Root published in February of this year. In August, a website called Madame Noire published a racist screed in which the author expresses her disgust at the thought of a white woman touching her daughter’s hair.

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“Would I feel as strongly about this situation had her teacher been Black, and decided to do her hair? Nope, because to me that would of [sic] been a sister looking out, a homegirl hook up because of the unspoken understanding all Black people share … I will never be ok with White hands in my child’s hair.”

This is to say nothing of the growing crisis of black-on-white violence and rhetoric that has been growing apace with the Black Lives Matter movement. Most of these crimes are never prosecuted or reported as the racially motivated hate crimes they clearly are.

Blatant anti-white sentiment, fostered by progressives in recent decades, spawned this moment. If they truly wish to combat it, to create a truly just and harmonious society, they must start by looking themselves in the mirror.