This wiki section is personally curated by Michel Bauwens, in order to offer critical views, from the emancipatory and universalist/egalitarian points of view, of the current political trends to allocate resources according to group membership, and to judge people as group members based on their biological markers with huge pressure to ideologically conform to the dictates of group leaders. By contrast, this wiki section draws on the multiple currents of egalitarian thought to offer critiques and evaluations, and stresses the important of peer to peer dynamics and commoning as elements of complex contributory identities, which allow free persons to freely associate with common projects.

The section is protected due to the huge pressure that these views face due to the prevalent mode of cancel culture and censorship. We encourage you to copy its material in other venues to preserve pluralistic dialogue.

Below under 'Key Movements' is a list of civil rights organizations that can assist you. This article has good advice: Recommendations To Defend Yourself Against Cancel Culture Attacks.

The P2P/Commons-based alternative to Identitarianism

The P2P/Commons approach is incompatible with Totalitarian Humanism.

The Commons are 'Dignitarian', not Identitarian, please read: Robert Hanna on the Distinction Between Identitariarism and Dignitarianism.

The commons require the contributory logic of free persons associating themselves around the common construction of shareable goods. This requirement is compatible with our unavoidable complex identities and even identitarianism, provided the latter do not erase the personhood and freedom of contributing individuals. Commoning, and the possibility of a contributory economy and society, is entirely incompatible with any approach, that judges people exclusively on their biological markers and related group identity, and denies the personhood and free expression of all individuals. In other words, what is currently called wokism, and represents a neo-racialist and neo-segregationist ideology, is absolutely incompatible with a commons approach, based on a free and equal right to relationality and expression.

This section of our wiki is specifically dedicated to critical approaches the authoritarian identitarianism that is related to Group Identity Theory (now also called Critical Social Justice), not on the older emancipatory movements such as the women's movement, the gay rights movements, civil rights for minority populations, etc ..., which mostly operated under a egalitarian ethos within the bounds of universalism. This section is exclusively concerned with movements that reject universalist egalitarianism and pose particular dangers to peer to peer and commons approaches.

To start, please read Steven J. Lawrence's 7-part series: [1]

How does our approach differ from those of the IDW, the organizers of the New Discourses project and right-wing critics ?

I believe that my own interpretation of p2p/commons theory and practice, is that it is a integral/integrative and a 'transmodern' movement, i.e. a movement that wants to preserve and integrate the best of traditional societies (kinship, reciprocity and commoning arrangements, relationship with land and other living beings) , the best of modernity (science, rationality, the welfare state), and the best of postmodernity (criticality towards any form of knowledge, networked and distributed knowledge at cosmo-local scales, affinity-based self-organization, etc..).

This means that elements of premodernity, modernity and postmodernity are worth defending. This sets it apart from the return to tribalism proposed by the woke ideology, but also from what is called the IDW, which was a defensive reaction against the threat of identity politics, but does not offer a way forward. I personally appreciate their defense of the positive aspects of modernity, but see a huge lack of engagement with a future that can no longer be just modern. In other words: they seem to reject post-modernity wholesale, and also lack an engagement with the defense of what was good in alternatives to western modernity. However, to the degree that some of the achievements of modernity need to defended and integrated in any new synthesis, their work should be regarded as necessary in a broader alliance. Though the IDW has dissolved, it continues the exist in various bifurcations.

In order to learn a critical and self-reflexive approach in this subject, you may look to critique and contextualization from various sources:

• on the radical left, current critics have been the people working around Jacobin magazine (Ben Burgis); with people like webcaster Michael Brooks (identified as 'integral left'), and from the black African-American left, with researchers on class and race such as Adolphe and Toure Reed. Also radical philosophers and journalistic commentators such as Glenn Greenwald, Slavoj Zizek, Chomsky, and Matt Taibi belong to this broad camp, which was initiated with the Vampire Castle essay of Marc Fisher, listed below. (see also the Dyab Abou Jahah quote). There is also strong critique emanating from the radical feminist camp.

• on the center left (in the U.S. often called the 'liberal left'), there are several groups active: 1) the group of Grievance scholars, i.e. Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian which focuses on the genealogy of the current identitarian ideology (New Discourses; Aero magazine); 2) the group around Brett Weinstein, Heather Heying, and Eric Weinstein (Dark Horse Podcast, the Portal); 3) the group around Rebel Wisdom documentary network and journalist David Fuller.

• some pluralistic alliances cover broader political ground. This would be the case for the Intellectual Dark Web nebulae, for magazines like Quillette, Unherd and the more radical Spiked, or for a loose alliance of African-American scholars such as Coleman Hughes, James McWhorter, etc .. (for some of this literature, see Free Black Thought). There is a group of critics that originated from the left but moved to the conservative camp as a result of their free speech commitments, for example Michael Rectenwald.

Please read this extraordinary open letter from the (Zimbabwean) Africa Brooke, it says everything that needs to be said: [2]

If you are looking for solutions rather than just resistance, this is very promising: Empowerment Theory for Anti-Racist Practice

To know more about alternative commons-based concepts to the Identitarianism that we critique in this section, see: Solidarity vs Identitarian-Based Relationships

• the three basic values of contributory communities: Equipotentiality ; Equiplurality‎ ; Equiprimacy‎

• The basic concepts of organicist Dignitarianism: from Human Dignity to Cosmic Dignitarianism

Contextual Quotes

"Anyone who tells you that you are bad or evil based on immutable characteristics, is both your enemy and an enemy of humanity"

- John Robb [3]

"Any ideology that asks people to judge others based on their skin color is wrong. Any ideology that asks us to reduce ourselves and others to racial stereotypes is wrong. Any ideology that treats dissent as evidence of bigotry is wrong. Any ideology that denies our common humanity is wrong. You should say so.."

- Bari Weiss [4]

"Identity is neither a pre-existing essence - this is the traditionalist, transcendental, essentialist version - nor something totally shifting that could be used in an arbitrary and contingent way - this is the constructivist variant," she explains. An object that is both absolute and relative, identity is a "mental representation" to which each individual has recourse in order to construct himself or herself both by reference to the collective with which he or she is assimilated and by the affirmation of his or her specificity. "Plural" and "evolving", it changes in individuals according to the contexts (family, region, work...). For all that, specifies the researcher, if the identity is "temporal" and "narrative", it is not completely constructed."

- Nathalie Heinich [5]

"As one with something of a taste for the bizarre and eccentric, I might find the PC circus to be little more than a philistine but amusing bit of outrageous entertainment, akin to professional wrestling or the old freak shows of carnivals past, if it weren’t for the fact that these folks are hell-bent on imposing their “ideals” on the rest of us by force of the state. Totalitarian Humanism is a war on sovereignty. It is a war on the sovereignty of individuals against arbitrary and coercive authority, the sovereignty of non-state institutions against political authority, the sovereignty of organic communities against a centralized leviathan, the sovereignty of nations against global entities, the sovereignty of history, tradition, and culture against prescriptive and prohibitive ideology. Totalitarian humanism is an effort to reduce all of us to the level of dependent serfs on a plantation ruled by an army of overly zealous concerned mommies and busy-body social workers backed up by the S.W.A.T. team and paramilitary police. Give me beautyism or give me death."

- Keith Preston [6]

Quotes

Short Quotations

"If you can't control your own emotions, you have to control the behavior of others"

- Robin Skynner, cited by John Cleese

"In the final analysis, I argue that the Evergreen affair was the manifestation of a coherent social system implicated by a thick system of belief, characterized by victimhood morality and ethnocentric ideas, which ultimately resulted in a racially hierarchical social order."

- Shaun Cammack [7]

"When you assign every individual a place on the totem pole, and make it your goal to chop the top off the totem pole, you’re left with a shorter totem pole, with someone else at the top who needs to be chopped off."

- Handwaving Freakoutery [8]

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

― C. S. Lewis [9]

Long Quotations

Please note, these quotations are never full endorsements, they aim to make people see a broader perspective on the topic.

"Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which robes one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes."

- James Baldwin [10]

Why both sides of the culture war are wrong

"“Left” and “right” would be the obvious names for the two countercultures, but that could be misleading. These terms are not well-defined, and had different meanings during the countercultural era than they did before or after.

Our current left and right like to be called “progressive” and “traditional”; and the countercultures might have liked that too. However, I will suggest that this characterization is a deliberately misleading fiction, promoted by both.

It would be more accurate to cast the countercultures in religious terms, as “holism” versus “holiness.” Or, in ethical terms, as “permissive” versus “restrictive”; or in social terms as “egalitarian” versus “respecting hierarchical differences.”

These contrasts concern boundaries and distinctions, one of the main dimensions of meaningness. So I call the two countercultures “monist” and “dualist”:

Monism seeks to deny, dissolve, or weaken boundaries and distinctions. (Holism is nearly the same thing as monism.) It seeks to discover and strengthen connections.

Dualism seeks to fixate, establish, or strengthen boundaries and distinctions. (Holiness is all about sharpening the difference between the sacred or Godly and the profane or sinful.) It seeks to sever connections that cross apparent boundaries. Monism and dualism are both wrong, and both harmful. Every boundary is always both patterned and nebulous. Boundaries are not, cannot be, and should not be, either non-existent nor perfectly sharp. Severe problems, including our current culture war, follow from trying to eliminate or absolutize them. An understanding of participation, the stance that the resolves the monism/dualism confusion, may help resolve these conflicts."

- David Chapman [11]

Maximal narcissism vs optimal narcissism in the context of Anti-Oedipal Collective Psychology

1.

"Psychologically, at every phase and in many situations in life, conflicts arise where a person needs to balance the maternal function – self-priority, ego-centrism, desires, imagination, needs, interests and will – with the paternal function – objective truth, established societal and natural laws, collective priority, self-restraint and consequences. Finding a balance between these two functions is a lifelong endeavour, and mastery involves, to use the phrase from addiction psychology, living life on life’s terms. This mastery means the difference between what Erich Fromm refers to as maximal narcissism and optimal narcissism. In optimal narcissism, “the biologically necessary degree of narcissism is reduced to the degree of narcissism that is compatible with social cooperation” (Fromm, 1964, p. 76). In this short definition, we see the balancing of subjective interests with the demands of society around us. Maximal narcissism is a threat to survival, as its value judgments are prejudiced and biased; fair criticism elicits intense anger and is experienced as a hostile attack on their person. Given enough power – either individually or as a group – those who are maximally narcissistic may “attempt to transform reality [representing the paternal function] in such a way as to make it conform, to some extent, with [their] narcissistic self-image [representing the maternal function].”

2.

"The West has enjoyed a confluence of various social, cultural and political advances over the last several decades, including:

• rapid large-scale improvements of living standards of people,

• technological advancements which led to safer, more comfortable and prosperous lives of hundreds of millions of people,

• the absence of life-threatening conflicts, disasters and diseases (Covid-19 is a recent deviation from the norm),

• proliferation of individual and property rights which led to freedoms never seen in the history of humanity,

• and the emergence of social media where the individual has been put on public display with a reach never seen in history.

The above advancements have led to an inordinate prioritisation of individual preferences, styles, wishes, rights, needs and comforts. In oedipal terms, this cultural shift has led to an increased cathexis or psychological investment in the satisfaction of the subjective, while pleasure-denial, self-restraint, resilience, grit and endurance of discomfort have increasingly been pushed to the side as unnecessary at best, and oppressive, harmful and hateful at worst. Whole generations have lived with knowing mostly the maternal aspect of existence, with a very low appreciation of the paternal function of life. They grew up with three Great Untruths, two of which echo the failure of the oedipal myth: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, and Always trust your feelings (Haidt & Lukianoff, 2018, p. 14).

As Howard Schwartz (2016) wrote in his book on political correctness, the above developments and Western society’s response to these, have led to an anti-oedipal collective psychology that has prevailed over at least two generations."

- Jaco Van Zyl [12]

Social Justice Identitarianism is the New Cosmology of Capital

1.

"Social justice identity politics is functioning as a “successor” ideology to neoconservativism, and (I agree) with black Marxist Adolph Reed that it’s the core moral constellation of neoliberalism. Though coming from apparently different political traditions, they—and quite a few others—are essentially arguing the same thing: identity is how capitalism intends to perpetuate itself. This is really a change in cosmology. Identity relations are replacing class relations as the dominant field of political struggle, which mean we’re replacing functional and material relations with social characteristics. Formerly it was the capitalists against the working class, and everyone knew that these were functional positions (one owned, the other labored) rather than eternal or inherent characteristics. There was nothing inherent or intrinsic about the capitalist herself which made her the enemy, it was what she did and how she colluded with others to make sure she could keep doing it. There was nothing inherent or intrinsic to the working class that made them good or evil, but rather only a functional relationship of being exploited for their labor and the material state of having no access to land or the “means of production.” Within this newer cosmology, it’s because a person is cis-, or able-bodied, or male, or white that they are oppressive. None of these are functional relationships, but rather identity markers that point to something “inherent” about the oppressor. There’s also nothing functional about being black, or female, or trans, or disabled: they, too, are all identity markers pointing to an “inherent” victimization by the oppressors. In other words, in the older cosmology, a worker is exploited by a capitalist. In this successor cosmology, the black disabled trans woman is oppressed by the white cis heterosexual able-bodied man. Before, it was because of what a person did that injustice arose. Now, it is because of who a person is. This arrangement suits capitalism quite well, because it cannot challenge the exploitation of workers by the owning class. In fact, within it a capitalist can even claim to be oppressed and victimized by the people she exploits if she has more oppressed identity markers (black, trans, disabled, etc) than the people whose labor increases her wealth. It’s really an ideal situation for the capitalists. That’s why so many corporations, banks, and neoliberal politicians have readily adopted the language of identity and at least the aesthetic of diversity and equity in their hiring practices, management styles, and political platforms. They have every reason to be happy with this cosmological shift, since they still get to keep property relations intact as long as they offer more expression to identity concerns."

- Rhyd Wildermuth [13]

2.

"What happens when levelling is the only instinct left? When the culture is so empty, so purposeless, so uprooted, that it has forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct itself? More to the point: what happens when levelling is the instinct not of the poor, but of power? What happens when the destruction of borders, limits and boundaries benefits big tech, big money and those who drink from their spigot, rather than the small voices left thirsting in the fields? And what happens when big money uses the language of the small voices — the language of levelling — to tie up its work in pretty bows? This is where we are. The post-modern Left, which has seized the heights of so much of Western culture, is not some radical threat to the establishment: it is the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to “heteronormativity” to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments."

- Paul Klingnorths [14]

Keith Preston's Class Analysis of the Woke Coalition, and: what it means for the commons

"The exportation of totalitarian humanist revolution through American cultural imperialism will likely result in the repeat of America’s “culture” war in countries worldwide, with the same regional, local, tribal, and sectarian fragmentation. The resulting breakdown of states will result in the broader proliferation of fourth-generation warfare forces and non-state actors generally, which will create opportunities for bottom-up anti-imperialism through the creation of startup societies and federated networks."

- Keith Preston [15]

Identity is the least important thing about us

"Our identity is the least important thing about us. And yet, it is the thing we have become most committed to talking about. From the standpoint of a left politics, this is a profound mistake since what it means is that the political left -- increasingly invested in the celebration of diversity and the redress of historical grievance -- has converted itself into the accomplice rather than the opponent of the right. Diversity has become the left's way of doing neoliberalism, and antiracism has become the left's contribution to enhancing market efficiency. The old Socialist leader Eugene Debs used to be criticized for being unwilling to interest himself in any social reform that didn't involve attacking economic inequality. The situation now is almost exactly the opposite; the left today obsessively interests itself in issues that have nothing to do with economic inequality. And, not content with pretending that our real problem is cultural difference rather than economic difference, we have also started to treat economic difference as if it were cultural difference. .. if we can stop thinking of the poor as people who have too little money and start thinking of them instead as people who have too little respect, then it's our attitude toward the poor, not their poverty, that becomes the problem to be solved, and we can focus our efforts of reform not on getting rid of classes but on getting rid of what we like to call classism. The trick, in other words, is to stop thinking of poverty as a disadvantage, and once you stop thinking of it as a disadvantage then, of course, you no longer need to worry about getting rid of it. More generally, the trick is to think of inequality as a consequence of our prejudices rather than as a consequence of our social system and thus to turn the project of creating a more egalitarian society into the project of getting people (ourselves and, especially, others) to stop being racist, sexist, classist homophobes. The starting point for a progressive politics should be to attack that trick."

- WALTER BENN MICHAELS [16]

On the need to return to authentic identity politics

"When a group of black feminists called the Combahee River Collective coined the phrase “identity politics” in 1977, they imagined that the “seemingly personal experiences of individual Black women’s lives” would provide the foundation for a politics that is “actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression”. Their ideology began with self, but it was not self-obsessed. Ultimately, they knew their work would benefit everyone. When identities can be invoked to assert an unquestionable authority, marginalized people can get by making dubious or false claim Since then, identity politics have veered away from Combahee’s foundational ideals. We should return to them, not to appease the right wing but to reaffirm the importance of a progressivism that touts liberty and justice for all. Identity politics become flimsy when they devolve into shallow back-and-forths that conflate lived experience with sound political analysis. A worldview that moves us closer to equality doesn’t stem from living in a certain kind of body. It emerges from pursuing a certain kind of politics."

- Kimberly Foster [17]

Chloé Valdary on not abdicating our spiritual power of compassion

"I've realized the problem w/ recent definitions of racism isn't the notion that only people with power can be racist. It's that its adherents only understand power in the physical, material sense & not in the spiritual/soul sense which suggests that nearly everyone has power. If my character erodes & I mistreat my neighbor, & hate my brother because he looks differently from me, that has a *societal impact.* To say I don't have power because I don't hold a certain percentage of wealth is an attempt to abdicate moral responsibility. Such a view also ensures that inequality *continues* because the failure to treat people as responsible beings w/ moral agency contributes to the fetishization & caricaturing of blacks & whites alike. It also breeds spiritual impoverishment; we live in an interdependent society. Both conservatives and progressives are correct."

- Chloé Valdary [18]

Quotes on the darker sides of group identity theory and practice

1. Selected from Diane Musho Hamilton:

"As we move towards greater inclusivity we’re also seeing some unintended consequences, such as:

• Oppressive rules around speech and “political correctness”. There can seem to be a hypersensitivity to language and behavior that can create a culture of fear.

• Endless processes of blame and accusation that don’t seem to ever resolve.

• A victim-oppressor framework that doesn’t allow any other narratives to come forth.

• The inversion of power hierarchies instead of their transformation (with a new group of oppressors at the top instead of no oppressors there).

• A monoculture that only values a narrow range of attitudes, politics, personality types, and communication styles.

• The demonization of those with differing views."

(https://tendirections.com/inclusion-2-0/?)

2. Erich von Neumann

"As is demonstrated by a wealth of historical examples, every form of fanaticism, every dogma and every type of compulsive one-sidedness is finally overthrown by precisely those elements which it has itself repressed, suppressed, or ignored." - Depth Psychology and a New Ethic

"The shadow, which is in conflict with the acknowledged values, cannot be accepted as a negative part of one's own psyche and is therefore projected--that is, it is transferred to the outside world and experienced as an outside object. It is combated, punished, and exterminated as 'the alien out there' instead of being dealt with as one's own inner problem." [19]

3. Glenn Greenwald:

"Any set of rules for political discourse that subordinate the merit of an argument to the identity of the person advocating it is one that is inherently unhealthy and distorted. And that framework, undoubtedly growing in strength in elite U.S. precincts, is also producing a wide range of incentives, distortions and pathologies for how marginalization and its various identities are understood." [20]

4. Steven J. Lawrence:

"Stated frankly, resentment-based or supremacist ideologies have always made themselves available to what Eric Hoffer called the “True Believer”—those whose moral zealotry often masks the underlying ego triumphalism and need for domination that usurps and undermines the high-minded ideals that originally drew them to “the cause” or “the movement”. In the best of scenarios, we can reasonably hope that chaos and violence will not be the outcome when the adoption of extreme belief systems reaches critical mass. And, perhaps we can also rely on the belief that the rule of law, social norms based on human decency, and the legal (and armed) protection of a populace that is relatively non-traumatized by war, poverty and disease will not allow wide-scale chaos, disorder and political violence to happen. But, if history is a guide, it would serve us well to keep in mind how fragile our sense of safety, moral order and societal stability really is.

For all these reasons, it’s important that we question the frameworks and ideologies that we are being asked to adopt uncritically and to put into practice in our schools, governmental organizations and workplaces. If we truly want the world to be a better place, we will need to understand that us-against-them ideologies are deceptive and dangerous precisely because they offer a moral choice that ignores the full dimensionality of human experience and the possibility of badness in ourselves and goodness in our enemies." [21]

5. Eckhart Tolle

“A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only power there is, is contained within this moment: It is the power of your presence. Once you know that, you also realize that you are responsible for your inner space now - nobody else is - and that the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.”

Denying the Individual, denying the universal

"Oppressed group identities ... are constantly in conflict the way classes were always in conflict. And in this worldview, individuals only exist at all as a place where these group identities intersect. You have no independent existence outside these power dynamics. I am never just me. I’m a point where the intersecting identities of white, gay, male, Catholic, immigrant, HIV-positive, cis, and English all somehow collide. You can hear this echoed in the famous words of Ayanna Pressley: “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” An assertion of individuality is, in fact, an attack upon the group and an enabling of oppression.

Just as this theory denies the individual, it also denies the universal. There are no universal truths, no objective reality, just narratives that are expressed in discourses and language that reflect one group’s power over another. There is no distinction between objective truth and subjective experience, because the former is an illusion created by the latter. So instead of an argument, you merely have an identity showdown, in which the more oppressed always wins, because that subverts the hierarchy. These discourses of power, moreover, never end; there is no progress as such, no incremental inclusion of more and more identities into a pluralist, liberal unified project; there is the permanent reality of the oppressors and the oppressed. And all that we can do is constantly expose and eternally resist these power-structures on behalf of the oppressed."

- Andrew Sullivan [22]

See also: Andrew Sullivan on Truth and Power in Group Identity Theory

There are no identities, our struggle is with capital: Marc Fisher and Joe Corbett

1. Mark Fisher:

"“So what can we do now? First of all, it is imperative to reject identitarianism, and to recognise that there are no identities, only desires, interests and identifications...The bourgeois-identitarian left knows how to propagate guilt and conduct a witch hunt, but it doesn’t know how to make converts. But that, after all, is not the point. The aim is not to popularise a leftist position, or to win people over to it, but to remain in a position of elite superiority, but now with class superiority redoubled by moral superiority too. ‘How dare you talk – it’s we who speak for those who suffer!’ ...

The rejection of identitarianism can only be achieved by the re-assertion of class. A left that does not have class at its core can only be a liberal pressure group. Class consciousness is always double: it involves a simultaneous knowledge of the way in which class frames and shapes all experience, and a knowledge of the particular position that we occupy in the class structure. It must be remembered that the aim of our struggle is not recognition by the bourgeoisie, nor even the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. It is the class structure – a structure that wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it – that must be destroyed. The interests of the working class are the interests of all; the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, which are the interests of no-one. Our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital. ...

"We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication.""

- Mark Fisher [23]

2. Joe Corbett:

"What we see in the postmodern cultural identity politics of the SJW's is not “cultural marxism”, not only because it lacks any semblance of a marxist analysis or emphasis on working class solidarity, but also because it is fully compatible with the capitalist agenda of full consumer representation of all potential demographics, not by demands for a living wage or a green new deal but by demands for reparations for slavery, removing the glass ceiling and other barriers to full participation in capitalist markets by minorities, including equal representation on the boards of corporations to exploit and oppress the masses of workers. Rather than “cultural marxists” a more appropriate term for these “radicals” would be cultural liberals."

- Joe Corbett [24]

3. Adolph Reed:

"Even as a program for addressing racial disparities, antiracism is not much of a remedy for inequality. If the racial wealth gap were somehow eliminated up and down the distribution, 90 percent of black people would still have only 25 percent of total wealth, and the top 10 percent of blacks would still hold 75 percent. And this is only to be expected because in a society with sharp and increasing overall inequality, eliminating racial “gaps” in the distribution of advantages and disadvantages by definition does not affect the larger, and more fundamental, pattern of inequality."

- Adolph Reed [25]

Helen Pluckrose on Ideological Possession

"Throughout history, groups of humans have become filled with a self-righteous, burning fervor to uphold a moral order and rid society of corrupting influences. In so becoming, they have often also become possessed of a kind of collective ideologically-inspired madness and thereby inflicted great cruelty on their fellow men and women. This is a part of humanity that must be acknowledged and mitigated. Modern, secular, liberal democracy, which is rooted in reason, evidence, freedom of speech and tolerance, has done rather well at channelling these impulses into more productive courses."

- Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Mike Nayna [26]

Dyab Abou Jahah on choosing for solidarity

“It is time to "shut up and listen" you would hear them say. At other times they will ask you to "use your privilege" and "speak up".

If you say something they don't approve of, they will tell you to "educate yourself", or even propose to educate you. "Stop being toxic", "stop being fragile", stop these crocodile tears of "innocence". Sounds familiar?

If you are white and you have another approach to the fight against racism than what a "person of colour" is saying, you will very likely hear this. If you are a man and you try to make a point on gender equality you are very likely to hear it too. If you are heterosexual and you have a point to make in the fight against homophobia that does not please a gay activist, some version of this narrative may come your way. The problem we are facing today is that the debate on equality is transformed into a debate on identity. An identity that is not seen anymore as an expression of cultural realities, linguistic diversity or religious doctrine.

Identity from a minority perspective is nowadays focalised around two central characteristics: colour and gender.

Do not get me wrong, I am aware of the importance of colour and gender in the debate on equality. And I am not going to reproduce the classical leftist analysis claiming that inequality results from class differences and nothing else. That analysis is reductionist. It is also often used to keep oppression forms based upon racism and sexism in place.

Nevertheless, we are facing a big problem with the rising minority identity politics paradigm, and the intellectual intimidation tactics its adherents are using in the debate. This is risking to jeopardise the struggle for equality altogether.’

- Dyab Abou Jajah [27]

The corporate religion of late stage capitalism ?

"It’s not a coincidence that corporate human resources departments love to contract diversity consultants like DiAngelo to do anti-bias trainings. Trainings more than pay for themselves if they can demonstrate a commitment to an inclusive workplace in the event of later anti-discrimination lawsuits. They’re also a lot cheaper than paying workers better and addressing structural inequalities. The more that blame for discrimination can be shifted on to individual racist “Karens”, the less onus there is on powerful corporations, and the politicians who defend them, to make real changes.

We do know, for example, of a tool far more useful than unconscious bias trainings in creating respect and equality: unions. Recent work in the American Journal of Political Science notes that union membership reduced racial resentment among white workers and made them more likely to support policies that benefit black Americans.

Where writers like DiAngelo focus on the privilege that all whites, including the poorest, have, unions offer the prospect for multiracial organizing and the pursuit of collective gains."

"The approach of generations of labor organizers hasn’t been to deny privilege, but to bind people together in a common project".

— Bhaskar Sunkara [28]

"The reason Wokeism is so easy to adopt into a corporation is that it is also a product of late-stage capitalism; a last gasp of a system running out of steam. Its doctrine can now be found in most major companies. As Matt Taibbi has pointed out, the emphasis Robin DiAngelo and others place on ‘lifelong vigilance’ of power and privilege creates a situation where Wokeism can perpetually insert itself into the workplace– there can never be enough sensitivity trainers to cleanse the sin away. Just as our economies are based on the erroneous idea of infinite growth, Wokeism preaches infinite sin; the unholy union between the two is terrifying."

— Alexander Beiner [29]

"The principles of secularism hold that, no matter how strongly you believe your belief system to be true or how essential you think it is that all of society holds it to be true and lives according to its moral dictates, you do not have the right to impose it on anyone else. We currently live in societies that do a pretty good job of applying this rule to religion, but which have not yet recognised Critical Social Justice as the same kind of thing. Instead, Critical Social Justice is largely misunderstood as a continuation of the liberal civil rights movements, which worked to reform laws and to open up all opportunities to everyone, regardless of their identities, and whose principles can still, quite reasonably, be expected to be upheld by employers. This is a misunderstanding of Critical Social Justice. As shown above, Critical Social Justice is a very specific belief system, which revolves around several core truth claims, which have not been shown to be true."

— Helen Pluckrose [30]

Why language policing is emerging now

"I sketched the rise of a new normative kind of selfhood in the West, that of “psychological man.” I also suggested that understanding this development is an important element in understanding the times in which we live, because it lies behind so many of the seemingly disparate developments which are transforming our society, from sexual ethics to current concerns about racism. In today’s essay, I want to focus my argument on how this development is reshaping our cultural values: first, it has shifted attention to the use of language as central in discussion of oppression; and second, it is transforming traditional social virtues into political vices.

To return to my grandfather whom I mentioned in yesterday’s essay: for him oppression was a matter of not being able to find work, of not being paid a fair day’s wage for an honest day’s work, of not being able to provide for his family. For today’s psychological self, oppression is a far broader concept with far less tangible, stable content. Oppression involves making people feel bad about themselves, less than fully human, or preventing them from being outwardly that which they are inwardly. In practice, this means that much of what is now considered oppression is linguistic in character. Words become all-important because words are speech-acts by which we acknowledge or deny the identity of another. We all intuitively understand this: to use a racial slur is not to describe someone but to denigrate them, to do something to them, to put them in their place. Words are, to use the hyperbolic jargon of our cultural moment, instruments of violence because injury is conceptualized in psychological terms. This is why speech codes are now so important. Even the accidental use of an inappropriate pronoun can be seen as an assault on someone’s person because it is seen as a denial of their identity.

Policing language thus becomes central to a society constituted by psychological selves. The net result of this is that matters once considered basic social goods such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion become problematic. They may have been virtues to the American Founders, but today they are rapidly coming to be seen as vices. Where the psychological self is normative, speech becomes violence and freedom of speech thus a license for violence. This in turn creates the strangest of situations: a society built on the notion of radical individual autonomy where the policing of language by the authorities becomes a vital part of the social contract. Individual freedom perversely comes to require political authoritarianism."

- Carl Trueman [31]

How the purity spiral is weakening activism from the inside

"I feel compelled to do the same things as an activist a decade later. I self-police what I say in activist spaces. I stopped commenting on social media with questions or pushback on leftist opinions for fear of being called out. I am always ready to apologize for anything I do that a community member deems wrong, oppressive, or inappropriate- no questions asked. The amount of energy I spend demonstrating purity in order to stay in the good graces of fast-moving activist community is enormous. Activists are some of the judgiest people I’ve ever met, myself included. There’s so much wrongdoing in the world that we work to expose. And yet, grace and forgiveness are hard to come by in these circles. At times, I have found myself performing activism more than doing activism. I’m exhausted, and I’m not even doing the real work I am committed to do. It is a terrible thing to be afraid of my own community members, and know they’re probably just as afraid of me. Ultimately, the quest for political purity is a treacherous distraction for well-intentioned activists."

- Frances Lee [32]

For more:

* "Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History": This article in the Intercept shows how literally every single 'left-liberal NGO' has imploded from the inside: https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-infighting-callout-culture/

* "The End of Progressive Intellectual Life": This article from Tablet shows the closure of intellectual diversity in the same NGO world: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-end-of-progressive-intellectual-life

The Tactical/Strategic Critique

"This is a near perfect crystallization of my problems with the modern "woke" left and it's approach to the problem of racial inequality. Another good example of this idea is the overly racialized rhetoric of police misconduct. Substantial evidence exists that this is not a problem exclusive to the black community. And while it undoubtedly affects blacks disproportionately, much of that is attributable to socioeconomic differences and the correspondingly higher rates of violent crime and police interaction.

This is not to say that attributing such disparities to racism per se is entirely invalid, and the visceral reaction of the polity to the abundance of visual evidence of blacks being brutalized by police (coupled with the media's startling negligence in covering similar instances involving white victims) is certainly understandable. But in failing to develop a non-racialized (or a less exclusively racialized) movement against police brutality, we deprive blacks and their allies of an expanded, strengthened political coalition better positioned to make real gains. Potential allies attempting to make this case are at best turned away, and at worst persecuted as trying to "erase" black pain by decoupling the problem from the prevailing narrative of anti-racism.

Furthermore, we place undue faith in the ability to directly counteract the subtle racial bias that is an inevitable *result* of social disparities (as much or moreso than it is the cause), without addressing those disparities themselves as primary. This leads to endless well-intended but ultimately futile efforts at "anti-bias" training, with it's ritual ablutions to confront one's privilege and "fragility" that ultimately serve as more of a self-help regimen to manage white people's feelings of guilt than an actual corrective to racial inequities."

- Eric73 [33]

The Class and Political Psychology Dynamics behind Political Correctness

Wesley Yang:

"Political correctness .. has become: a mode of exercising power within an intramural contest between rival elites. In this contest, the fetishistic invocation of the “marginalized” is a tool the powerful use to increase the power of a given group, often to the detriment of the very people they purport to represent. The study shows that virtually no one who does not directly benefit from the exercise of this power (in the form of sinecures, professional advancement, or the destruction of rivals within liberal institutions) supports it.

Political correctness can thus be defined as the ideology of a distinct class of petty officeholders and office seekers within the therapeutic state. Their dogmas inexorably point in the direction of, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. put it back in 1991, “a regime so heavily policed” as to be “inconsistent with democracy.”

PC also refers to the specific means that this faction has adopted of attempting to police dissent out of existence in pursuit of what it calls justice. Their ideology draws on the sometimes brilliant and penetrating, and often exasperating and pretentious, work of critics of Western concepts of truth, reason, and law who can broadly be classified as “postmodernists.” Their ideology metastasizes a complex and rebarbative set of critiques of power into an active parapolitical program seeking to transform the world along, as Gates put it, “sweepingly utopian” lines. Gates was writing before the microaggression reporting systems, the compulsory implicit bias training, and the social media agon had even been dreamed up. But he foresaw all of it.

What matters most about this faction is not that they are annoying. It is that institutional power increasingly defers to them. That deference makes them potent, despite their small numbers and unpopular opinions, and the lack of grounding for those opinions in American custom and law.

The politically correct exploit two aspects of group psychology to dominate what is in fact a far more numerous group. They exploit the power that intolerant minorities, whose energies are focused on a single issue, have over majorities whose preferences and attachments are more diffuse. They benefit from what social psychologists have termed “the false enforcement of unpopular norms,” a phrase that describes the tendency, as observed in both experimental settings and in the wider world, of widespread conformance to unpopular norms out of social pressure, and the accompanying desire to signal the genuineness of one’s conviction by out-competing all others in zealous enforcement of norms in which they do not themselves believe.

Since political correctness is above all about an intra-elite battle among elites—a form of nonelectoral political struggle for hegemony within ruling institutions—it is there that the battle will be contested."

(https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/political-correctness-minority)

Robert Hanna:

"Another paradoxical feature of the oppressor-class-curated character of the compensation process under distributive social justice is that the oppressed groups selected for compensation are identified under the very same labels–race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, etc., etc.–that the oppressor-class originally picked out arbitrarily in order to target those people for rationally unjustified and immoral discrimination and oppression.

Hence the very “identities” that oppressed groups then adopt as special sources of moral virtue and social solidarity for the purposes of qualifying for distributive social justice, are in fact nothing but mirror-reflected versions of the arbitrary discriminatory point-of-view of the oppressors, that “internalize the oppressor,” and only produce further coercion and conflict via mirror-reflected discrimination and mirror-reflected oppression.

The currently popular concept of “intersectionality,” which emphasizes ways in which members of different identity-groups can suffer the same kinds of oppression and the same kinds of failures to respect their human dignity, and thereby find social solidarity in that way, is rationally and morally more cogent than identitarianism; but it remains, at best, an unstable halfway-house between internalizing-the-oppressor on the one hand, and a fully universalist and dignitarian approach to the problem of oppression on the other."

(https://againstprofphil.org/2018/12/19/the-paradox-of-distributive-social-justice-and-what-is-to-be-done/)

Empowerment practice and its intrapersonal work, as practical solution for prefigurative bubbles

"An abundance of literature demonstrates that mandatory diversity trainings not only fail on their own terms, but can make things worse. That is because every diversity training I’ve experienced, including those I organized and facilitated earlier in my career as a diversity officer, begin with either the behavioral or the interactional component of empowerment. They tend to skip the intrapersonal component that prepares an individual for fair-minded critical thinking and coexistence in the first place. Mindfulness and metacognition should be a much bigger focus if we truly want to get things done. Otherwise, we may remain in our prefigurative bubbles, running on metaphorical treadmills, getting nowhere."

- Erec Smith [34]

For more: Empowerment Theory for Anti-Racist Practice

Cornell West on the difference between schooling and education

"In our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.

The Western canon is, more than anything, a conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices and the excellence of voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else in the world. We should never cancel voices in this conversation, whether that voice is Homer or students at Howard University. For this is no ordinary discussion.

The Western canon is an extended dialogue among the crème de la crème of our civilization about the most fundamental questions. It is about asking “What kind of creatures are we?” no matter what context we find ourselves in. It is about living more intensely, more critically, more compassionately. It is about learning to attend to the things that matter and turning our attention away from what is superficial.

Howard University is not removing its classics department in isolation. This is the result of a massive failure across the nation in “schooling,” which is now nothing more than the acquisition of skills, the acquisition of labels and the acquisition of jargon. Schooling is not education. Education draws out the uniqueness of people to be all that they can be in the light of their irreducible singularity. It is the maturation and cultivation of spiritually intact and morally equipped human beings.

The removal of the classics is a sign that we, as a culture, have embraced from the youngest age utilitarian schooling at the expense of soul-forming education. To end this spiritual catastrophe, we must restore true education, mobilizing all of the intellectual and moral resources we can to create human beings of courage, vision and civic virtue."

- Cornell West [35]

In the context of integral theory and spiral dynamics, is this movement a sign of "green hegemony", or not ?

This is using the ideas of Clare Graves, and the colour coding of Spiral Dynamics:

"Cowan & Todorovic advise caution in relation to people claiming to be certain levels, for example Turquoise (H-U), or D-Q (blue) or E-R (orange) which may be masquerading as F-S (green):

…we see the relationship that has confounded so many bright people – green-sounding ideas slid back into an absolute, authoritarian, dichotomous way of thinking about them, maybe even into an aggressive and rigidly dogmatic form. That’s not FS in operation, but it can certainly look Green at the surface. Sometimes, people may have developed a broader way of conceptualising (such as R/orange), but be in a situation where they are coping with life of prior levels (such as C/red)."

- [36]

For a specialist discussion, see Henry Andrews on the Mean Green Meme.

On the Anti-Democratic Nature of the New Identity Politics

Wesley Yang:

""We can therefore see here what the Successor Regime aims for and how it goes about obtaining its ends, which in turn tells us about the sociology of the movement of which it is a part: the manufacture of consensus around a range of issues through the capture of disciplinary power by adherents sharing a common set of values and goals that seeks to rule out various aspects of political action as presumptively illegitimate (border control, policing, prisons, standardized testing) by policing any debate out of them out of existence. It is a vision of a radically less disciplinary society of the street obtained through a radically more disciplinary society of the seminar room, workplace, board room, and bedroom -- an ongoing distributed process of moral revolution without central direction but converging relentlessly around the same handful of goals — a politics of persuasion without persuasion, abjuring persuasion for coercion.

The process evades electoral politics entirely, simply erupting occasionally in enactments and pronouncements that appear to us in the guise of fait d'accompli, as the newspeak moves seamlessly from student life offices to the language of offices of the US federal government. "

(https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/undocumented-citizens-and-the-new)

We Need to Repair the bridge between rationality and meta-rationality

David Chapman:

"Kegan describes three stages of adult development (numbered 3, 4, and 5). We could call them pre-rational, rational, and meta-rational. These stages are distinctive, internally consistent, relatively-well-functioning modes for organizing one’s thinking, one’s self, and one’s relationships. They might be described as “islands of psychological stability.” To progress from one island to the next, you must cross a heaving sea of psychological confusion, in which the previous mode no longer seems functional, but you cannot yet operate in the next mode reliably. These stage transitions are emotionally and cognitively difficult, and typically take several years, during which one may think, feel, and act inconsistently.

Ideally, a society and culture provides “bridges” of support from one stage to the next. To some extent, ours does. However, Kegan pointed out that we have allowed the bridge from stage 3 to 4 to fall into disrepair. We are not adequately teaching young adults how to be rational, systematic, or modern. This is the central theme of his In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life.

This problem seems to have only gotten worse in the two decades since he wrote that. That is what makes me fear civilizational collapse. Keeping modern institutions operating requires cognitively modern, rational operators. We may be destroying the conditions necessary to produce them." (https://meaningness.com/metablog/stem-fluidity-bridge?)

See also: Post-Modernism Has Destroyed the Bridge to Rationality\

Reasonable vs Extreme Diversity

"Christine Jorgensen was the first trans woman on record back in 1953. Individuals who actually have better lives after transitioning as adults are relatively rare. They aren't the problem. The problem started with the notion that gender is arbitrary, and socially constructed, so that anyone can self identify as any gender they imagine themselves to be. It started out with the acceptance that men can be feminine and women can be masculine, which opens up gender expression to some extent. By now it has gone way beyond the original notion of relaxing gender stereotypes to the point where gender is being deconstructed altogether. It is especially terrible when it is being foist upon children and adolescents. This tells me that diversity and inclusion can be taken to extremes, regardless of the good intentions."

- Zel Schu [37]

Ending the era of spiritual malpractice

"Exorcizing gender ideology from society will require a total divestment from the opinions of the so-called experts; it will require us to commit to the truth, beauty, and goodness that have allowed man to flourish, and the absence of which, as we see today, cause man to suffer needlessly. It may be lawyers that get us out of the most rampant excesses of gender ideology, especially with respect to children, but we will only be out of the woods, so to speak, when we address not just the medical malpractice of transgender healthcare but the spiritual malpractice that led to gender ideology gaining prominence in the first place."

- Neera Deshpande [38]

Doug Mann et al. on the insurmountable political contradictions of identitarian theory

"The chief dogma of The Identitarian Church is that our biological identity – our race, sex/gender, and sexual orientation – is what makes us who we are, not our choices, our actions, or our ideas. We are prisoners of our biology.

Ironically, identitarians believe that gender and sexuality, and for some race, are socially constructed – imposed on us by impersonal social forces. Yet for some mysterious reason, they also believe that everyone is free to choose their own gender and its associated pronouns. “Sex does not exist” claims one of their high priests.

So we have three mutually contradictory first principles: biological determinism, sociological determinism, and freedom of will based on “blank slate” psychology. These ideas cannot be coherently squared with each other."

- Doug Mann [39]

Wesley Yang et al. on the Catastrophic Degradation of Science

"The ersatz “scientific consensus” cited on behalf of “gender affirming care” rests upon a foundation of quicksand. It is a Collateralized Debt Obligation constructed out of a mass of underpowered — at best methodologically flawed, at worst downright fraudulent — individual studies that make only the most perfunctory attempts to qualify as data-gathering. Each constituent part is invalid in itself and is aggregated into a larger whole that compounds rather than mitigates the weakness of the individual parts. The resulting structure is then blessed with a Triple-A rating by a credentialed member of the scientific clerisy with activist commitments to the cause whose declaration that the benefits of “gender affirming care” are “settled science” is then uncritically broadcast by the NGO lobbies that dominate Democratic party messaging and mainstream media coverage of the issue.

It takes only a very cursory understanding of research method to be able to see this once you look into the studies themselves."

- JOSÉ DUARTE, PHD AND WESLEY YANG [40]

The Role of Cancel Culture in Transition Times

"“Cancel Culture” might be a new term, but ruling classes directing commoners rage against their most valuable citizens to suit their own interests is anything but. Socrates was put to death for corrupting the youth; if he were born in Nazi Germany, he would be called a Jewish sympathizer, in the Soviet Union he’d be called a capitalist, if he were born in America he’d be called a racist sexist homophobic transphobic anti-vaxxer. We really do have to do everything to excess. When times are good and the stability of ruling classes are secure, they integrate these types of people into the system, harness their talents, and society thrives from the fruits of their labor. When times are bad and their stability is uncertain, they demonize them and cast themselves as the protagonists in their duplicitous narrative; manipulating the weakest, dumbest, most gullible, conformist, cowardly members of their population into doing their bidding."

- Harry Bergeron [41]

Key Resources

• New Discourses: project for political dialogue by James Lindsay, but also the construction of a detailed encyclopedia on the genesis of identitarian concepts, taken from the original sources, with commentary. The main aim of these three authors is the defense of the positive legacies of modernity.

Key Articles

• Perhaps the most complete analysis of all the combined reasons why the current form of identity politics emerged, and why it is a long-term phenomema that will be very hard to dislodge for 'decades': Read N.S. Lyons' analysis here

• The Role of Nonprofits in the Genesis of Identity Politics. By Jan Calloway in Damage magazine. [https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/think-tanked Think-Tanked: How Progressive Nonprofits Went Over the Waterfall

• Only the Economic Left Can Beat the Woke. By David Rieff.

• Robert Bly on the Culture of Inversion and Self-Colonisation in the Sibling Society

• How_the_Monism_of_the_Sixties_Counterculture_Prepared_for_Wokeness. By David Chapman. The culture war as a struggle between 'progressive' monism (doing away with distinctions) vs 'conservative' dualism (strengthening distinctions).

• Wokism as Simulated Religion: "Just as our economies are based on the erroneous idea of infinite growth, Wokeism preaches infinite sin; the unholy union between the two is terrifying."

• A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Identity Politics. By Jaco Van Zyl.

I strongly recommend reading the full article from Alexander Beiner.

Introductions

Bear in mind that when conservatives and parents movements', or the original progressive egalitarians (including African-American Marxists scholars) oppose CRT, they are opposing an actual practice and ideology, but that these critiques are aimed as CRT as it appears today not as it was originally constituted.

To understand this distinction, see: Realist vs Idealist Interpretations of CRT

This article contrasts identitarian ideology with the 'classic' left positioning: Comparison Between Woke Identitarian vs Classic Left Antiwoke Positioning

• Psychological Structure Underlying the Critical Social Justice Worldview: Key Features of the Critical Social Justice Worldview, by Jaco van Zyl.

As recommended by the site, Social Justice Evolution

• "It will be helpful for visitors to this site to begin with the distinction between the Civil Rights movements of the 1950’s and 60’s, -which were inspired by the principles of universal liberalism- and contemporary Critical Social Justice (CSJ) movements, which draw upon a different set of principles including social constructivism and group identity. For a concise examination of these differences, we recommend the essay, “Identity Politics Does Not Continue the Work of the Civil Rights Movements”.

• "It will also be helpful to understand the distinction between the general principles of social justice -which most people rightly support- and the specific ideology that many are now calling Critical Social Justice. For a brief primer on this distinction, we recommend this short essay by Rohan Loveland called Universal Social Justice: A Necessary Alternative to Critical Social Justice.

See also:

• Why be concerned with a few thousand cancellations, rituals of degradation and berufsverbot for dissenters ? Because it's just always a beginning, not where it ends. Read this absolutely stunning essay by James Lindsay: Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism

• Why Group-Based Disparities Are Not Necessarily Directly Related To Discrimination By Zach Goldberg: Group disparities ≠ discrimination

• In Defense of Open Research on Human Capabilities. How Stifling Debate Around Race, Genes and IQ Can Do Harm. By Noah Carl. Evolutionary Psychological Science volume 4, pages399–407 (2018) [42]

How-To

• Strategic and tactical recommendations to fight identitarian policies in school boards: Playbook to Fight Woke School Board Takeovers

More detailed considerations

• Review of Progressive Anti-Identitarian Views vs Wokism

• A very good introduction of the issues raised, by Micha Narberhaus: Critiquing the Dogmatic Versions of Group Identity Theory

• A must-read and one of the first progressive call to arms: Mark Fisher's Vampires’ Castle

• Social Justice Ideology Does Not Foster Egalitarianism. By Michael Rectenwald [43]

• Reflections on Intersectionality

• An Open Letter of the Non-Identitarian Left to the Misunderstanding Right

• Slavoj Zizek on the Role of the Superego in Identity Political Suppression

Adolph Reed Jr., Malcolm Kyeyune : Race and Class

• Identity Is Functioning As the New Imperialist Cosmology. By Rhyd Wildermuth.

• The Class Path to Racial Liberation. By Adaner Usmani and David Zachariah. Catalyst, VOL 5 NO 3 FALL 2021: "To choose race-based politics or coalitions over class-based ones is to elevate the interests of the rich over the interests of the poor."

"The debate is also a debate about strategy. What kinds of coalitions should egalitarians build? And what kinds of remedies should these coalitions demand? Some people defend race-based coalitions and race-targeted remedies like reparations. In the second part of this essay, we address those egalitarians who dedicate themselves to the specific goal of reducing racial inequality (e.g., the gap in earnings between the median black and the median white person). We argue that even these egalitarians will find that race-based politics has fatal limits. In societies in which racially oppressed groups are a minority of the population, race-based coalitions are fatally constrained by demography. Thus, even if all one cares about is racial inequality, race-based politics are a dead end. Class-based politics are the only viable route to racial liberation. To defend this conclusion, we argue that conventional race-based and class-based goals can be conceptualized as different ways of redressing inequality in modern societies. We show that these two agendas will have radically different bases of support. Partisans of “race-based” politics appeal to electoral coalitions built on the support of the black population. They will find it impossible to build viable electoral or working-class coalitions because, in the United States, they have nothing to offer to a majority of the potential members of either group. “Class-based” politics, by contrast, can be anchored in either the disruptive power of a multiracial working class or in electoral coalitions of the poor.1 Class-based politics are thus a much more promising vehicle for egalitarian change in the advanced capitalist world. In the final part of the essay, we argue that, even in countries where the parameters of racial demography furnish more hospitable foundations for race-based politics, the case for class-based over race-based strategies is still overwhelming."

• How race and class are related. By Stan Goff. (recommended)

• "Affirmative action should be based on class, not race. Focusing on the disadvantaged of all races is fairer and more appealing, writes Richard Kahlenberg, a scholar."

[44]

• The Myth of Class Reductionism. By Adolph Reed: "Centrist Democrats and left-identitarians are bound in shared embrace of a particularist, elite-driven politics .. This .. political vision, - at the expense of long-term, movement-driven, majoritarian strategies at all levels of government — threatens to preempt hopes of restoring the public-good model of governance that was at the heart of postwar prosperity and foundational to the civil rights movement." ; see also: The Argument against Race Reductionism ; By Adolph Reed; New Labor Forum 29(2):36-43 ; May 2020

• Antiracism as a Neoliberal Alternative to the Left. By Adolph Reed Jr. Dialectical Anthropology volume 42, pages105–1152, 2018

[45]: "Antiracist politics now is fundamentally antagonistic to a left politics of broadly egalitarian social transformation."

• Why Liberals Separate Race from Class. by Touré F. Reed. The tendency to divorce racial disparities from economic inequality has a long liberal lineage. Jacobin, August 22, 2015

• Strongly recommended:

1. Malcolm Kyeyune on Identity Politics as a Response to Elite Over-Production
2. Lama Abu Odeh on How the New Diversity Liberalism Replaces the Progressoriat as the New Academic Ruling Class

Intersectionality and Religion

• Andrew Sullivan: Is Intersectionality a Religion?
• Rhyd Wildermuth:
  • Role of the Soul in Woke Ideology‎
  • Esoteric or Mystical Nature of Race Within the Neoliberal Anti-Racist Framework‎‎

Essentialism

• What’s Wrong With Essentialism‎ ?Group Identity Essentialism and the Endorsement of Social Hierarchies‎

• Group Identity Essentialism and the Endorsement of Social Hierarchies‎

Gender

• The Double Hijacking of the Feminist Movement.

Testimonies

• Cancel Culture Is Built on the Culture of Exploitation and Free Labour. A personal testimony from Budapest, Hungary: by Orsolya Bajusz:

Key Books

My provisional recommendation:

1. Cynical Theories is a stellar account of the evolution of the ideas in academia, which explains how identity politics is rooted in the evolution of postmodern thought
2. The Coddling of the American Mind, is an account of how these ideas got hold of the Generation Z student body, and introduced a new regime in the universities
3. The Madness of Crowds is an account of how the students entered society, and started influencing and taking over a multitude of institutions in the anglo-saxon world, to generally detrimental effect
4. The book by Erec Smith, a slightly more complex read, shows the disempowering effects of the ideology on minority students
5. The books by black Marxist scholars Alfred and Toure Reed are very useful to root identity politics in a solid class analysis.
6. For cultural critics from the conservative side, see the books by Carl Trueman and Mary Eberstadt, focusing on gender and sexuality as related to the development of a post-religious self.

The booklist:

Class

• Touré F. Reed’s Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism: "presents a forceful critique of race reductionism and makes a persuasive case for the return to a redistributive, public goods approach to governance; reveals race reductionism to be a class politics that reinforces black precarity."

[46]

• We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality and the Rise of a New Elite. by Musa Al-Gharbi. Princeton University Press, 2021.

• David Goodhart. Head Hand Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century. "how the expansion of higher education ... has distorted political life." [47]

• Catherine Liu. Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class.

• The Conformist Rebellion: Marxist Critiques of the Contemporary Left. By Elena Louisa Lange and Joshua Pickett. Depaolis, 2022 [48]

"Instead of criticising the impersonal rule of capitalism, today's left focuses on consternation. With the turn from Marx to identity politics, it can no longer understand capitalism - nor contribute to its overcoming."

Culture

• The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars. By Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018: "explaining the nation’s shift from a culture of honor, to a culture of dignity, to one of victimhood"

• The Coddling of the American Mind, is an account of how these ideas got hold of the Generation Z student body, and introduced a new regime in the universities

• Batya Ungar-Sargon. Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.

Development Issues

• Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously. by Olúfemi Táíwò. Hurst, 2022.

Education

• Undoctrinate. How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools—and What We Can Do About It. By Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder. Simon and Schuster, 2021 [49]

• Luke Rosiak on the Race to the Bottom in American Public Education. Book: Race to the Bottom. By Luke Rosiak.

Gender and Sexuality

• How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution. By Carl Trueman.

• Helen Joyce. Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.

• Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. Mary Eberstadt. Templeton Press, 2019.

• Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. by Kathleen Stock. (Fleet, £16.99) [50]

• Female Erasure. Ruth Barrett, editor. Tidal Time, 2019. [51]

• Andrew Doyle. The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World.

Health and Psychotherapy

• Cynical Therapies. Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice. Edited by Dr Val Thomas. Ocean Reeve Publishing, 2023

Politics and Institutional Capture

• How Woke Won. Joanne Williams. Shepherd, [52]: on the very rapid capture of governmental and public institutions in the UK.

• The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics by Richard Hanania. Broadside Books (September 2023)

• Christopher F. Rufo. America’s Cultural Revolution: "a landmark study of America’s radicalization since the 1960s." review

Race

• A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment. By Erec Smith: don't let yourself be discouraged by the academic title, this is the most pragmatic book offering more efficient solutions to combat racism and to strengthen those that suffer from it, and need common struggle to overcome it.

• Erec Smith. The Lure of Disempowerment: Reclaiming Agency in the Age of CRT: [53]: "seeks to remedy a ubiquitous problem we see in anti-racist activism in the academy and academy-adjacent spaces: disempowerment. This is the tendency to embrace victimhood and label opposing or even altered views as violent and inherently racist.

• Toward Freedom. The Case Against Race Reductionism. by Touré F. Reed. Verso, : " the road to a more just society for African Americans and everyone else, the fate of poor and working-class African Americans is inextricably linked to that of other poor and working-class Americans."

• Transcending Racial Divisions: Will You Stand By Me? By Christine Louis Dit-Sully: a historical account of race ideology up to contemporary identity politics.

• Woke Racism. How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. By John McWhorter. Penguin / Random House, 2021 [54]

• Wilfred Reilly. Hate Crime Hoax. Recommended by John McWhorter.

• Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics. Olúfemi Táíwò. Haymarket Books, 2022. See: Elite Capture of Identity Politics

Society

• The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray. Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019: the conservative critique.

• Frank Furedi. Hundred Years of Identity Crisis: The Culture War Over Socialisation. De Gruyter, 2021.

• The Identity Trap. By Yascha Mounk. Penguin / Random House, 2023

[55]

Spirituality

• American Awakening, Joshua Mitchell: " an invaluable resource in breaking down the religious categories and pathologies of identity politics. If we are to understand the crisis of American communities, the crisis of American politics, or the crisis of the American citizen, we must first understand the religious “substitutism” that is taking place." [56]

Theory and Philosophy

• Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity ― and Why This Harms Everybody, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Pitchstone Publishing (August 25th, 2020): this is a genealogy of identitarian thought, through the different phases of the evolution of postmodernism in academia. First, classical postmodernism, which teaches the relativity of all things through deconstruction; then, applied postmodernism, which reflects the desire to apply these insights, and leads to the creation of new disciplines such as Critical Race Theory; but finally, in the third phase, the re-essentializing of the categories of race and gender, leading to 'reified postmodernism'. A highly recommended, very well documented book, using multiple excerpts from the protagonists directly.

• Springtime for Snowflakes: "Social Justice" and Its Postmodern Parentage. By Michael Rectenwald.,New English Review Press, 2018 [57]; see our entry: The Social Justice Movement and Its Postmodern Parentage

• The Ideology of Tyranny. The Use of the Neo-Gnostic Myth in American Politics. Guido Preparata. Palgrave-MacMillan,2007

Political gnosticism emerges once humanity expects paradise to occur in the earthly future, and no longer in the transcendent realm. It sees a fallen world with evil forces, that must be combatted to regain paradise.

• Left Is Not Woke. by Susan Neiman. Polity, 2023

• The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism, see the book: I FEEL, THEREFORE I AM: THE TRIUMPH OF WOKE SUBJECTIVISM. By Mark Goldblatt. Bombardier Books, 2023 [58]

A very promising book on the absolute subjectivism that underlies the ideology.

Key Movements

Please read this advice/how-to artice if you are being targetted: Recommendations To Defend Yourself Against Cancel Culture Attacks (we do not endorse all recommendations); Short intro to the pluralistic movements.

May favourite so far is definitely FAIR in the US, because it combines many progressive voices in the mix.

• If you need support, go here: The Solid Ground (SG), a peer support community. SG is a bi-partisan supportive community for anyone concerned about the imposition of Critical Social Justice. Founded by Jody Shaw et al.

Generic, Ideology Critique

• New Discourses, with James Lindsay
• Plebity Free Speech Fund, "which exists to aid those who have been fired or otherwise significantly harmed as a result of their speech." [59]
• Social Justice Reformation, depository

Education, Speech Rights, Open Inquiry

• Academic Freedom Alliance, with Cornell West
• Committee for Academic Freedom - UK [60]
• Counterweight, with Helen Pluckrose (UK) (initiative is closed)
• Foundation for Individual Rights in Education , USA
• Free Speech Union, UK
• Freedom in the Arts
• Heterodox Academy, with Jonathan Haidt, USA
• New Tolerance Campaign: "a watchdog organization mobilizing Americans to confront intolerance double-standards by establishment institutions, civil rights groups, universities, and socially-conscious brands".

[61]

• Scientific Freedom Network - Germany
• Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences
• Undoctrinate: protecting critical thinking in US schools (K12)
• University of Austin: project to recreate a pluralistic university dedicated to truth-seeking

Gender and Sexuality

• Declaration on Women's Sex-Based Rights: "The Declaration reaffirms women and girls' sex-based rights, and challenges the discrimination we experience from the replacement of the category of sex with that of ‘gender identity.’"
• Fourth Wave Now
• Gender Exploratory Therapy Association
• Genspect: an international alliance of professionals, trans people, detransitioners, parent groups and others who seek high-quality care for gender-related distress, emerging as a leading organisation that offers an alternative to WPATH
• ReIME: " improving ethical long term care and treatment for gender non-conforming children and youth."
• Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine
• Terf is a Slur documents the harassment and misogyny of current identity politics

Psychotherapy

• Critical Therapy Antidote (UK), for psychotherapy professionals and practitioners
• Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science

To read:

• Against Social Justice Therapy. Evan Dunn

Race and Dignity

See: Proposed Political Measures To Reduce Identitarian Racialism

• Don't Divide Us, UK
• Equiano Project, UK
• Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, USA

Key People

Key progressive critics of identity politics:

1. Paul Gilroy
2. A.Sivanandan
3. Anthony Appiah
4. Edward Said
5. Kenan Malik

African-American Voices in the USA

1. Coleman Hughes,
2. John McWhorter,
3. Denzel Washington,
4. Frances S. Lee,
5. Thomas Chatteron Williams,
6. Kmele Foster,
7. Dr. Carlos Hoyt,
8. Cedrick-Michael Simmons,
9. Ayishat Akanbi,
10. Glenn Loury,
11. Afrika Brooke,
12. Derrick Blackman,
13. John Wood Jr.
14. Adolph Reed Jr.,
15. Greg Thomas,
16. Shelby Steele

Key Podcasts

• Progressive Anti-Cancel-Culture Podcast

Key Resources

• Critical Race Training in Education: map and directory of trainings in the U.S. [62]

• Canceled People Database : "a database of people who have been "canceled". [63]

• Wokal Distance has several brilliant and well documented twitter threads, such as distance explaining the dynamics of cancel culture: [64]

Alternatives to CRT Approaches

I strongly recommend reading this article critical of 'trauma-inducing training approaches': Francis Weller on Trauma Culture vs Initiation Culture

Facilitation

• Moral Courage College
• Open Mind Platform
• Theory of Enchantment

Education

• Distance to 100‎ : "focuses on “the gap between 100% proficiency for all students and [their] current performance levels.” Rowe believes that such an approach would reveal the common c..."
• FAIRstory Anti-Racist Curriculum‎‎
• Merit, Fairness and Equality Framework vs DEI Framework
• Book: Undoctrinating Politicized Classrooms
• A thread on identity politics in education, by Wokal Distance,https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1278865200817438721

Key Videos

• Very good introduction on why the current ideology is harmful for emancipatory struggles: Erec Smith on Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition‎‎

See also:

• Ayishat Akanbi on Replacing the Moral Superiority of Political Correctness with Compassion and Understanding

• Benjamin A. Boyce on What Happened at Evergreen State College

• Mike Nayna on the Grievance Studies Story

• Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay's Critical Introduction to Group Identity Theory

• Touré Reed on the Pitfalls of Liberal Antiracism and Woke Neoliberalism ; Touré Reed on the Resurgence of Race Reductionism

• A really brilliant lecture: Vivek Chibber on Recovering the Commonality of Humanity from Postcolonial Theory: "we will never recover joint struggle against exploitation, based on recognizing the commonality of all human peoples, if we do not overturn these types of theories".

• Why We Must Reject the Ideology of Impact and Recognize Intention: Dr. Asher on Why Authoritarians Love "Intention vs. Impact" [65]

See also:

• Brett Weinstein's talk, How the Magic Trick is Done , https://youtu.be/bz0oxIZ3xIg

Documentaries

• Mike Nayna’s 3 Part Evergreen Documentary: https://youtu.be/FH2WeWgcSMk

• Benjamin A Boyce‘s 24 part complete Evergreen (he has made 11 parts so far, out of 24), https://youtu.be/p5Wny9TstEM [http://bit.ly/31mddXS playlist

• Better Left Unsaid: "Curt Jaimungal and Desh Amila’s film takes a long, uncompromising look at the social justice movement, highlighting its faulty logic and tracking its philosophical origins". [66]

Gender

• Dysconnected: an inquiry speaking to detransitioners, parents, and their defenders.
• What is a Woman: lets the transgender professionals accompagnying gender transformation speak for themselves, while inquiring into the key question of 'what is a woman'.

Overview of Research and Statistics on Identity Political Themes

The Fastest Cultural and Political Shift in Recent History

"the Great Awokening constitutes the most rapid change in elite culture in recent history" ... "The pace and suddenness of the Great Awokening are evident in ... quantitative indicators: social attitudes among white liberals/Democrats; ; speaker disinvitation attempts at US universities; Google search interest for woke terms; and newspaper word usage frequencies." [67]

• Google search interest for woke terms ... rose in the mid 2010s, suggesting that the relevant concepts became more ingrained in the public mind. Graph at [68]

* Newspaper word usage frequencies: The sixth indicator, which I would call the pièce de résistance, is newspaper word usage frequencies. (Note that the following charts were taken from a recent paper by David Rozado, Musa Al-Gharbi and Jamin Halberstadt; though similar ones have been published by Zach Goldberg.) As the first chart indicates, the frequency with which the New York Times and the Washington Post (the two most prominent US newspapers) use various woke terms has skyrocketed since 2010. In 2019, for example, the NYT used ‘white supremacy’ 4196% more than nine years before. Graph at [69] ; Graph 2

Business (aka 'Woke Capitalism)

"Should companies be able to refuse to do business with people who hold political beliefs they disagree with? Only 20 per cent of people think they should. Should companies be able to force workers to declare their gender pronouns, a marker of allegiance to gender identity theory? Only 16 per cent think they should while nearly 60 per cent are opposed. What about companies like Ben and Jerry’s publicly campaigning against policies that are implemented by democratically-elected governments? Only one in three people support this. And what about firms being able to fire workers because they share controversial beliefs on social media, outside of working hours? Only 12 per cent think firms should be able to do this. Consistently, in all these areas and more, most voters push back against the creeping tenets of progressive ideology in business. Indeed, when we asked voters whether they think employees should be discriminated against because of political beliefs they express at work, we found that more than half the country think they should not be discriminated against while only 18 per cent express support for this discrimination. Remarkably, Conservative and Labour voters are united — we find no major divide between left and right in how people think about this issue."

- Matthew Goodwin [70]

Class

A threadreader of 43 tweets, which profiles 200+ cases of cancellations of ordinary people, 25 June 2021, By Eva Tallaksen,

"I decided to dig in and was taken aback by how many stories I came across of 'canceled' people. I expected a few dozen, found well over 200.

My criteria were therefore:

1) non-public figures ... ... 2) called out by others – sometimes a mob, sometimes publicly – for an alleged perceived offense *which is not punishable by law* and does not constitute hate speech 3) Suffered a real life impact as a consequence, many times without due process"

(https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1408507924951961600.html)

Working class opinion vs elite opinion

Every claim in the original article has a link to supporting data [71]:

"It is not the working class that sees the police as an unnecessary evil and opposes rigorous enforcement of the law for public safety and public order.

It is not the working class that believes public consumption of hard drugs should be tolerated, with intervention limited to reviving addicts when they overdose.

It is not the working class that believes many crimes like shoplifting should be decriminalized because punishing the perpetrators would have “disparate impact”.

It is not the working class that believes you should never refer to illegal immigrants as “illegal” and that border security is somehow a racist idea.

It is not the working class that believes an overwhelming surge of migrants at the southern border should be accommodated with asylum claims, parole arrangements, and release into urban areas around the country.

It is not the working class that believes competitive admissions and job placements should be allocated on the basis of race (“equity”) not merit.

It is not the working class that views objective tests as fundamentally flawed if they show racial disparities in achievement.

It is not the working class that believes America is a structurally racist, white supremacist society.

It is not the working class that sees patriotism as a dirty word and the history of the United States as a bleak landscape of racism and oppression.

It is not the working class that thinks sex is “assigned at birth” and can be changed by self-conception, rather than being an objective, biological reality.

It is not the working class that thinks it’s a great idea to police the language people use for hidden “microaggressions” and bias against the “marginalized”."

(https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/to-beat-the-intersectional-left-we?)

Publishing and Media Freedoms vs Censorship

• Report: Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm. Pen America, 2023. [72]. See: Booklash Against Literary Freedom Through the Language of Harm. How identitarian outrage discourages the freedom to publish.

Racism and Racial Equality

• Racial Equality Frames and Public Policy Support: "We demonstrate that despite leftward shifts in public attitudes towards issues of racial equality, racial framing decreases support for race-neutral progressive policies. Generally, the class frame most successfully increases support for progressive policies across racial and political subgroups." [73]

• "If you look at how white and black wealth are distributed in the U.S., you see right away that the very idea of racial wealth is an empty one. The top 10 percent of white people have 75 percent of white wealth; the top 20 percent have virtually all of it. And the same is true for black wealth. The top 10 percent of black households hold 75 percent of black wealth."

- Adolph Reed [74]

"Between 1968 and 2016 black Americans made significant advances into occupations and job categories to which they’d previously been denied access. Consistent with that expanded opportunity, in the paper we mentioned above, Manduca found that during that period black/white disparities in income rank—where median group income falls in the national income distribution, measured in centiles—narrowed by nearly a third. That was nowhere near parity but a definite improvement. (Black median income rose from the twenty-fifth centile to the thirty-fifth.) However, during the same period the overall black/white income gap was virtually unchanged. The reason was the extreme concentration of income at the top during that period. In fact, black median income at the twenty-fifth centile in 1968 equaled 55 percent of the national mean, but in 2016 income at the thirty-fifth centile equaled only 48 percent of the national income average. It’s not racism that was responsible for that relative decline; it’s neoliberal capitalism."

- Adolph Reed [75]

• “The overall racial wealth disparity is driven almost entirely by the disparity between the wealthiest 10 percent of white people and the wealthiest 10 percent of black people.” While Bruenig is clear that a discernible wealth gap exists across class levels, he explored the impact of eliminating the gap between the bottom 90 percent of each group and found that after doing so 77.5 percent of the overall gap would remain. He then examined the effect of eliminating the wealth gap between the bottom 50 percent—the median point—of each population and found that doing so would eliminate only 3 percent of the racial gap. So, 97 percent of the racial wealth gap exists among the wealthiest half of each population. And, more tellingly, more than three-fourths of it is concentrated in the top 10 percent of each. If you say to those white people in the bottom 50 percent (people who have basically no wealth at all) that the basic inequality in the U.S. is between black and white, they know you are wrong. More tellingly, if you say the same thing to the black people in the bottom 50 percent (people who have even less than no wealth at all), they also know you are wrong. It’s not all the white people who have the money; it’s the top ten percent of (mainly) whites, and some blacks and some Asians. The wealth gap among all but the wealthiest blacks and whites is dwarfed by the class gap, the difference between the wealthiest and everyone else across the board."

- Matt Bruening [76]

"The economist June O’Neill (1990; 2005), for example, has pointed out that gaps in income between blacks and whites vanish almost entirely following adjustments for such obvious traits as years of education, median age, region of residence, and any aptitude test score. To quote the earlier of her two papers on this subject at some length: “Overall, black men earn 82.9 percent of the white wage. Adjusting for black-white differences in geographic region, schooling, and age raises the ratio to 87.7 percent; adding differences in (standardized) test scores raises the ratio to 95.5 percent, and adding differences in years of work experience raises the ratio to 99.1 percent.”6

More controversially, but with equal empirical support, multiple scholars have noted that adjustment for non-raced variables has the same effect even on “racially disproportionate” rates of black encounters with police.7 At the most basic level, simply adjusting for a black crime rate —and thus black police encounter rate—that is often more than twice the white rate completely eliminates the disparity between the 13 percent representation of blacks within the U.S. population and the roughly 25 percent representation of identified blacks among those shot and killed by the police.8 At a higher level of analysis, running a fairly comprehensive regression model including multiple victim and officer characteristics reveals that whites are 27.4 percent more likely to be involved in police shootings than are similarly situated black Americans." [77]

Source: June O’Neill, “The Role of Human Capital in Earnings Differences between Black and White Men,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 4 (1990): 25-45; June O’Neill, Dave M. O’Neill, “What Do Wage Differentials Tell Us about Labor Market Discrimination?,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 11240 (2005).

According to SCF data, the bottom 20 percent of white households—18.6 million (using an average household size of 2.53, about 47 million people)—own virtually nothing or are so indebted that the total value of their wealth is negative. Their reality is shared by the 30 percent of black households—4.5 million (approximately 11 million people)—and 20 percent of Latino households—3.4 million (an estimated 8.6 million people). Using different data, economist Gabriel Zucman calculated in 2014 that as much as 50 percent of the total US population—nearly 160 million people at the time—has zero or negative wealth.

In other words, for the tens of millions of households that have zero or negative wealth, the “racial wealth gap” is a meaningless concept. It does not exist. Regardless of skin color, no one has anything. A more “equitable” distribution of wealth across the lower strata of racial groups would not pay a single bill for a poor black family, for the simple reason that you cannot divide something that does not exist.

The United States is a sea of multi-racial destitution. According to the analysis of SCF data by Matt Bruenig with the People’s Policy Project, the poorest 10 percent of the US population is about 54 percent white, 27 percent black, 12 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent some other group. The next most impoverished layer is 42 percent white, 32 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent other. And the third one up from the bottom is 53 percent white, 20 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic and 7 percent other. When one gets to the top three deciles of wealth holders, the racial composition begins to strongly favor whites. The largest imbalance exists in the highest tier. The racial wealth gap is primarily meaningful for elite African Americans, who are frustrated at being underrepresented where the vast majority of net worth is concentrated."

- Andrea Peters [78]

• Education Stats for the UK:
  • "Black British kids have made the most striking progress. Over the last decade, between 2009/10 and 2020/21, their rate of progress into the higher education system by the age of 19 has surged by nearly twenty percentage points, rocketing from 44% to 62%. Increasingly, they are pulling away from children who are white or from mixed backgrounds."
  • "According to statistics from the Department for Education, for the first time in British history a lower proportion of white pupils are going to the most highly selective universities than any other ethnic group in the country. The figures are striking. Among British Chinese families almost 41% of their youngsters are now progressing into ‘high-tariff’ or highly selective, typically elite universities, such as Oxbridge and the Russell Group. The figure for young British Asians is 16%. For Black British it is 10.7%. For white British … it is just 10.5%. "

- Matthew Goodwin [79]

History

• Critique of the 1619 Project, by James Oakes in Catalyst magazine, a review of good history: [80]

Anti-Bias Tools and Training, Trigger Warnings

• "A review of nearly 1,000 studies of anti-bias tools found little evidence that they have any impact. In fact, recent studies suggest anti-bias training's primary effect may be to encourage discrimination: Firms with diversity training end up with fewer minorities in management, and field research finds that training both reinforces stereotypes and increases animosity against minority groups." [81]

Trigger Warnings Don't Work:

• People who are randomly assigned to receive a trigger warning before viewing or reading something potentially upsetting do not then experience less anxiety; in fact, in a few studies they fared worse, compared to those who received no warning. For a summary of these studies please visit https://www.thefire.org/catching-up-with-coddling-part-two-trigger-warnings-screen-time-v-social-media-covid-19-and-the-continuing-decline-of-gen-zs-mental-health/.

• Two Carleton College professors surveyed the available studies and came to the same conclusion in The Chronicle of Higher Education. See Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder, “The Data Is In — Trigger Warnings Don’t Work,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 15, 2021, at

http://chronicle.com/article/the-data-is-in-trigger-warnings-dont-work.

• "A recent study found a substantial correlation between the degree to which students report engaging in cognitive distortions (especially emotional reasoning) and the degree to which they endorse safetyism beliefs (e.g., “Intentions don’t matter; only the emotional impact of those words on the listener matters.”) Students reporting higher levels of cognitive distortions also reported being more lonely and less resilient. This finding is consistent with our claim that the Great Untruths are harmful to those who embrace them. See Celniker, J., Ringel, M., Nelson, K., & Ditto, P. H. (2021, April 28). Correlates of “Coddling”: Cognitive distortions predict safetyism-inspired beliefs, belief that words can harm, and trigger warning endorsement in college students. "

URL = https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5g7nc.

Health

• Explaining Differences in Medical Outcomes

• "the mortality gap between black and white Americans has narrowed considerably, decreasing by almost half over the past 30 years, from seven to 3.6 years. This is partly for reasons of policy, such as US Medicare expansion, and partly because of better medical intervention, including improvements in treating cardiovascular disease and cancer. The racial gap has also narrowed, however, for a bleaker reason – the reduction in the lifespan of poor white people, especially those without higher education. The economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have shown that, when it comes to mortality statistics, black people with a university degree have almost caught up with university-educated white people, while white people without a degree have fallen almost to the level of black people who lack university education. “Education,” they observe, “is now a sharper differentiator of expected years of life between 25 and 75 than is race, a reversal of the situation in 1990.” That education divide is a major issue on this side of the Atlantic, too."

- Kenan Malik [82]

Policing

• An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. Roland G. Fryer, Jr. July 2017 [83]

"On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings."

• Defunding the Police was directly responsible for thousands of extra deaths in poor communities:

"There’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests. The timing matches the protests well, and the pandemic poorly. The spike is concentrated in black communities and not in any of the other communities affected by the pandemic. It matches homicide spikes corresponding to other anti-police protests, most notably in the cities where those protests happened but to a lesser degree around the country. And the spike seems limited to the US, while other countries had basically stable murder rates over the same period."

- Scott Alexander [84]

• "NPR had to admit that better funded departments help make cities safer. In fact, according to a recent working paper, not only do well funded departments save lives, but “in the average city, larger police forces result in Black lives saved at about twice the rate of white lives saved”

- Dominic King [85]

• "In my investigation so far, I have not been able to identify a single study using valid research design that has found bias in police shootings. To date, Fryer’s study is the only study using valid research design to test for bias, and it provides strong evidence for an absence of bias in police shootings." (see also: Policing Statistics in Connection with Race - USA

- Isaac Krieger [86]

• De-policing as a result of false anti-police rhetoric is causing a massive spike in homicides, mostly in predominantly black neighborhoods. [87]

• Defunding the Police as a Luxury Belief: the sociology of support for abolitionism is class-based. By Rob Henderson, who coined the important concept of Luxury Beliefs

• Commons- and p2p-based approaches to violence work: "Researchers at New York University analyzed data from 264 cities over a 20-year period and estimated that for every increase of ten CBOs focused on crime and community life in large cities, there was a nine percent reduction in murder and a six percent reduction in violent crime. A report from the John Jay Research and Evaluation Center shows that Cure Violence sites in Brooklyn and the South Bronx experienced greater declines in gun injuries than did comparison areas." [88]

• Racialized policing: Perceptions of Police Violence Across the Political Spectrum in the US Report: How Informed are Americans about Race and Policing? McCaffree, K. & Saide, A. Research Report: Sceptic Research Center, CUPES-007 | February 20, 2021 [89]; * Influence of political views on perceptions of racial violence: "support for BLM correlates very highly with being more liberal, and a recent survey found that among those who describe themselves as “Very Liberal”, more than 50% believe law enforcement killed 1,000 or more unarmed black men in 2019. Nearly 8% believed they killed more than 10,000! According to the Washington Post, the real number of unarmed black men shot and killed by police in 2019 was 11. That’s a difference of 3 orders of magnitude." [90]

"The movement for criminal justice reform has finally brought the topic of police brutality back to the forefront. One unexplored aspect of police killings is the economic profile of the neighborhoods where the killings occur. In a first of its kind research project, I examined police killings this year and found that in the first five months, 95 percent of reported police killings were in neighborhoods with incomes under $100,000."

- Zaid Jilani [91]

• "Back in the early 1970s, the NYPD killed 91 people in a single year. In 2018, they killed five [92]. Since 2001, the national incarceration rate for black men ages 18-29 has been cut by more than half [93]."

- Coleman Hughes [94]

"I analyze racial and class disparities in incarceration. My analysis shows that class status has a large and statistically significant effect on (1) whether or not men aged 24–32 years have ever been to jail or prison; (2) whether or not men are jailed after being arrested; (3) whether or not men have spent more than a month in jail or prison; and (4) whether or not men have spent more than a year in jail or prison. After controlling for class, I do not find race to be a statistically significant factor for the first three outcome categories, but I do find that race has a significant impact on whether or not a man has spent more than a year in prison or jail."

- Nathaniel Lewis [95]

• for the results of efforts to defund the police, rather than reform policing: the Post-Defunding Crime Statistics.

John McWhorter on the Socio-Economic Factors in Police Violence

"data also suggests that when it comes to police shootings, with all factors taken into account, such as whether the suspect was armed and whether the officers had just cause to fear for their lives, cops kill white people in greater numbers than Black people, but they kill Black people to a disproportionately far greater degree. White cops may not like Black people much in many cases — and they show it — but when it comes to ending Black lives, just maybe we can open up to the possibility that they hold back on resorting to shooting just as much as they do with white men?

That was the finding of the Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who in 2016 found that while Blacks were more likely to experience some form of force in their interactions with the police after they were stopped, there was no racial bias when it came to officer-involved shootings.

Overall, the Cops and Black People 101 story — that police officers casually mow down Black men while letting white men pass with a summons or a slap on the hand — doesn’t hold up. Many more white men than Black men die at the hands of cops. We just don’t hear that part of the story very much.

So on that gloomy old map you see illustrating articles about housing bias, most people living within the redlined perimeter were likely white, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research study, but we don’t hear that part of the story either.

None of that means that racism hasn’t existed or doesn’t exist. But it also suggests that socioeconomic factors matter as well, and a lot. This is a point made by the historian Touré Reed, who wrote an important book to this effect; his father, the political scientist Adolph Reed Jr., is of similar mind, as is the historian Barbara Fields — all three want us to think more about class than “antiracism.”

In a nutshell, one of my takeaways from redlining and shootings by the police is that alleviating Black poverty makes Black people less susceptible to ills that disproportionately befall those who are poor — ills in which racism surely plays a part, but my interest is in the fact that being poor makes you encounter these things so much more."

- John McWhorter [96]

Cross-Racial Support for Policing

"For years, polling data has shown that the communities which want at least the same level of policing if not more are communities composed primarily of Black, Brown and poor people. It is not hard to understand why. If the police are defunded or radically reduced, rich people will simply hire private security (even more than they already employ for their homes, neighborhoods and persons), and any resulting crime increases will fall most heavily on poorer communities. Thus, polling data reliably shows that it is these communities that want either the same level of policing or more. Indeed — according to one Gallup poll taken in the wake of the George Floyd killing, when anti-police sentiment was at its peak — the groups that most want a greater police presence in their communities are Black and Latino citizens."

- Glenn Greenwald [97] ; via [98]

Education and Learning

* The Evergreen Affair: A Social Justice Society. By Shaun Cammack. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences, August 2020 [99]

"In the final analysis, I argue that the Evergreen affair was the manifestation of a coherent social system implicated by a thick system of belief, characterized by victimhood morality and ethnocentric ideas, which ultimately resulted in a racially hierarchical social order." See also: our own analysis of Woke Ideology.

Censorship, Deplatforming, Cancel Culture in and around Academia

• Academic freedom issues (deplatforming, cancel culture):

1. Political Discrimination, Punishment, , and Self-Censorship in Academia; Report: Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship. by Eric Kaufmann CSPI Report No. 2, March 1, 2021 [100]
2. "In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented them from saying things they believed, up from 55% in 2019, while 41% were reluctant to discuss politics in a classroom, up from 32% in 2019. Some 60% of students said they were reluctant to speak up in class because they were concerned other students would criticize their views as being offensive." [101]
3. Scholars Under Fire Database - FIRE: "The number of scholars targeted for their speech has risen dramatically since 2015, according to research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE has logged 426 incidents since 2015. Just under three-quarters of them resulted in some kind of sanction — including an investigation alone or voluntary resignation — against the scholar. Such efforts to restrict free speech usually originate with “progressive” student groups, but often find support from left-leaning faculty members and are encouraged by college administrators, who tend (as Sam Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College demonstrated, and as his own subsequent experience confirmed) to be even further to the left than professors. There are also attacks on academic freedom from the right, which FIRE challenges. With a growing number of Republicans calling for bans on critical race theory, I fear the illiberalism is metastasizing." [102]

• The decline in empathy amongst student populations since 2000: "Empathic Concern was most sharply dropping, followed by Perspective Taking" [103]

Media Coverage

* Report: Media’s misleading portrayal of the fight over critical race theory. By Frederick Hess. American Enterprise Institute, November 2021

URL = https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/medias-misleading-portrayal-of-the-fight-over-critical-race-theory/

1. Coverage largely ignored bedrock assumptions of CRT, including its explicit rejection of rationality and objectivity. This was mentioned in fewer than 10 percent of articles.
2. News accounts also rarely mentioned concerns about CRT-aligned practices, such as segregated, race-based affinity spaces or the promotion of “anti-racist” racial stereotypes.
3. Instead, most coverage focused on whether schools should discuss racism and slavery, even though few (if any) critics have adopted this position. The result has been a misleading, slanted, and dismissive caricature of sober concerns."

• Sharp increase in UK media press coverage:

1. "Recent years have seen considerable debate about the rise of political polarisation in British society. Specifically, over the last decade, various studies have suggested that the UK is now rapidly following the United States into a more polarised politics in which intensifying ‘culture wars’ over issues such as racism, identity, diversity, history, the legacy of history, and ‘social justice’ or so-called ‘woke’ politics are becoming far more prominent.
2. While this debate typically focuses on the role of party politics, much less attention has focused on the relationship between news media and rising polarisation. Building on recent pioneering research which has tracked a sharp increase in the overall prominence of prejudice and social justice rhetoric in US and Spanish media, our purpose in this report is to explore whether similar trends are now also visible in the UK.
3. We use computational content analysis to explore the chronological prevalence in UK news media of words which denote prejudice (i.e., sexism, racism, homophobia, etc.) and ‘social justice’ or ‘woke’ rhetoric (i.e., white privilege, whiteness, cultural appropriation, diversity, etc.). Our main interest in doing so is to explore how the media debate has changed over time.
4. Thus, we present analyses of UK media usage of these terms between the years 2000 and 2020 in 16 million news and opinion articles, published in a nationally representative sample of ten popular British media outlets: The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Mirror, BBC, The Times, Financial Times, Metro, The Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Sun. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive analysis of UK media coverage of these issues to date.
5. Consistent with recent studies in the U.S. and Spain, we find that references to prejudice and social justice rhetoric have increased sharply in UK media in recent years. Between 2010 and 2020, terms such as racism and white supremacy in popular UK media outlets increased on average by 769% and 2,827% respectively, while terms such as sexism, patriarchy and misogyny increased by 169%, 336% and 237% each. Additional terms such as transphobia, islamophobia and anti-semitism increased by 2,578%, 289% and 469% respectively. Similarly, terms associated with social justice discourse have also markedly increased over the same temporal period: diversity (199%), activism (146%), hate speech (880%), inequality (218%), gender-neutral (1,019%) or slavery (413%).

These sharp increases are pervasive across media, regardless of their ideological leanings. But overall prevalence tends to be larger in left-leaning outlets." [104]

Psychology and Psychotherapy

* Article: The tendency for interpersonal victimhood: The personality construct and its consequences. By Rahav Gabaya, Boaz Hameiribc, Tammy Rubel-Lifschitz. Personality and Individual Differences. Volume 165, 15 October 2020, 110134 [105]

"In the present research, we introduce a conceptualization of the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), which we define as an enduring feeling that the self is a victim across different kinds of interpersonal relationships. Then, in a comprehensive set of eight studies, we develop a measure for this novel personality trait, TIV, and examine its correlates, as well as its affective, cognitive, and behavioral consequences."

• A 2010 study by the UK-based Equality and Human Rights Commission found that the psychological basis for prejudice is more likely to develop and persist when people see their identity in terms of belonging to particular groups, groups have different or conflicting key values, people view others as different, and their groups discriminate against others. These developments are the modus operandi of ODEI and illustrate how it cultivates bigotry in the hearts and minds of individuals." [106]

• "A July 2020 study of three extreme political attitudes shows that those who endorse the dogmatic application of DEI are more likely to have Dark Triad traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. The same study also revealed that the psychological makeup of individuals attached to ODEI is closer to individuals attached to white identitarianism than those attached to liberalism.” [107]

Gender

• "Caution with respect to gender-affirming care for minors may be warranted, as European experience indicates. A series of Europe-based systematic reviews of evidence for the benefits and risks of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones have shown a low certainty of benefits. Specifically, longitudinal data collected and analyzed by public health authorities in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and England have concluded that the risk-benefit ratio of youth gender transition ranges from unknown to unfavorable." [108]

• COHERE - Finnish Study on Transgender Health;

[109]: findings and recommendations regarding youth gender transition.

• This study shows a strong political aspect to self-identification: The Rise of LGBT as a Social and Political Identity. by Eric Kaufmann.

• In this overview article, Noah Carl reviews different statistical studies showing a link between the feminization of academia, and the support for identity politics and related censorship measures: [110]

• Jorgensen, S.C.J. Transition Regret and Detransition: Meanings and Uncertainties. Arch Sex Behav (2023). [111]: peer reviewed overview article.

Wesley Yang et al. recommends:

"there has never been any high-quality evidence in support of the safety or efficacy of pediatric gender medicine" [112]

1. "The sexologist James Cantor dismantled the evidence cited on behalf of the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement regarding pediatric gender medicine back in 2018. [113]
2. Michael Biggs wrote this important critique of the Dutch Protocol that is the most often cited piece of evidence in support of the efficacy of pediatric gender transition, which was further elaborated in 2022 in a separate critique. [114]
3. Leor Sapir did a thorough fisking of 16 studies at Reality’s Last Stand. [115]
4. Jesse Singal’s Substack has been covering this issue continuously in recent years. He recently published an overview of this subject in the publication Unherd. [116]
5. the British Medical Journal recently weighed in with a reported feature covering similar territory" [117]

• Report: THE EMERGING GENDER GAP IN LABOR MARKETS AND EDUCATION (MIT Economics)

[118]

"Although a significant minority of males continues to reach the highest echelons of achievement in education and labor markets, the median male is moving in the opposite direction. Over the last three decades, the labor market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition; employment rates; occupational stature; and real wage levels. These emerging gender gaps suggest reason for concern. While the news for women is good, the news for men is poor."

Re-assignment Surgery

• A report in the UK: Evidence of Methods of Treating Gender Dysphoria in Children

• "Ten to 15 years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers." [119]

• "the four best designed and conducted studies ... did not demonstrate clinically significant changes or differences in psychometric test results after [gender reassignment surgery]." [120] via

• " most children desist if left untreated.) According to a summary of multiple studies, about 80 percent of children desist. Statsforgender.org states: “Evidence from 10 available prospective follow-up studies [1] from childhood to adolescence indicates that childhood gender dysphoria will recede with puberty in ~80% of cases. A Dutch paper notes that follow-up studies show the persistence rate of gender identity disorder to be about 15.8%, or 39 out of the 246 children who were reported on in the literature.” [121]

Detransitioning

Read more about the phenomenon of detransition:

Boyd I, Hackett T, Bewley S. Care of Transgender Patients: A General Practice Quality Improvement Approach. Healthcare. 2022; 10(1):121. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10010121

D’Angelo, R. (2020). The man I am trying to be is not me. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 101(5), 951–970. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2020.1810049

Entwistle, K. (2020). Debate: Reality check – Detransitioner’s testimonies require us to rethink gender dysphoria. Child and Adolescent Mental Health, camh.12380. https://doi.org/10.1111/camh.12380

Expósito-Campos, P. (2021). A Typology of Gender Detransition and Its Implications for Healthcare Providers. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0092623X.2020.1869126

Hall, R., Mitchell, L., & Sachdeva, J. (2021). Access to care and frequency of detransition among a cohort discharged by a UK national adult gender identity clinic: Retrospective case-note review. BJPsych Open, 7(6), e184. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjo.2021.1022

Littman, L. (2021). Individuals Treated for Gender Dysphoria with Medical and/or Surgical Transition Who Subsequently Detransitioned: A Survey of 100 Detransitioners. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02163-w

Marchiano, L. (2021). Gender detransition: A case study. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 66(4), 813–832. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12711

Voices of Resistance and Reconstruction

The following can be podcasts, videos, or articles:

(the titles are in alphabetic order, following the first name of the speakers or authors)

A

• Adam B. Coleman on the Dangers of the Victimhood Narrative
• Adolph Reed on Identity Politics and Inequality
• Andrew Doyle and Douglas Murray on Woke Activism
• Andrew Doyle on Cancel Culture
• Andrew Sullivan on Truth and Power in Group Identity Theory
• Ayishat Akanbi on Replacing the Moral Superiority of Political Correctness with Compassion and Understanding

B

• Bayo Akomolafe on Cancel Culture and the Limits of Identity Politics
• Benjamin A. Boyce on What Happened at Evergreen State College
• Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder on Undoctrinating the US School System
• Bonnie Snyder on Free speech and Woke Sensibilities in US High Schools
• Bret Weinstein on Navigating the Culture War
• Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying and the Evergreen Equity Council

C

• Chloé Valdary on the Arguments for and Against Critical Race Theory
• Chris Hedges on Cancel Culture as the Death of Liberalism
• Christine Louis-Dit-Sully on Why Identity Politics is a Right-Wing Movement
• Coleman Huges about the Legal Challenge against Critical Race Theory in Education
• Coleman Hughes on Race, Racism and Anti-Racism
• Conor Barnes on Sensemaking and Identity in the Culture War 2.0

D

• Douglas Murray on Identity Politics and the Madness of Crowds

E

• Erec Smith on Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition
• Eric Weinstein on the Intellectual Dark Web

G

• Glenn Loury on the Problem of Self-Censorship and Bottom-Up Coercion
• Glenn Loury on the Problem of Self-Censorship in Public Discourse
• Greg Lukianoff on Group Identity Politics vs. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

H

• Helen Joyce on the Harms of Denying Biological Sex
• Helen Pluckrose on Fighting Back Against Cancel Culture
• Helen Pluckrose on Group Identity Theory as Reified Post-Modernism
• Helen Pluckrose on How Postmodernism Evolved Towards Group Identity Theory
• Helen Pluckrose on the Evolution of Postmodernist Thought
• Helen Pluckrose on the Rise and Whys of Grievance Studies
• Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay et al on Social Justice as a Religion

I

• Inaya Folarin Iman on the Need for New Narratives on Race
• Interview with John McWhorter on Anti-Racism
• Isabella Malbin on the Threats to Female Identity and Women's Rights

J

• Jacobin on How the Left Should Be Against Workplace Antiracism Training
• James Lindsay About Critical Methods
• James Lindsay on Critical Race Theory
• James Lindsay on Cynical Critical Theories
• James Lindsay on the Origins of Critical Social Justice Theories
• Jodi Shaw on the Racialisation of US Higher Education
• Jody Shaw on the Condition of Education Workers in the Context of Group Identity HR Policies
• John McWhorter on the Woke Ideology as a Religious Faith
• John McWhorter on Thinking Critically about Critical Race Theory
• John McWhorter on Viewpoint Diversity among Black Intellectuals
• Jonathan Haidt on the Functioning of the Prestige Economy in Monomaniacal Ideologies
• Jonathan Pageau on Gender Inversion in Popular Culture
• Jonathan Pageau on Masculine and Feminine Symbolism in Contemporary Culture
• Joshua Mitchell on Identity Politics and the Stain of Inheritance after the Death of Religion

K

• Karen Stenner on the Authoritarian Dynamic
• Katie Herzog on Gender and Medecine

L

• Lama Abu Odeh on How the New Diversity Liberalism Replaces the Progressoriat as the New Academic Ruling Class
• Lauren Adams on the Equality Act
• Lisa Marchiano on the Jungian Approach to Surviving a Moral Panic
• Louise Mazanti on Going Beyond the Post-Modern Feminization of Society

M

• Malcolm Kyeyune on Identity Politics as a Response to Elite Over-Production
• Mary Eberstadt on the Relation between the Sexual Revolution and Identity Politics
• Meghan Murphy on Gender Identity
• Michael Rectenwald on Woke Capitalism
• Mike Nayna on the Grievance Studies Story

The Mini-Encyclopedia of Woke Concepts

A

1. Affirmative Care
2. Anti-Racism
3. Anti-Oppression Politics

C

1. Cancel Culture ;
2. Cultural Appropriation

D

1. Deplatforming
2. Diversity ; Diversity and Inclusion Training ; Diversity Through Segregation

E

1. Ethnomathematics ; Mathematics as a Racist Construct

G

1. Gender
   1. Gender-Affirmative Treatment
   2. Gender Identity ; Gender-Identity Ideology
   3. Role of the Ideology of Gender-Balance in Academic Research
   4. See also: Female Erasure
2. Group Identity:
   1. Group Identity Essentialism
   2. Group Identity Essentialism and the Endorsement of Social Hierarchies
   3. Group Identity Theory
   4. Group Identity Theory as Reverse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

I

1. Identity Politics
   1. Identitarian Deference
   2. Identity Capitalists; Identity Determinism ; Identity Epistemology
   3. Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time
   4. Identity Politics Undermined the Left in the Sixties and Will Do So Now
   5. Identity Synthesis
   6. Identity-Based Policy Making
2. Implicit Bias Training ; Implicit Association Testing ; Unconscious Bias Training
3. Intersectionality

L

1. Luxury Beliefs

M

1. Male Privilege
2. Microaggressions

N

1. Neo-Segregation

O

1. Oikophobia
2. Outrage Porn

P

1. Political Correctness
2. Positionality ; Positionality Statements
3. Privilege ; Male Privilege ; White Privilege
   1. Privilege Checking
   2. Privilege Reductionism
   3. Privilege Walk
4. Progressive Stacking
5. Pronouns Problematique
6. Purity Spiral

R

1. Race Blindness vs Racism Blindness
2. Race Reductionism
   1. Race-Positive Design
   2. Systemic Racism

S

1. Sex as a Spectrum
2. Spiral of Silence
3. Spiritual Authoritarianism and Wokeness
4. Standpoint Epistemology
5. Successor Ideology
6. Systemic Racism

T

1. Toxic Shame
2. Trigger Warnings
3. Tunnels of Oppression

V

1. Victimhood Culture
   1. Rise of Victimhood Culture
   2. Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood
2. Virtue Signalling

W

1. White Privilege
   1. White Complicity
   2. White Fragility
2. Whiteness
   1. White Supremacy Culture Training
   2. Whiteness Studies
3. Woke Ideology
   1. Woke Capitalism
   2. Woke Racism
   3. Woke State