The Counterweight Handbook E-Book

Helen Pluckrose

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 413

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Diversity, equity and inclusion programmes have the admirable goal of creating a welcoming environment for everyone. Increasingly, however, people are realising that the way they are commonly practised isn't simply an extension of past civil rights movements. Instead, they're often intertwined with Critical Social Justice ideology, which imposes its principles and punishes any disagreement. Mild questions about Critical Social Justice claims – like all white people being racists or all minorities being oppressed, or sex differences having no biological basis – are met with curt commands by DEI trainers and HR officers: 'Educate yourself,' 'Do the work,' 'Listen and learn.' Advancements at work and school often depend on agreeing with these beliefs. Critical Social Justice ideology poses a real threat to rights and democracy, yet speaking out risks social backlash. When choosing between compliance and ethical opposition, what's the right path? Based on the author's years of experience studying, exposing and fighting Critical Social Justice ideology and advising people and organisations struggling with it, The Counterweight Handbook is designed to help people address Critical Social Justice problems in the most ethical and effective way possible.

Leseprobe

‘I came to Counterweight for support with pushing back against the rising tide of racial policies affecting my workplace. It can be hard and lonely to feel like you are the only one standing up against such things in the office. Counterweight gave me strategies not only to help stop things but also to push back against them.’

‘I was confronted in my first round of interviews for an academic position with some diversity questioning that I found strange and incoherent. I contacted Counterweight for guidance in my second round of interviews. Not only did I learn how to approach the issue positively and constructively, but I also learned to find common ground with my interviewers while not saying anything that goes against my principles.’

‘Counterweight yielded results … The letter Counterweight helped me to write has given a shot across the bow to my employers and made them think again.’

‘I contacted Counterweight when the overreach of Critical Social Justice in my higher education setting threatened to prevent me from finishing my PhD … Counterweight gave me the support I needed to continue on toward the completion of my degree without compromising my authenticity or my integrity.’

‘I reached out to Counterweight because my identity as a nonbinary person clashed with my increasing worries about the debate-stifling tendencies of my Critical Social Justice environment. I feel a weight has been lifted, and I have found ways to think and talk about myself and about what I believe in a constructive way.’

‘Counterweight enabled me to express to my organization why Critical Social Justice ideology is incompatible with my beliefs and assert my right not to have to adopt it in contravention of my own belief system.’

The above testimonials are from some of the many individuals who have successfully used the strategies and approaches developed by the author and Counterweight. They remain anonymous here for obvious reasons.

SWIFT PRESS

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2024First published in the United States of America by Pitchstone Publishing 2024

Copyright © Helen Pluckrose 2024

The right of Helen Pluckrose to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781800751088eISBN: 9781800751095

For Carrie Clark, Kevin Lowe, Harriet Terrill, Isobel Marston & Laura Walker-Beavan.

The core Counterweight team.

“Just a bunch of women being nice to each other (and Kevin).”

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Problem of Critical Social Justice at Work and in Schools

1.   Understanding the Theories behind Critical Social Justice: Key Tenets

2.   Analyzing the Core Claims of Critical Social Justice: Simple Responses

3.   Identifying the Problems with Unconscious Bias Testing and Training: Principal Flaws

4.   Assessing and Addressing Critical Social Justice Problems: Action Steps

5.   Stating Concerns about Critical Social Justice and Affirming Principles: Writing Templates

6.   Choosing the Best Personal Approach for Combating Critical Social Justice: Case Studies

7.   Dealing with Common Critical Social Justice Challenges: Troubleshooting

Conclusion: The Fall of Critical Social Justice and How to See It Out

Glossary of Common Critical Social Justice Terms

Appendix: Sample Letters

Letter Objecting to Mandatory Gender Pronoun Declaration

Letter Objecting to Ideologically Biased Readings on Race

Letter Objecting to Support for Radical Political Movements in Public Organizations

Letter Objecting to Affinity Groups or Other Racial Segregation

Letter Objecting to Claims That All White People Are Racist and/or Socialized into White Supremacy

Letter by Non-White Writer Objecting to Critical Social Justice Approaches to Antiracism

Letter Urging Caution over Voluntary Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Meetings

Letter to a School on Antiracist Teaching

Letter to a School Teaching about Gender Identity

Letter by a Non-White Writer Objecting to Antiracism Training

Notes

About the Author

Acknowledgments

My most profound thanks must always be to Carrie Clark, the reason Counterweight existed at all, and it wasn’t just me pouring everybody into a Discord server and triaging emergencies extremely inefficiently. Thank you for your amazing logistical brain that manages to somehow keep up with everything and everyone, produce briefings on them all at the drop of a hat, and plan out and oversee a dozen projects all at once. You exhaust me, woman. I am always indebted to Kevin Lowe, whose immense, systemizing, analytical brain is equally sharp at detecting flaws and inconsistencies in ethical arguments and at solving tech problems. Thank you for being our Head Vulcan. (Yes, that is a perfectly appropriate job title). Thank you to Harriet Terrill, our first successful client, then media manager, then CEO, for her astonishing versatility, creativity, patience, persistence, organization, and positivity and to Isobel Marston, her right-hand woman who managed to fly in and produce things of greatness in between changing the grading curve of various philosophy departments and caring for people overcoming addiction. The two of you not only made Counterweight work, but restored my faith in humanity when I was at risk of losing it. I am extremely grateful for the input of Laura Walker-Beavan, a deeply knowledgeable critic of postmodern thought and Critical Social Justice theories from a consistently principled and scrupulously honest liberal position.

Special thanks must go to Mike Burke and Elizabeth Spievak, the heart of the Counterweight academic team, who kept its vision alive and its resources intact and have done great things since, even while facing intense and unjust cancellation attempts themselves. Mike, you are the perfect liberal conservative foil to my liberal leftism (but do stop trying to steal my ‘walking British stereotype” crown. You will fail). Elizabeth, the way you have powered through everything with grace, fairness, and compassion intact is awe-inspiring. I am deeply grateful to Jennifer Richmond, who has been astonishingly productive and ever-engaged in a dozen different projects and bringing everybody together despite a truly hellish few years. Thank you, my friend. Thanks too to Jennifer Friend, whose dedication to preserving the therapeutic profession and supporting those struggling in authoritarian Critical Social Justice environments almost makes up for her tutworthy sense of humor and tea-heresy. I owe much to Trish Nayna Schwerdtle, defender of rigorous scholarship in medicine and humanitarian aid, a woman of such steely determination that whenever she says “I will make time,” I imagine her literally altering the laws of physics, and to Laura Kennedy whose immensely powerful brain is surpassed only by her ability to verbally eviscerate the rude, the presumptuous and the authoritarian in a softly spoken sentence. Thanks to Neil Thin, whose endless calm, kindness, balance, and reasonableness make him an invaluable asset to any project and to James Petts, whose precision in reasoning and ethical consistency can be eye-watering but valuable and somewhat softened by his ability to make excellent cakes. I appreciate all the prominent public figures who made Counterweight a well-known resource and the truly liberal organizations in our orbit who remain steadfastly principled despite great pressure to buckle one way or the other, particularly, the Institute of Liberal Values, Free Black Thought, and Queer Majority.

TheCOUNTERWEIGHT HANDBOOK

Introduction: The Problem of Critical Social Justice at Work and in Schools

If you work or study in the United States, the United Kingdom, or any number of other Western countries, you are probably familiar with the words diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and many of the policies and programs that come with it, such as antiracist or unconscious bias training. Today, almost all major corporations and universities have offices committed to DEI, with many having vast bureaucracies tasked with advancing and promoting DEI agendas.1 Just over half of workers in the United States have DEI trainings or meetings at work,2 and it is not uncommon for schools—from universities to preschools—to ask prospective faculty, students, or families how they will contribute to a culture of diversity and inclusion. Such requests seem benign to the uninitiated. Surely all people of goodwill want to be inclusive of a diverse range of people? Companies, universities, and schools have a legal responsibility to comply with antidiscrimination law and a moral responsibility to oppose discrimination against people on the grounds of their race, sex, sexuality, etc. Isn’t DEI just a natural extension of that obligation? It should come as no surprise to anyone reading this book that the answer is no. In practice, diversity, equity, and inclusion are inextricably connected with an illiberal, authoritarian ideology.3

This reality is becoming increasingly clear to increasing numbers of people. Those who were hitherto only vaguely aware of this ideology as something that belongs to an academic activist culture or that only mattered in the online culture wars have suddenly found themselves confronted with it and been told to “educate themselves,” “do the work,” or otherwise commit to affirming their belief in the tenets of this ideology. It is no longer something that one can avoid by simply avoiding academics, activists, or the parts of the Internet that are bathed in the culture wars. Indeed, today it is actively being promoted by otherwise liberal democratic governments and is coming into places people have to go and cannot simply avoid, such as work or school or even the doctor’s office.4 This ideology, with its authoritarian prescriptions and coercive policies, represents a belief system that is sometimes referred to as “wokeism” or “cancel culture.” But it can more precisely be referred to as “Critical Social Justice,” an approach to social justice activism that has a basis in neo-Marxist concepts of “critical consciousness”—being aware of oppressive power systems that most people cannot see—but derives more from postmodern concepts of knowledge as a construct of power operating in the service of the powerful and perpetuated by language.

This book is intended to be a resource for people who are suffering from the imposition of Critical Social Justice ideology on them at their place of work, in their university or school, or in their wider community, and who object to it and wish to combat it based on liberal principles. Although I explain Critical Social Justice in greater depth elsewhere in the book, I first must make one thing plain: Critical Social Justice is not synonymous with “social justice”—the aim for a just society—which can be approached using any number of frameworks, even if many Critical Social Justice proponents believe and act as though their approach is the one and only form of social justice. While some might approach social justice from a Critical Social Justice perspective or a religious perspective or a socialist perspective, I approach social justice issues from a liberal humanist perspective and will use the word “liberal” quite frequently in this book. If you Google my name or read an article about me, you will most likely find me described as an “anti-woke campaigner” or a “critic of wokeness,”5 but only because this is less of a mouthful than “advocate of liberal approaches to social justice and critic of Critical approaches to social justice who nevertheless wants everyone to be free to hold and express whatever views they have (including woke ones) provided they don’t impose them on anybody else.”

It is important to understand that this term, liberal, when used in its philosophical sense, does not refer to and should not be read as a synonym for the political left, a conflation often made in the United States. Rather, it refers to a broad set of values that seeks to defend every person’s freedom of belief and speech, support viewpoint diversity, and recognize and value our shared humanity. With this comes the moral responsibility to defend the same rights, freedoms, and responsibilities for everybody. Under this definition, which is the one that defines liberal democracies, liberalism can be found on both the political left and political right. American readers might be most familiar with it as the principle that all people should be considered equally deserving of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. While liberals on either side of the political spectrum may disagree about economic issues and other issues of policy, they are united in their support for individual liberty, common humanity, freedom of belief and speech, the value of viewpoint diversity, and the need for consistent principles in which the same rules and freedoms apply to everyone. This is where “liberals,” in the broadest sense of the word, often find their own principles of social justice at odds with those of “Critical Social Justice” and, increasingly, find themselves in need of defending not only their rights but also their principles.

In Cynical Theories, published in the summer of 2020,6 James Lindsay and I presented a genealogy of Critical Social Justice ideas and made the case for liberal principles in the face of them. We described the problem of (Critical) Social Justice as “reified postmodernism” and argued that it had solidified into its current form in academia around 2010. This more easily graspable and dogmatic form of earlier theories thoroughly crossed the barrier of academia to become a significant cultural force in mainstream society across the Anglosphere by around 2015,7 and it continued to escalate with each passing year. Until the summer of 2020, Critical Social Justice activism had manifested mostly as small eruptions, like bubbles surfacing out of agitated lava, often on the very university campuses on which the ideology had been cultivated and refined.8 For example, the academic couple Nicholas and Erika Christakis aroused angry student protests at Yale University for suggesting students should be able to choose their own Halloween costumes; psychologist Jordan Peterson faced wrath at the University of Toronto for challenging the compelled use of preferred pronouns; biology professor Bret Weinstein was chased off the campus of Evergreen State College after he objected to white people being asked to remain home for a ceremonial “Day of Absence”; social critic Camille Paglia caused outrage by criticizing aspects of the #MeToo movement at the University of the Arts; and law professor Ronald Sullivan’s appointment as a faculty dean at Harvard University was not renewed after he joined disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team.9

The same type of phenomenon was occurring in other tightly knit, highly competitive fields and industries populated with graduates of elite universities, such as Hollywood: talk show host Ellen DeGeneres was condemned for posting a picture of herself riding the back of black Olympic athlete Usain Bolt; actor Matt Damon was pilloried for suggesting some forms of sexual assault were more serious than others; comedian Kevin Hart was uninvited from hosting the Oscars for past use of homophobic slurs; and J. K. Rowling was threatened for defending the concept of “women” as a biological sex category.10 Explosions occurred in other enclosed communities as well, ranging from knitting to young adult publishing,11 that did not always gain nearly as much national or even international attention but that all had the same ideological imprint and exhibited the same dogmatic fervor. To many of us addressing the issue of authoritarian Critical Social Justice and hearing from people regularly, it seemed clear that these visible explosions occurring mostly in intense enclosed communities signaled a vast ideological pressure below the surface that would lead to a much larger culture-wide explosion.

The trigger for that explosion finally occurred in the late spring of 2020. In a period of lockdowns and in a culture of fear over a virus that was not yet fully understood, an unarmed black man suspected of a petty crime died at the knee of a police officer with a reputation for using excessive force. The death of George Floyd energized the already active and influential Critical Social Justice antiracist movement and ignited mass protests under the banner of Black Lives Matter that raged across the United States, much of the Anglosphere, and parts of Europe throughout the summer. Politicians, celebrities, and businesses large and small immediately pledged their allegiance and commitment to the cause—or at least to its slogans. Seemingly overnight, Critical Social Justice ideas were mainlined directly into many of our most important institutions and informed many of their most important policies and programs, while mainstream media played the role of cheerleader and social media companies played the role of enforcer, suppressing or outright banning certain contrarian or dissenting views. This led people to organize into self-selected echo chambers, further creating a false sense of consensus around Critical Social Justice, even as it encouraged a culture of fear, grievance, hostility, and polarization. In the face of this dogmatic and authoritarian ideological movement that had suddenly engulfed not only places of work but also society at large, those who objected to it or even had basic questions about it often either kept their heads down and quietly submitted to training or reeducation of one kind or another, or were outright bullied into compliance for fear of being canceled, mobbed, or fired.

For every cancellation or public outrage that had made headlines, there were countless people quietly being fired or disciplined or having it made very clear to them what they were or were not allowed to believe with a short email of termination or a curt meeting with a human resources officer. Vast numbers of people whose lives or work were adversely affected simply weren’t notable enough to have their more routine dismissal or demotion tried in the court of public opinion. Everyday people caught up in this cauldron that was not of their making and from which they wished to escape searched for some kind of resolution. In the vast majority of cases, they did not understand why their place of work or their place of education had suddenly adopted an authoritarian ideology that demanded their compliance, and they sought ways to make sense of it and to find a way out without risking their employment or education.

As someone whose work criticizing Critical Social Justice and highlighting its excesses had made international headlines in recent years—and who had just cowritten a best-selling book on the subject—many of those same people began reaching out to me. Hundreds of emails began pouring into my inbox and the inboxes of many of my colleagues and collaborators each day from people seeking help with the new illiberal and dogmatic policies and training programs rooted in Critical Social Justice at their workplace, university, or school. In this context of unprecedented demand and acute need, I cofounded Counterweight, an organization aimed at helping those faced with coercive Critical Social Justice practices in just about any and every conceivable type of setting, including corporations, universities, schools, hospitals, nonprofits, engineering firms, tech firms, emergency services, publishing companies, art studios, museums, professional societies, social clubs, and so on. With every message my colleagues and I received, it became ever clearer that people in all walks of life and all spheres of society were experiencing different manifestations of the same problem.12

We heard from people who were concerned that their place of work had implemented Critical Social Justice–based policies and training programs that required white employees to affirm themselves as racists and non-white employees to affirm their adherence to Critical Social Justice concepts of antiracism. None of them appreciated being told what values they held, and all complained that being told they must hold particular values because of their race felt pretty racist.

We heard from parents who were alarmed that their local schools had begun to teach Critical Social Justice beliefs about racism. White parents were concerned that their children were being required to pretend to have been socialized into racist beliefs that actually ran counter to the values they had been taught at home, while non-white parents were afraid of the impact a belief in invisible racial power systems would have on the ability of their children to be confident in the world and succeed.13

We heard from volunteers and workers at nonprofits and humanitarian aid groups who were horrified that their organizations had been so deeply infected by the ideology that it undermined the vital services being provided to the most vulnerable people in desperate need of them.14 As one such individual (who is not white) said to me, “Money going into training humanitarian aid workers about the problems of ‘white saviorism’ is needed for laboring women and malnourished children fleeing warzones.”

We heard from academics who were concerned that Critical Social Justice ideology had begun to enter all academic disciplines and thus made rigorous scholarship and pursuit of knowledge even more difficult. In some cases, they were directly told that Critical Social Justice causes, including DEI initiatives, trump academic freedom,15 and in others, they faced having to compromise their principles when required to write a DEI statement for a job application, a promotion package, or a grant or to simply accept that they would not get the job, promotion, or award.

We heard from parents whose children were being introduced to Critical Social Justice ideas about race and gender in kindergarten and early elementary classrooms, with teachers using illustrated books and cartoons based on these ideas. In some cases, kids as young as four and five were asked to identify their skin color and the skin color of their classmates and then told that only white people can be racist and only people of color can experience racism.16 In other cases, teachers encouraged children to think about their sexual orientation and gender identity using the so-called gender unicorn or genderbread person.17

We heard from therapists and professionals in the medical field who were concerned that they were being expected to affirm a Critical Social Justice version of gender identity ideology even if they or their patients had ethical objections to the concept of gender or did not believe they had a gender identity or even if their patients were simply experiencing difficulties that had other underlying causes in need of investigation and treatment.

We heard from people who were more broadly concerned about the negative social effects of Critical Social Justice ideology. They ranged from people who had suffered social media dogpiles for expressing a non–Critical Social Justice view to those whose families and friendship groups had become divided over political issues.18 Navigating these issues was particularly difficult for some of our clients who were neurologically atypical or suffered from anxiety disorders. Many of them reported struggling with increased anxiety and fears that they might accidentally say something that could be interpreted as racist or otherwise problematic, even though they opposed racism and other bigotries. This, they told us, had caused them to become even more anxious in social interactions and even more likely to avoid them, and this was a particular problem for many of them who already faced significant challenges in this area and now felt even more isolated and lonely.19

We heard from teachers, parents, academics, students, emergency services personnel, medical practitioners, psychologists, engineers, blue-collar workers, businesspeople, charity workers, and more. Their particular situations were different, but in every case, the cause of their distress was the imposition of the same set of ideas: Critical Social Justice.

Although I eventually had to step away from the heavy demands of Counterweight to recover my health, I have continued to provide assistance to people in trouble, whether they are in positions of power in major institutions seeking help to hold back the Critical Social Justice tide in their organizations or on the lowest rung of their vocational ladder being asked to affirm beliefs they do not hold and morally object to if they want to continue to be able to feed and house their families. Indeed, since the release of Cynical Theories, not a day has gone by in which I haven’t been contacted by someone in need of assistance or advice because of a new illiberal program, policy, or protocol at their place of work or at their school or in their nonprofit or in their hospital or in their social club. While I and many of my colleagues have done much to help people behind the scenes, the demand for such assistance far outweighs what any one individual or organization can realistically supply. It quickly became clear that an accessible, practical, and user-friendly guide to understanding the problem is much needed—especially one that provides the tools for people to push back against this once insurgent but now increasingly entrenched ideology themselves.

Written with this goal in mind, The Counterweight Handbook has been designed to help you, the employee, volunteer, student, concerned parent, or even employer, not just understand the problem but also assess the problem and respond to the problem. The ideas and recommendations I present in this book stem not only from the many years I have spent reading, thinking, and writing about Critical Social Justice ideology but also from my own work directly helping people push back against it. It explains how proponents of Critical Social Justice see the world as structured into invisible systems of power and privilege that everybody has been socialized into and how they propose to fix it using the policies and training programs that you and so many others are today being subjected to. It provides practical advice on what you can do when you are told to affirm your commitment to beliefs you do not hold, undergo training in an ideology you cannot support, or submit to antiscientific testing and retraining of your “unconscious” mind. Consequently, much of the book deals with the basics: what is Critical Social Justice exactly, and how do you determine whether your organization is adopting the ideology in its practices and policies and to what extent? If you establish that it is, the book provides the information you need before you start trying to address it and discusses what mindset and attitude is most helpful to take when trying to raise your concerns. Where possible, we advise people to take a calm, persistent, and polite but firm approach to addressing problems as they arise and to network with others to form communities of resistance and initiate grassroots activism.

Because people so often feel that their options are either to keep their heads down and submit to the ideology or to throw themselves on the grenade to fight it, the book outlines the various ways you can address Critical Social Justice problems depending on the severity of the problem, your own personal circumstances, and your personality and skill set. It also looks specifically at unconscious bias testing and training, explaining how these tools are supposed to work and why they actually don’t work and can even be counterproductive and detrimental to an organization. Because it is nearly always most effective to put your concerns and objections in writing, the book includes writing templates that you can adapt to your own needs and a glossary that explains the terms you are most likely to hear or encounter and might need to draw on. The handbook also provides a breakdown of the common talking points you are likely to face and need to respond to when addressing Critical Social Justice problems and includes anonymized case studies to show what doing that looks like in practice. It concludes by discussing why Critical Social Justice must eventually fall and how to prepare for replacing it with an approach to social justice that is compatible with individual freedom of belief, liberalism, and viewpoint diversity.

A growing number of organizations and individuals take a big-picture approach to the problem of Critical Social Justice in the workplace, in schools, and even in government. They aim to attack it from the top down, with the idea that putting legal or financial pressure on companies, universities, and other organizations, lobbying and fundraising for “anti-woke” politicians, and changing incentive structures is the best way to combat Critical Social Justice. Any and all approaches to stopping the influence of Critical Social Justice that are ethical and legal, that will benefit individuals, and that do not themselves lead to the authoritarian or illiberal are worthwhile, but The Counterweight Handbook takes a decidedly different approach. It works from the bottom up and is written for individuals who want to combat Critical Social Justice policies and programs in their daily lives and has been developed to help them address the problem they face in the most ethical and effective way possible and with the minimum personal risk. Although this book is aimed primarily at those facing Critical Social Justice at work or in school or university, the book contains useful information for all readers affected by Critical Social Justice, and all users of the handbook should be able to easily dip into the book and find relevant information and advice. No matter your specific needs or aims, however, I strongly recommend that you read the book first, familiarize yourself with its contents, and only then refer back to the various tools and templates if you find yourself needing to take action.

Although there is growing awareness of the problems with Critical Social Justice and its demonstrably negative impacts on the institutions that it dominates, it continues to be a primary driver of society-wide polarization and hostility. It continues to surface in troubling but predictable ways and to pose a significant threat to liberal democracies alongside a rising authoritarian reactionary backlash. Thus, it is essential that concerned individuals take principled action when they encounter authoritarian Critical Social Justice, whether this is by making an issue public, taking legal action, issuing a direct and uncompromising challenge, questioning the materials and supplying counterviews, feeling out support within an organization, or simply declining to contribute to the false impression that there is a consensus in favor of it. Critical Social Justice is too unstable, incoherent, contradictory, cannibalistic, and divorced from reality—and it alienates far too many people, including those it claims to represent—to survive forever, but the longer it retains its power, the more damage it will do to individual people and to society. If liberal-minded people keep their heads down and go along with it, only voicing their opposition behind closed doors or via anonymous social media accounts, it will continue to push into our lives and our institutions, damaging both. If our first goal is to survive Critical Social Justice, our second goal is to defeat it. To do so, we need the positive action of individuals like you who are willing to stand against it on all levels and in all spheres of life, not only for your rights and interests but also our common rights and interests. We, as individuals, need to fight back against this coercive, divisive, and authoritarian ideology wherever we find it and reaffirm our collective commitment to freedom of belief, expression, and conscience.

We are the counterweight that is so greatly needed.

1 Understanding the Theories behind Critical Social Justice: Key Tenets

If you are somebody who has decided to read this book, you will almost certainly already have some idea of the problem that is commonly referred to as “wokeism” or “cancel culture.” Because these terms are so slippery, it can be very hard to define them in a universally accepted way and thus to criticize them in a knowledgeable and principled way. This is made especially hard when advocates of the theories behind this particular form of activism insist that the word “woke” is a pejorative used by right-wing bigots to prevent people from talking about important issues of social justice or maintain that cancel culture is a myth created to shield those with privilege from accountability and to delegitimize the marginalized who call out bigotry.1 Nevertheless, “wokeism” refers to a real phenomenon with identifiable characteristics that is not simply about opposition to racism or other bigotries.2 After all, opposition to prejudice and discrimination is central to all ethical frameworks that seek a more just society where nobody is disadvantaged due to their immutable characteristics. Equally, cancel culture refers to a real phenomenon that operates much more broadly than by moralizing scorn aimed at celebrities and other high-profile people on social media for something they’ve said, done, or believe. It affects many more average people who have been bullied, pilloried, shamed, or fired simply for expressing an unpopular idea or for asking the wrong question,3 and we see manifestations of it daily that threaten fundamental rights and inhibit democratic processes.4 Rather than use these two separate but interrelated terms that are often inadequately defined and overly charged, however, I will refer to this overall phenomenon as “Critical Social Justice” to be precise in my meanings, definitions, and prescriptions.5

The core tenets of Critical Social Justice are easily recognizable and distinguishable from other ethical frameworks. Central to this is a belief in largely invisible systems of power that into which everybody has been socialized. This simplistic belief rejects both the complexity of social reality, which does not break down so neatly into identity-based power structures, and the individual’s agency to accept or reject bigoted ideas. This makes it different from most other ethical frameworks that oppose prejudice and discrimination. Critical Social Justice theorists and activists apply their “Critical” methods to analyze systems, language, and interactions in society to “uncover” these power systems and make them visible to the rest of us. In their framework, these systems include “whiteness,” “patriarchy,” “colonialism,” “heteronormativity,” “cisnormativity,” “transphobia,” “ableism,” “fatphobia,” etc., and are believed to infect all aspects of society and even the most benign everyday interactions. The belief that people are unable to avoid being racist, sexist, or transphobic because they have absorbed bigoted discourses from wider society is a tenet of faith that bears testament to its origins in postmodern thought, particularly that of Michel Foucault.6

Following on from its focus on invisible systems of oppressive power and how language often serves those systems, Critical Social Justice demands enforcement of the right ways of thinking and punishment of the wrong ways of thinking. When teachers are fired for including black intellectuals like Glenn Loury in Black History Month; when firefighters face disciplinary action for saying they do not care what race or gender identity an individual has when saving their lives; when African Muslim immigrants are barred access to jobs for saying they have not experienced any racism or Islamophobia in their new country; and when graduate students are at risk of not being allowed to finish their PhDs for the crime of referring to people who give birth as “mothers,” we can safely say that we are living in a culture in which people are removed from earned positions for thinking the wrong way.7

Critical Social Justice is, at root, based on two core premises: (1) invisible power systems like white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity permeate all of society, and (2) most people cannot see them because these systems just seem normal to us and, for the majority and the powerful, it is more convenient that we not see them.

Therefore, Critical Social Justice focuses primarily on oppressive attitudes, beliefs, biases, and narratives assumed to exist in society and be perpetuated primarily by the groups in society seen as dominant—the white, the male, the straight—but which can also be upheld by groups seen as marginalized. Just as dominant groups may knowingly uphold things like “white supremacy” to maintain their power or because they are ignorant or indifferent, marginalized groups may knowingly uphold “white supremacy” to curry favor with the dominant groups or because they have internalized the narratives underlying them. According to Critical Social Justice ideology, the way to dismantle these invisible power structures is to address the attitudes, beliefs, and biases people are assumed to have using specific “Critical” methods that center on scrutinizing and policing the use of language in society.

To be “woke,” as popularly understood, is to have become aware of these alleged invisible power systems and to want to act to dismantle them. This involves “awakening” others to the Critical Social Justice view of the world and getting them to take on the same assumptions and policing of themselves and others. The symbolism of being “woke” reflects the belief that a specific process is needed to arouse people from their stupor and get them into a state of awareness. This heightened awareness and intentional engagement can be understood as a variation on “critical consciousness” as developed by Paulo Freire writing in the neo-Marxist tradition.8

Of course, beliefs that one’s ideological group has developed a consciousness of oppressive power dynamics that broader society largely accepts uncritically is a trait of overly certain ideologues rather than of the left. We might think of the concept of being “red-pilled,” which references the film The Matrix, to describe having been suddenly awakened to a social reality that one had previously been asleep to, and which is associated mostly with the right-wing “anti-woke.”9 Humans are highly prone to believing that they have “seen the light” and have a responsibility to make others see it, too. Those on both left and right who favor the “marketplace of ideas” approach to evaluating ideas on their merits while mitigating one’s own bias as much as possible via evidence, reason, and viewpoint diversity generally reject any way of determining what is true that relies on believing one’s own ideological group to be awake and all others asleep.

Within Critical Social Justice, the word “consciousness” is used in the usual sense to indicate being awake and aware of a certain reality. However, within academic theory, the term “critical” holds a different meaning from its everyday usage. In common usage, to be critical can mean to think negatively of something, or it can be related to what we’d usually think of as “critical thinking,” where we attempt to step back from an issue and survey it as rationally and objectively as possible with the purpose of establishing whether it is true or ethically sound. Critical theorists, however, draw a sharp distinction between the everyday meaning of “critical” and their meaning of “critical.” Alison Bailey, a Critical Social Justice theorist in education, makes this distinction explicit. She begins by describing what is meant by “critical thinking”:

The critical-thinking tradition is concerned primarily with epistemic adequacy. . . . To be critical is to show good judgment in recognizing when arguments are faulty, assertions lack evidence, truth claims appeal to unreliable sources, or concepts are sloppily crafted and applied. For critical thinkers, the problem is that people fail to “examine the assumptions, commitments, and logic of daily life . . . the basic problem is irrational, illogical, and unexamined living.” . . . In this tradition sloppy claims can be identified and fixed by learning to apply the tools of formal and informal logic correctly.10

Here, Bailey provides an accurate understanding of what is generally meant by critical thinking. Humans are not perfectly rational, objective, and logical beings; we get at truth best by evaluating arguments and truth claims on the grounds of the soundness of their reasoning and the strength of their evidence. To work properly and minimize confirmation bias (only looking at the evidence that confirms what one already believes) and motivated reasoning (using rationalizations for what one already believes), this evaluation needs to be done with other people with different views. Other people are likely to be equally biased but will be more likely than us to see the flaws in our arguments, point out the problems with our evidence, and offer counterarguments and disconfirming evidence for us to consider. If an expectation exists that viewpoint diversity, reason, evidence, and civil and honest debate govern these discussions, we are far more likely to arrive at a greater approximation of truth and find more productive solutions to our problems than if we did not undertake such an endeavor. This is not a perfect system, but science has advanced significantly, and human rights and equality have improved dramatically in societies where this process has been allowed.

As Bailey makes clear, however, this is not how the word “critical” is used within Critical Social Justice theories. Rather, the word “critical” in this narrower context refers to the application of a certain theoretical framework to any analysis of society. Because Critical Social Justice emerged from both neo-Marxist and postmodern thought, the word “critical” refers to criticizing power structures that are believed to exist according to the ideology—and not to seeking truth. For Bailey and other theorists, then, critical thinking, which she accurately describes, is something quite different from things like, say, “critical pedagogy,” an approach to teaching methods that uses “critical” theories. She explains,

Critical pedagogy begins from a different set of assumptions rooted in the neoMarxian literature on critical theory commonly associated with the Frankfurt School. Here, the critical learner is someone who is empowered and motivated to seek justice and emancipation. Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities.11

Although such ideas might have originated in neo-Marxist thought, Critical Social Justice theorists and activists are less interested in class and socioeconomic status and more interested in race, gender, sexuality, and other identity-based groupings. They begin by assuming an oppressive power imbalance exists and then apply their critical methods to find it. This is how critical theorists Kiaras Gharabaghi and Ben Anderson-Nathe describe it in “The Need for Critical Scholarship,” saying, “Critical scholarship is less an approach and more an invitation; it is a way of thinking about research as a form of resistance.” They invite scholars “to submit your scholarship that is critical not in its conclusions but in its starting points” and sum up their approach like this: “Critical research is not out to create truth; it aims to consider the moment and looks forward to a way of seeing that moment in ways we could not have imagined. Finally, it invites into the research process an active identification of and engagement with power, with the social systems and structures, ideologies and paradigms that uphold the status quo.”12 This is an explicit statement that “critical” scholarship is not about truth but about criticizing things via a specific theoretical framework that begins with set assumptions about power dynamics and identity.13

I have traced the complicated evolution of this scholarship elsewhere,14 but the assumptions and doctrines that are foundational to Critical Social Justice ideology are rather simple. The core tenets are as follows:

1.   Knowledge is a social construct created by groups in society. These groups are determined by their identity in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and more and are deemed to have either dominant or marginalized positions in society.

2.   The dominant groups—white, wealthy, straight, Western men—get to decide which knowledges are legitimate and which are not. They choose the ones that serve their own interests.

3.   These legitimized knowledges then become dominant discourses in society and simply the way to speak about things. Everybody is unavoidably socialized into them and cannot escape being so.

4.   People at all levels of society then speak in these ways, thereby creating and perpetuating systems of oppressive power like white supremacy, patriarchy, and cisnormativity.

5.   Most people cannot see the systems of oppressive power that they are complicit in because they have been socialized into having those very specific biases and thus unconsciously act on this socialization.

6.   Therefore, the systems of oppressive power are largely invisible and their existence and means of operation need to be theorized by Critical Social Justice scholar-activists.

7.   Only those who have studied Critical Social Justice theories—particularly the marginalized groups who subscribe to them—are fully able to see the invisible power systems and must convey them to everybody else.

8.   Social justice (as defined by Critical Social Justice theories) can only be achieved by making everybody believe in these theories. This entails seeing and affirming these invisible power systems and their own complicity in them, as well as committing to dismantling them.

9.   Any disagreement with or resistance to affirming Critical Social Justice beliefs is evidence of either ignorance or selfish unwillingness to accept one’s complicity in the oppressive power systems. Thus, any disagreement or resistance is automatically invalid.

10. Therefore, the liberal belief in the individual’s agency to evaluate a range of ideas and accept or reject them is a self-serving myth, and liberalism, above nearly all other ideologies, is a major impediment to achieving (critical) social justice.

These ideas were once contained in the somewhat fringe academic departments in which they were developed. Only after they escaped the bounds of the academy and were applied to and acted upon in the world—namely, in the form of Critical Social Justice—did people more broadly begin to take notice of the damage and problems they inevitably cause in practice. A primary reason that an illiberal, authoritarian ideology that spreads by rejecting the marketplace of ideas and individual autonomy, demanding religious-like adherence to its tenets, and taking advantage of people’s basic sense of justice and empathy has been able to become culturally powerful is that no one of goodwill wants to stand against social justice. No one ever says, “There’s too much justice in this society. We’ll need to reduce that,” do they? It is, in fact, rather presumptuous for the Critical Social Justice movement to appropriate for itself the title “social justice” and act as though it owns the term—as though the rest of the politically engaged world is seeking something else. Different political factions primarily disagree on the fine details of what a fair and just society should look like and how to achieve that in relation to things like taxes and welfare programs. Nevertheless, there is a general consensus that a just society is one in which everybody is equal under the law and no group is denied access to any rights, freedoms, or opportunities given to others. That is, the mainstream view of social justice is that society should be fair to everyone, from which the view of Critical Social Justice advocates differs profoundly.

People who express concerns about Critical Social Justice are often asked how they can be against social justice, so it is important to know and be able to say that the scholars are using their own theoretical definition that differs significantly from other aims to make society more just. Another way of expressing this is to say that “woke” simply means being kind or empathetic and caring about social injustice, a claim often made by well-intentioned people who have mistaken Critical Social Justice for something much more universalist and liberal than it really is. Activists within the field have refuted the claim that “woke” simply means “being kind.” They maintain that this definition amounts to a “whitewashing” (repurposing in the interests of white people) of the term because it fails to acknowledge the Black Radical Tradition from which it originates.15 Similarly, academics have taken pains to inform people that Critical Social Justice is not simply the aim to create a just society and, in fact, stands against many approaches to doing so, especially those based on empirical evidence that focus on the individuality of all people and our common humanity. As education professors Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo write in their book Is Everyone Really Equal?, “Most people have a working definition of social justice; it is commonly understood as the principles of ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’ for all people and respect for their basic human rights. Most people would say that they value these principles.”16 They then go on to explain how their own approach differs from this:

While some scholars and activists prefer to use the term social justice in order to reclaim its true commitments, in this book we prefer the term critical social justice. We do so in order to distinguish our standpoint on social justice from mainstream standpoints. A critical approach to social justice refers to specific theoretical perspectives that recognize that society is stratified (i.e., divided and unequal) in significant and far-reaching ways along social group lines that include race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Critical social justice recognizes inequality as deeply embedded in the fabric of society (i.e., as structural), and actively seeks to change this.17

As this passage indicates, other approaches to social justice may not hold that society is stratified so simply along identity markers or that these stratifications permeate everything all the time. Indeed, people who care about a just society but are not convinced that the “critical” method will help to achieve one can take a variety of approaches to measuring and addressing inequalities, prejudice, and discrimination.18 Yet, these once-fringe “critical” theories have, by design and intention, entered the mainstream, and its adherents, as taught and trained, are actively seeking to change the inequalities that they believe are “deeply embedded in the fabric of society.” They act accordingly wherever and whenever they can, whether in government, the judicial system, corporations, educational institutions, religious congregations, or even hobbyist groups.

The idea that we have all been socialized into horrible bigoted beliefs like white supremacy and patriarchy and that even those of us who think we abhor them have them lurking deeply in our unconscious has been affecting everyday people for some time now in places they simply have to go and cannot avoid. In all kinds of places of work or study and in many vital institutions, people find themselves obligated to allow specialist trainers to dig these unconscious bigoted beliefs out for us, tell us what they are, have us affirm them, and commit to dismantling them via approved processes and re-education materials. Further, these ideas have been adopted and integrated across a wide range of academic and professional fields. Because we, as a society, still need scholarship and expertise that is not influenced or corrupted by ideology, this is a matter of urgent concern.