Are humans no longer capable of recognizing context? How is "he mastered the material in the lecture" invoking centuries of internalized slavery and causing harm in the process?
It’s not. What we are witnessing is the last gasp of an unproductive class of hall monitors and moral busybodies trying to control everyone else and appear productive and enlightened while doing it.
As an elder millennial, it really doesn’t seem like a last gasp. These academic attempts are perfect for conspicuous signalling at no cost and such signals usually get repeated by my generation and zoomers. What I’m trying to say is that based on the past few years it seems these busybodies are winning.
I agree with this point. If my mortgage depended on writing this kind of content 40 hours a week, believe me, I would crank out so much harm reduction gobledygook that you would have no chance due to volume alone. And now that ChatGPT is around, I have a practically infinite supply of starter content to expand on.
There's a fundamental asymmetry at work here: the DEI bureaucrats have all of the time and incentives in the world to make more of this and ram it through the right channels. This is their paycheck. Supporting this is perceived as virtuous in many circles regardless of validity. And who is pushing back? Not anybody in a position where their opinion would matter. Instead all we get is a WSJ article and a few dozen anonymous posters on web boards. Doesn't bode well.
People are tired of openly racist organizations lecturing everyone else about how racism is such a problem — such as Harvard who has been griping for a decade… and argued they have a right to be racist to Asians in October.
As a Millennial, everyone I know is focused on the economy and over the whole “woke”.
I imagine it's mostly white woke people coming up with these lists. It's their attempt to "help", but at the same time reinforce their status.
Tangential to this topic, the New Yorker did an article on Clarance Thomas' views on race. He used to align with radical black nationalism before his views grew more conservative. It's a very interesting article.
These particular quotes stuck with me: "Thomas came to believe that, for the white liberal, offering help to black people was a way to express the combined privileges of race and class...The second way affirmative action continues white supremacy is by elevating whites to the status of benefactors, doling out scarce privileges to those black people they deem worthy...Put simply, Thomas believes that affirmative action is a white program for white people."
I think this is the crux of the issue. Modern media makes an art of decontextualization, to the point where most of us experience the world as a series of disconnected narratives emerging from the ether only to dissipate just as quickly as they come. In this milieu the quixotic and paradoxical attempt to perfect language in the service of justice seems like a reasonable, plausible, and achievable goal.
