"Autoethnography" refers to a form of research (if we must) in which one’s own reflections upon life, often written in autobiographical form, are treated as authoritative analyses of broader society.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-autoethnography/
"'Diversity,' 'Inclusion,' and 'Equity,' as described in the Critical sense, truly aren’t what they seem to be, and it's appropriate to order the three words in this nonstandard way and apply the acronym "DIE" to their program." -James Lindsay
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/diversity-delusion/
The question to pose is simple enough: What would it take for you to say that the Woke movement has gone too far?
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/woke-breaking-point/
In a sense, "BIPOC" is a necessary consequence of intersectionality and, potentially, a first step in an "alphabet people"-style expansion of the acronym to indicate relative status within the Matrix of Domination.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-bipoc/
People have been asking us to help them understand, and one of the things they have been asking for most frequently is a reading list for these ideas.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/beginners-curriculum-critical-race-theory/
"Social Justice is a highly counter-intuitive movement which speaks its own language and has its own conceptions of the world." -Helen Pluckrose
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/helen-pluckrose-evolution-postmodern-thought/
In short, "model minorities" are those that live up to the standards of dominant culture (whiteness) and are therefore held up as a model for other minorities on how to do a minoritized culture "right."
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-model-minority/
Generally speaking, “medicalization” is viewed by adherents to Theory as a problematic. That is, making a matter of identity medically relevant is viewed as creating a kind of oppression.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-medicalizing/
Social Justice provides all of us with explicit permission to treat its claims and advances in the same way we would any other faith—say, like Scientology—and to proceed accordingly without the guilt it attempts to foist upon us as a conversion mechanism.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/postmodern-religion-faith-social-justice/
Robin DiAngelo’s emotionally and financially manipulative manuscript for "racism education" should be soundly condemned by anyone who truly seeks to end racism and enjoy a unified and peaceable future.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/5-reasons-book-white-fragility-shallow-destructive/
"Latinx" (pronounced: la-tin-ecks) is a gender-neutral, hyper-inclusive variant on the standard terms Latino and Latina, which derive from Spanish, which is a gendered language.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-latinx/
If a similar book were written about any other racial group-Asian Insecurity, Black Hostility, Latinx Insensitivity, etc., not only would the book never become a bestseller, it would never be published.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/intellectual-fraud-robin-diangelos-white-fragility/
The idea of "internalized racism" is a way of discrediting the views of racial minorities when those views do not support Theory.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-internalized-racism/
A shorter, lighter version of James Lindsay's previous article about the problems with Critical Race Theory that's easier to read and share.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/sharing-size-nine-reasons-critical-race-theory-terrible-dealing-racism/
"Giving into a demand made by Critical Race Theory cannot appease it. It can, however, signal that you will give into their demands, which will then continue to come and to escalate." -James Lindsay
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/reasons-critical-race-theory-terrible-dealing-racism/
There are two interrelated primary reasons that Social Justice increasingly uses the term “minoritized group” in place of “minority group,” which it functionally replaces.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-minoritize/
"Womxn" means "woman" (and is pronounced like "wuh-minx" ), except with the "man" removed as an act of symbolic feminist activism.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-womxn/
In a perfect example of how Social Justice will eventually problematize everything, the term "people of color" has recently been recognized by Social Justice adherents as a way to lump non-white people together as a single identity group that isn’t white.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-people-of-color/
Healthism is sometimes defined as the “dark side of healthy living,” and is characterized as an attitude or way of living that prioritizes health, considers it a moral good, and sees it as a matter of personal individual responsibility.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-healthism/
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 25 (Audio Version)
In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay continues his abridged reading of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s famous (or infamous) paper, “Mapping the Margins,” which appeared in the Stanford Law Review in 1991. While not the birthplace of intersectionality, this paper is the first full-throated appeal for its application, not just in the world but also in the movements from which it was born: radical feminism and black liberationism.
In part 1 of this series, James read the introduction to the paper, wherein he claims the Woke One Ring was forged to form one model of systemic oppression to rule them all: intersectionality, by which all the radical and civil rights movements were ensnared and brought under the dominion of postmodern neo-Marxist thought. Here, in part 2, James reads through the conclusion of “Mapping the Margins” and illustrates exactly how Crenshaw’s ideas will achieve the complete subordination and redirection of all leftist, left-wing, and civil-rights thought.
This episode of the New Discourses podcast is the second part of a two-part series reading an abridged version of Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins.” You can find Part 1 here: https://newdiscourses.com/2021/03/forging-woke-one-ring-kimberle-crenshaws-mapping-margins/
Social Justice Theory generally presumes marginalization is either far more influential or far more unjust (or both) than it is in reality.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-marginalization/
"My message is 'Biden cannot win.' I say that as somebody who wants to stay apolitical. I didn't want to have to do this." -James Lindsay
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/10/biden-is-not-the-room/
"This bill helps support that fundamentally equal and fair treatment before the law, which is currently at risk." -James Lindsay
https://newdiscourses.com/2021/03/letter-supporting-bill-ban-critical-race-theory/
"My dear, sweet, son, I’ve got to break it to you: you’re not trans, you’re just weird."
https://newdiscourses.com/2021/03/youre-not-trans-youre-just-weird/
by James Lindsay
The state of New Hampshire is trying to advance a bill in its state house of representatives (HB544) that mirrors the executive order President Trump issued "against Critical Race Theory," which is to say against the divisive (and racist/neoracist) tenets at the heart of Critical Race Theory and so-called "diversity" training sessions based upon it. After testifying in support of the bill in a legislative committee meeting on February 18 (in which sitting state representative Kris Schultz slandered [video below] me), I have followed up with the legislative committee this week by sending the following letter urging positive endorsement and support for the bill as it hopefully makes its way to the New Hampshire House floor. Because I think it might be instructive for other people to see what I wrote, the letter I sent is reproduced below (correcting a typo or two from the original). I encourage other people to follow suit [https://newdiscourses.com/2020/12/maintaining-expanding-ban-critical-race-theory/] in their own states, urging similar legislation or executive action and then showing up to testify and sending letters of support and encouragement.
To whom it may concern,
I am writing as an expert and concerned American, though not a New Hampshire citizen, in unequivocal support of HB544 which bans the teaching of certain divisive tenets as though they are fact. I also testified in the committee hearing as an expert on Critical Race Theory, against which this bill is ultimately based, on February 18 of this year. Please give this important, necessary bill your full-throated endorsement and a positive recommendation.
I don't know that this is the time for lengthy written testimony, so I'll try to keep my remarks brief. The bill being proposed, it should immediately be noted, bans not only the divisive tenets that stem from the Critical Race Theory worldview and its related activism, which is very aggressive and very interested in achieving dominance in our schools, workplaces, and lives, but it also bans trainings and uncritical teaching of what would be the more commonly understood forms of unacceptable bias, behavior, and ideology, including both white supremacy and patriarchy. It prohibits recipients of state funding from the same things the Civil Rights Acts and the Fourteenth Amendment are already supposed to protect against, although these are failing. Namely, the bill would prohibit teaching as uncontested fact or mandating training in racial and sex stereotyping, scapegoating, and discrimination, as well as positioning the state, institutions, etc., as intrinsically racist in a "systemic" way, which has allowed them thus far to avoid being found in violation of either the Civil Rights Acts or Fourteenth Amendment despite openly and explicitly advocating, in the words of the theorist Ibram X. Kendi, "present discrimination," which is billed as a necessary remedy to past discrimination. While someone might argue that this bill is unnecessary because of the Civil Rights Act, in practice this has not been borne out, making a bill like this more necessary than not. Every American, and every New Hampshire citizen, should not want discrimination, stereotyping, and scapegoating to be a part of their workplace training modules or children's education. This bill helps support that fundamentally equal and fair treatment before the law, which is currently at risk.
It should also be noted that this bill has First Amendment relevance as well, and not in the way its opponents would explain. The essence of the First Amendment is that people have freedom of conscience, particularly with regard to matters of spiritual belief, and freedom of speech, such that the state can neither compel nor restrict speech. Opponents of this bill will say that the bill seeks to restrict speech, but this is not true. It explicitly leaves provision for workplace trainings and education that don't teach these already-illegal tenets as uncontested fact. Moreover, the situation is quite the opposite to that portrayed by the opponents to the bill who oppose it on free-speech grounds. These workplace trainings and educational programs violate for very many people both freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. Their freedom of speech is violated by compelling them to admit to complicity in racism and sexism, among other social violations that are unlikely to be true. It also compels them to adopt a particular approach to anti-racism and anti-sexism that is very narrow and to speak on its behalf. This latter example, then, not only violates freedom of speech but also the freedom of conscience implied by both the free-exercise and establishment clauses of the First Amendment. It is not the state's place to be dictating (or funding the dictators of) how one is to feel about the issue of racism and sexism. Citizens, the overwhelming majority of whom firmly reject racism and sexism, should be granted the freedom of conscience to oppose those on terms they find recognizable, which in a free, liberal country like the United States will mostly likely be rooted in equality, colorblindness, individualism, and universal humanity, which are solidly American values. They may also do so from Judeo-Christian principles, for example the famous injunction from Paul that in Christianity there is "neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free," etc. They should not be compelled to do so in the terms most often employed by so-called "anti-racist," "diversity," "racial sensitivity," and "culturally responsive" programs today, which are a specific ideology known as Critical Theory, which explicitly rejects virtually all of these values for others, sometimes termed "liberationist" and at other times rightly labeled "neo-Marxist," including in the words of the activists pushings these programs themselves. While the law may not bear out today that these trainings and pedagogical pursuits violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as existing Civil Rights legislation, it is likely that they will eventually. It is therefore better to get on the right side of this issue now and take proactive steps to strengthen a legal architecture that is failing citizens in their most fundamental rights.
For the sake of brevity, I will not elaborate at length on the theory underlying the overwhelming bulk of these trainings and relevant school curricula, which is Critical Race Theory, the same (neo-Marxist) Critical Theory mentioned above specifically made to take race as a category of difference upon which Marxian conflict theory (oppressors versus oppressed) is to be applied. I will simply remind the committee that in addition to this theory being one among many approaches to the issue of race and racism, it is one that is rooted specifically in making precisely the same mistake that made racism the problem it has been throughout our history as a nation, which is specifically placing social significance into racial categories and considering that significance determinant and in some ways relevant to one's social standing and access to power. This was a horrific thing to have done in the 16th century going forward, and it's no better to do in the 21st century. It didn't work out then, and it won't work out now, unless one's goal is to effect an American Cultural Revolution in mirror image to the one Mao perpetrated on China in the 1960s-1970s, which (as few people know) used many of the same arguments and ideas about race, applied to the Han Chinese race instead of "whiteness."
Critical Race Theory begins from the assumption, in its own words, that racism is the normal state of affairs of society, changing the question from "did racism take place?" to "how did racism manifest in that situation?" (for racism is assumed to be relevant to every situation), and it calls into question "the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral principles of constitutional law." That is, it is presumptive, divisive, and explicitly un-American, if not anti-American. Moreover, it is designed not to be able to be disagreed with, as all disagreement is framed as some variation of racial "fragility" or "privilege-preserving epistemic pushback," which is to say a cynical drive to maintain one's social dominance, not legitimate criticism of the genuinely bad arguments and cynical assumptions put forth by the theory itself. Because it cannot be disagreed with without accusations of bad intentions and motivations, it is divisive and very difficult to uproot once installed. Because it believes "there is no neutral" between "dominance" and "oppression" (Marxian conflict theory), it is again divisive and in fact polarizing. Because its issues are so sensitive and because it addresses them in such an accusatory way (everyone who doesn't agree with it is racist and white supremacist), it diverts incredible volumes of resources to dividing and polarizing every environment it can gain a foothold in. HB544 exists to minimize that destructive influence and colossal waste of (taxpayer-funded) resources. Even worse, not only is there no evidence supporting the application of this theory, there is evidence against its claims that it can generate that which it claims to generate, so it tears apart organizations and poisons minds (including those of children) with its divisive tenets while profiting off a fraudulent enterprise that robs the taxpayers while destroying their communities.
On these grounds, and possibly hundreds of pages more that I could write if needed, I again urge you in the strongest possible way to support and recommend HB544 as a step in the right direction, away from these divisive teachings and in support of the fundamental inalienable rights this country has always recognized and strived to extend to all citizens, even the allegedly privileged ones. This bill is important for New Hampshire, and it sends a message to America, whose federal government has just unambiguously signaled it wants to take us in the opposite direction by rescinding a similar federal executive order. That opposite direction is back into racial and sex discrimination, stereotyping, and scapegoating, and its into things America has never been and has never been willing to become, namely whatever it is that Critical Theory (i.e., neo-Marxism) aims to make of it.
Thank you.
James Lindsay, Ph.D.
Were the Grievance Studies team to attempt another hoax today they might have a more difficult time. The Critical Animal Studies literature is almost beyond parody.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/10/boldly-go-critical-animal-studies-final-frontier/
To cut to the chase with the word, which has a variety of meanings, we’d like to insist that altogether too often, the word "authentic" in Critical Social Justice means "in agreement with Theory."
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-authentic/
Any number of pseudo-intellectual terms have little by little crept in and invaded what used to be respectable areas of study, or driven them out completely and replaced them with mountains of treacherous and dangerous nonsense.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/04/trans-gender-civilizational-collapse/
"Spoiler alert: The infected monkey is loose in the city, and just like in the movie, people don't believe the threat is real. The problem is that the contents of social justice don't match the pretty diversity picture on the box." -James Lindsay
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/03/james-lindsay-truth-critical-methods/
While the usual definition of racism is partially recognized within Critical Social Justice, under its purview, "racism" means something different, or at least something more—and more vague.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-racism-systemic/
The same mechanism explains the triumph of the social justice gangsters over older and less adventurous purveyors of Theory. And they all have the industrious and well-meaning Jackie Derrida to thank for it.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/03/reconstructing-derrida-poetics-nonsense-rule-cool/
As noted by W.E.B. Du Bois, and profoundly Theorized since, this "double consciousness" is believed to give members of minoritized groups (and oppressed people more generally) unique insight into the nature of society, the "revelation of the other world."
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-double-consciousness/
"Your side is a coalition of factions, some of which need cleaning up, and so is ours. Most of us on 'the left' are realizing we need to fight those on our Critical Social Justice fringe, and we hope you’ll start to notice." -Helen Pluckrose
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/03/letter-misunderstanding-right/
According to critical race educator Robin DiAngelo, author of the influential book White Fragility, "anti-Blackness" is the essential foundation of the white identity.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-anti-blackness/
To have a critical consciousness is to be aware of—and generally unhappy about—your positionality in society, i.e., your relationship to systemic and institutional power as determined by Theory.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical-consciousness/
"If UCF escapes without consequences, it will be open season on tenured faculty with dissenting points of view on politics and culture." -Adam Ellwanger
https://newdiscourses.com/2021/02/negys-challenge-academic-cancellation-freedom-fight/
"The answer to all of this is more and better science and not the injection of intentional critical political biases as though those constitute a 'corrective' measure." -James Lindsay
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/09/no-science-isnt-social-construct/
"Of all the things on New Discourses, the one I'm most excited to be involved in making and to share with you all is this resource: Translations from the Wokish: A Plain-Language Encyclopedia of Social Justice Terminology." -James Lindsay
https://newdiscourses.com/translations-from-the-wokish/
Social Justice extends the idea of complicity out of the realm of contributory actions and into one of uncritical benefit from systems that oppress.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-complicity/
"Here we have Marcuse very explicitly calling for withdrawing the civil rights of those who disagree with his liberation movements and extending civil rights to those who agree. This is the logic of the world we live in now." -James Lindsay
https://newdiscourses.com/2021/02/repressive-tolerance-left-good-right-bad-what-could-go-wrong/
Whiteness studies indicates that whiteness itself contains various features that make it impossible for white people to understand racism. It also makes white people unwilling to attempt to understand racism.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-whiteness-studies/
"This magic narrative has been and remains the key to their power." -James Lindsay
https://newdiscourses.com/2021/01/birth-new-american-mythology/
Whatever his substance and depth, humor and humanity, Professor Jordan Peterson is a guru for young men and their sympathizers who don’t know who or how to be in today’s post-everything world.
https://newdiscourses.com/2019/12/guru-appeal-jordan-peterson-post-everything-world/
There won’t be change if a few faculty members speak up. On the contrary, by putting themselves in the firing line and being summarily executed, other academics are likely to be further deterred from speaking out.
https://newdiscourses.com/2019/12/academics-cowards-grievance-studies-academic-pursuit/
Our Patreon, YouTube, and Subscribestar contributors now have early access to the latest New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay!
https://www.patreon.com/posts/antonio-gramsci-46365316
