Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

by Helen Pluckrose

There is compelling reason to believe that it was not considered significant in earlier periods. The Bible, for example, written over two thousand years ago in the Mediterranean, where black, brown, and white people were to be found, is filled with moralistic tribalism, but makes almost no mention of skin color.

Postmodern Theorists, by contrast, were more concerned with linguistic and social systems and therefore aimed to deconstruct discourses, detect implicit biases, and counter underlying racial assumptions and attitudes.

This idea is central to critical race Theory, as is evident from the very first lines of The Alchemy: “[S]ubject position is everything in my analysis of the law,” Williams writes. Then she articulates the importance of language and discourses and the need to disrupt them, by blurring the boundaries between meanings, legal and otherwise: I am interested in the way in which legal language flattens and confines in absolutes the complexity of meaning inherent in any given problem; I am trying to challenge the usual limits of commercial discourse by using an intentionally double-voiced and relational, rather than a traditionally legal black-letter, vocabulary.20

As a result, we hear the language of critical race Theory from activists in all walks of life, and one could be easily forgiven—if critical race Theory didn’t consider it racist to forgive this—for thinking that critical race Theory sounds rather racist itself, in ascribing profound failures of morals and character to white people (as consequences of being white in a white-dominant society).

The number of axes of social division under intersectionality can be almost infinite—but they cannot be reduced to the individual. (People often joke that the individual is the logical endpoint of an intersectional approach that divides people into smaller and smaller groups—but this misunderstands the fundamental reliance on group identity.

However, there is nothing complex about the overarching idea of intersectionality, or the Theories upon which it is built. Nothing could be simpler. It does the same thing over and over again: look for the power imbalances, bigotry, and biases that it assumes must be present and pick at them. It reduces everything to one single variable, one single topic of conversation, one single focus and interpretation: prejudice, as understood under the power dynamics asserted by Theory. Thus, for example, disparate outcomes can have one, and only one, explanation, and it is prejudicial bigotry. The question is just identifying how it manifests in the given situation.

All this “sophistication” keeps intersectionalists busy, internally argumentative, and divided, but it is all done in the service of uniting the various Theoretically oppressed groups into a single meta-group, “oppressed” or “other,” under an overarching metanarrative of Social Justice, which seeks to establish a caste system based on Theorized states of oppression.

Liberal feminists generally believe society already provides almost all the opportunities required for women to succeed in life. They simply want the same access to those opportunities as men and advocate measures that allow and protect that access—educational opportunities, affordable childcare, flexible working hours, and so on.

Liberal feminism does not automatically assume that differences in outcomes imply discrimination, however, and thus it eschews the equity-based approaches of intersectional feminism.

The result is that the belief that society is structured of specific but largely invisible identity-based systems of power and privilege that construct knowledge via ways of talking about things is now considered by social justice scholars and activists to be an objectively true statement about the organizing principle of society. Does this sound like a metanarrative? That’s because it is. Social Justice scholarship and its educators and activists see these principles and conclusions as The Truth According to Social Justice—and they treat it as though they have discovered the analogue of the germ theory of disease, but for bigotry and oppression.

It is profoundly ironic that a movement claiming to problematize all sources of privilege is led by highly educated, upper-middle-class scholars and activists who are so oblivious to their status as privileged members of society.

Standpoint theory operates on two assumptions. One is that people occupying the same social positions, that is, identities—race, gender, sex, sexuality, ability status, and so on—will have the same experiences of dominance and oppression and will, assuming they understand their own experiences correctly, interpret them in the same ways.

Standpoint theory can be understood by analogy to a kind of color blindness, in which the more privileged a person is, the fewer colors she can see. A straight white male—being triply dominant—might thus see only in shades of gray. A black person would be able to see shades of red; a woman would be able to see shades of green; and a LGBT person could see shades of blue; a black lesbian could see all three colors—in addition to the grayscale vision everyone has. Medina refers to this as a “kaleidoscopic consciousness” and “meta-lucidity.”25 Thus, having oppressed identities allows extra dimensions of sight. This gives the oppressed a richer, more accurate view of reality26—hence we should listen to and believe their accounts of it.

As always, postmodernism and Marxism exhibit significant and intentional differences. The key difference is whether the oppressed suffer from false consciousness as a result of a hidden imposition of power, as the Marxists believed, or whether it is the oppressors who suffer from false consciousness, due to their socialization into a system of knowledge that benefits them, as the postmodernists would increasingly have it.

DiAngelo sermonizes, To challenge the ideologies of racism such as individualism and color blindness, we as white people must suspend our perception of ourselves as unique and/or outside race. Exploring our collective racial identity interrupts a key privilege of dominance—the ability to see oneself only as an individual.

Social Justice scholarship does not merely present the postmodern knowledge principle—that objective truth does not exist and knowledge is socially constructed and a product of culture—and the postmodern political principle—society is constructed through knowledge by language and discourses, designed to keep the dominant in power over the oppressed. It treats them as The Truth, tolerates no dissent, and expects everyone to agree or be “cancelled.”

The blurring of boundaries and cultural relativism typical of the applied postmodernist Theories are developed further, in an attempt to erase the boundary between rigorously produced knowledge and lived experience (of oppression).

Robin DiAngelo calls anything except deferential agreement “white fragility”; Alison Bailey characterizes disagreement as “willful ignorance” and a power play to preserve one’s privilege; Kristie Dotson characterizes dissent as “pernicious”; Barbara Applebaum dismisses any criticism of Social Justice Theoretical methods as “color-talk” and “white ignoreance.”

The answer seems to be that the skepticism and relativism of the postmodern knowledge principle are now interpreted in a more restrictive fashion: that it is impossible for humans to obtain reliable knowledge by employing evidence and reason, but, it is now claimed, reliable knowledge can be obtained by listening to the “lived experience” of members of marginalized groups—or what is really more accurate, to marginalized people’s interpretations of their own lived experience, after these have been properly colored by Theory.

The difficulty with this sort of Social Justice “way of knowing” is, however, the same as that with all gnostic “epistemologies” that rely upon feelings, intuition, and subjective experience: what should we do when people’s subjective experiences conflict? The overarching liberal principle of conflict resolution—to put forth one’s best arguments and hash the issue out, deferring to the best available evidence whenever possible—is completely eliminated by this approach. Indeed, it’s billed as a conspiracy used to keep marginalized people down.

Instead, what Social Justice scholars seem in practice to do is to select certain favored interpretations of marginalized people’s experience (those consistent with Theory) and anoint these as the “authentic” ones; all others are explained away as an unfortunate internalization of dominant ideologies or cynical self-interest. In this way the logical contradiction between radical relativism and dogmatic absolutism is resolved, but at the price of rendering the Social Justice Theory completely unfalsifiable and indefeasible: no matter what evidence about reality (physical, biological, and social) or philosophical argument may be presented, Theory always can and always does explain it away.

The most immediate aspect of the problem is that Social Justice scholarship gets passed down to students, who then go out into the world. This effect is strongest within Social Justice fields, which teach students to be skeptical of science, reason, and evidence; to regard knowledge as tied to identity; to read oppressive power dynamics into every interaction; to politicize every facet of life; and to apply ethical principles unevenly, in accordance with identity.

Some scholars mischaracterize criticisms of shoddy and unethical scholarship as motivated by a hatred of minority groups or women. This is astonishing. Try to imagine a parallel in other fields. Would it seem reasonable to argue that people who object to unevidenced and unethical scholarship in medicine just hate sick people and don’t care about their suffering? Do people say, “Yes, some bad papers get added to the body of medical knowledge but there are good ones too!” rather than trying to weed out the bad papers so that people don’t receive dangerous or ineffective treatments? No, because we recognize that safe and effective medicine is essential to human thriving.

These problems have also affected disciplines other than identity studies, especially in the humanities and arts. Literature, philosophy, and history have long accepted and, at times, even required the inclusion of Theory within their courses.

Drawing upon Indigenous worldviews to reconceptualize what mathematics is and how it is practiced, I argue for a movement against objects, truths, and knowledge towards a way of being in the world that is guided by first principles—mathematx. This shift from thinking of mathematics as a noun to mathematx as a verb holds potential for honouring our connections with each other as human and other-than-human persons, for balancing problem solving with joy, and for maintaining critical bifocality at the local and global level.

As a society, we turn to universities to help identify which statements, ideas, and values we can trust. Universities then transmit both information and intellectual culture to students. In this way, these institutions produce the educational and cultural elite, who will later go into the professions, head industries, establish charities, produce media, and shape public policy.

Although most people—including the owners of the companies themselves—probably do not subscribe to Social Justice ideas, these ideas are clearly influential, as demonstrated by the fact that tech, broadcasting, and retail giants are ready to placate their advocates.

It is perhaps not surprising that large corporations have caved in so easily to Social Justice pressure. Their overriding goal is, after all, to make money, not to uphold liberal values. Since the majority of consumers and voters in Western countries support the general idea of social justice, and since most people fail to understand the difference between social justice and Social Justice, large corporations sometimes find that it is astute public relations to give in, at least on minor matters that do not much affect the bottom line, to the demands of Social Justice activists.

While universities in Western countries are supposed to be ardent defenders of liberal values such as freedom of debate, they are becoming increasingly bureaucratized, with power being taken away from professors and transferred to administrators—and increasingly being run like profit-oriented businesses. University administrators are as sensitive to public relations as corporate executives, though the political environment in which they navigate is quite different (especially for public universities, which are at the direct mercy of elected politicians). This produces a complex set of pressures on university administrators, in which the protection of academic freedom is frequently not the highest priority.

Kevin Hart was forced to step down as host of the Oscars, for example, when old tweets containing gay slurs were discovered,41 and when he was later injured in a car accident, many Social Justice–oriented activists celebrated it. The lesbian presenter Ellen DeGeneres was also censured, for her qualified defense of him. Her crime: accepting his mea culpa on behalf of a community, some of whom didn’t want it. She had already caused outrage by tweeting a humorous picture of herself appearing to ride on the back of Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, which some activists thought played into racist tropes.42 Hollywood A-lister Matt Damon incurred online feminist wrath by saying that sexual assault occurred on a spectrum and describing a pat on the butt as different from rape,43 and game-show host Mario Lopez was pressured to apologize by an online mob outraged by his view that parents shouldn’t uncritically accept a three-year-old’s self-defined gender identity.44 Tennis superstar Martina Navratilova was attacked for arguing that it is not fair for trans women tennis players to compete against cis women.45 John McEnroe also came under fire for saying Serena Williams would rank at about 700 against men.

Sometimes, as with DeGeneres’ picture of herself on Usain Bolt’s back, such bigotry is seen as an attempt to prop up an allegedly “white supremacist” culture (which is accused of seeing black men as “beasts of burden”). At other times, as when DeGeneres defended Hart, it is interpreted as speaking over a marginalized community and erasing its identity by negating its claim to offense or victimhood. At still other times—as with Damon, Lopez, Navratilova, and McEnroe—the problem is simply presenting a view that runs counter to Theory itself.

However, sometimes these demands are mutually contradictory, as when J. K. Rowling was condemned for not including people of color among her main protagonists and having no explicitly gay or trans characters in the Harry Potter books,48 yet was also criticized for including Native American wizarding lore.

Media and art can also be negatively impacted when books, art, films, or video games are scrutinized as “discourse” and problematized on the grounds of the power dynamics which they “speak into.”

Even Dr. Seuss books can be argued to be racist,53 and the depictions of black people in film can be critiqued on the grounds of alleged stereotypes which include black women being presented as strong and tough characters.

Others have pointed out that complicated Social Justice rules about language, bias, and social interactions are often particularly difficult for autistic people to follow and that the neurologically atypical, who tend to be overrepresented in careers like technology, engineering, and physics, are particularly vulnerable to running afoul of such rules.62 James Damore, the autistic Google technician

The commitment to always trusting one’s feelings, rather than trying to be objective or charitable, reflects the Social Justice focus on experiential over objective knowledge. This is also tied to identity. Marginalized people’s experiences and emotions are, for Theory, authoritative (when they support Theory, that is; they’re false in one way or another when they don’t).

The valorization of victimhood and a Theoretical approach that fixates on how power oppresses and marginalizes go hand-in-hand. Victims vindicate the Theory, thus gaining status with those who subscribe to it. The moral imperative is to protect marginalized people from the nonobvious forms of harm contained in attitudes and discourses.

Campbell and Manning note that people seem most inclined to look for evidence of racism and bigotry where it is least evident, noting, We thought of Emile Durkheim, the nineteenth-century French sociologist, who famously asked his readers to imagine what would happen in a “society of saints.” The answer is that there would still be sinners because “faults which appear venial to the layman” would there create scandal.74

When Weinstein asked for evidence that the campus was racist, they shouted over him and told him that the request for evidence was itself racist. Had Weinstein any understanding of what it was like to be black, they insisted, he would know. Their evidence was that they lived the experience every day. So, instead of making any case for their incendiary claims about the college, which appear not to be supported by any data, the student-activists simply chanted Social Justice slogans like “white silence is violence” and demanded that the science department be monitored and its faculty brought in, retrained, and sanctioned for their inherently problematic views. There is a one-word answer to how this could have happened: Theory.

Having accepted that “the question isn’t ‘did racism take place?’ but rather ‘how did racism manifest in that situation?’,”76 the only possible conclusion was that they were working for an intrinsically racist organization.

Communism is a great example of the human tendency to fail to appreciate how our best theories can fail catastrophically in practice, even if their adherents are motivated by an idealistic vision of “the greater good.”

Social Justice cannot succeed because it does not correspond with reality or with core human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity and because it is an idealistic metanarrative. Nevertheless, metanarratives can sound convincing and obtain sufficient support to significantly influence society and the way it thinks about knowledge, power and language. Why? Partly because we humans aren’t as smart as we think we are, partly because most of us are idealists on at least some level, partly because we tend to lie to ourselves when we want something to work. But Theory is a metanarrative and metanarratives are, in fact, unreliable.

Liberalism and science are systems—not just neat little theories—because they are self-skeptical rather than self-certain, by design. This is a reasoned—not a radical—skepticism. They put the empirical first, rather than the theoretical.

As Theory points out, that progress has sometimes been problematic, but it has still been progress. Things are better than they were five hundred years ago, for most people most of the time, and this is undeniable.

Postmodern Theory and liberalism do not merely exist in tension: they are almost directly at odds with one another. Liberalism sees knowledge as something we can learn about reality, more or less objectively; Theory sees knowledges as completely created by humans—stories we tell ourselves, largely in the unwitting service of maintaining our own social standing, privilege, and power. Liberalism embraces accurate categorization and clarity of understanding and exposition; Theory blurs boundaries and erases categories, while reveling in manufactured ambiguity. Liberalism values the individual and universal human values; Theory rejects both in favor of group identity and identity politics. Although left-leaning liberals tend to favor the underdog, liberalism across the board centers human dignity; Theory focuses on victimhood. Liberalism encourages disagreement and debate as means to getting at the truth; Theory rejects these as ways of reinforcing dominant discourses that suppress certain perspectives and insists that we cannot get to “the” truth, but only to “our” truths, which are rooted in our values. Liberalism accepts the correspondence theory of truth—that a statement is true if it accurately describes reality; Theory promotes the idea that truth is a “language game” and that words, ultimately, only point to other words and can never correspond concretely to reality—unless those words describe oppression. Liberalism accepts criticism, even of itself, and is therefore se...

Liberalism is perhaps best understood as a desire to gradually make society fairer, freer, and less cruel, one practical goal after another.

But even if the majority view is in most respects correct, and the view being censored mostly wrong, permitting open debate is still crucial for allowing the majority view to be refined and improved.

Thus, even if Theory were 99 percent correct, and its critics (like ourselves) 99 percent wrong, freedom of debate would still be advantageous to Theorists: firstly by allowing them to improve their Theory further, and secondly by giving them—and us—more rational confidence in the correctness of Theory by virtue of its successful confrontation with opposing ideas.

Although postmodern Theorists frequently tell us that liberals and humanists are regressive and want to take us backwards, it is they who advocate returning to satisfying local narratives, revelation, and the “ecstatic glow of subjective certainty,” rather than pursuing progress in the way that has worked so well.

Others might say that progress is a myth because Nazism, the Holocaust, and genocidal communism all occurred less than a century ago—and after the Enlightenment. This would be reasonable if the argument were that everything that came after the Enlightenment was liberal. In fact, these phenomena show what happens when totalitarianism is allowed to dominate over liberalism.