This article was originally published by Rhoda Wilson at The Daily Exposé.
The diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) regime has assumed a few names since the summer of 2020, among them: “woke” and “cancel culture.” But it can be more precisely referred to as “critical social justice.”
So, what exactly is critical social justice that so many in the Western world have been forcibly subjected to?
Over the past three years, Western societies have devoted immense resources to promoting and even mandating diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) initiatives and practices, such as anti-racist and unconscious bias training, in almost all spheres of society. Indeed, the DEI regime has become so all-encompassing and penetrating that ordinary people, ones whose life trajectories have no intersection with an academic activist culture or parts of the internet soaked in a cultural war, find their livelihoods are nonetheless entangled, frankly, saddled with, or even jeopardized by a variety of DEI policies, programs and the discourse itself.
So, what exactly is DEI, that over half of workers in the US receive its training at work? What exactly is DEI that companies, universities, and government can require a written commitment to its principles? Isn’t DEI just another name for the commonsensical opposition to discrimination against people on the grounds of their race, sex, sexuality, or any number of immutable attributes? The answer is no.
As Helen Pluckrose writes in her 2024 book ‘The Counterweight Handbook: Principled Strategies for Surviving and Defeating Critical Social Justice—at Work, in Schools, and Beyond’, the DEI regime is “inextricably connected with an illiberal, authoritarian ideology,” which has assumed a few names since the summer of 2020, among them: “woke” and “cancel culture.” But, Pluckrose summarises, it can be more precisely referred to as “critical social justice,” which she understands as a particular “approach to
The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at SHTF Plan