What shouldn't be forgotten is that "checking your privilege" is something that one can take on as a means of simply being grateful for all of those ways in which one is advantaged.
Read moreThe Commercialisation of Pride
It began with the 1969 Stonewall riots in which, for the first time ever, a mass of people who identified as “gay” came together to protest a police raid on one of the few safe havens for such a group; the Stonewall Inn. Never before had such a large number of gay individuals been seen together in the daylight hours and it is considered to constitute the most important event leading to the gay liberation movement.
Since then we have been gifted with a yearly celebration in which LGBT people can come together to mark the progress made, the increasingly rare injustices that still occur, and the losses suffered along the way. However, in recent years the attendance for the march is now in the millions, and the organisation of such a large event cannot be done without a lot of money - enter the corporations.
These brands serve a purpose, they contribute the much needed money which allows the event to continue and grow, and subsequently these companies benefit from their exposure. The resentment is rooted in what they do in the other 51 weeks of the year. These same companies can be seen lobbying Republican politicians with views antithetical to LGBT rights. Understandably people view this as a cynical toe-dip into the water of justice before a scurrying back to their political home of tax-cuts. The question is what can be done? A frustrated movement is picking up steam, and this year alongside the Pride march there will be a protest against this commercialisation. While this more traditional form of activism has its merits, others see the solution as attainable via another route - working with the companies year round to ensure they are always aligned with the movement. Ultimately the beautiful message at the core of this is being obfuscated, and I see our place as trying to hold to that essence because to lose it would be a very sad thing indeed.
This Jussie Smollett Case Has Bothered Me
Jussie Smollett staged an attack and has recently taken a "sweetheart deal" wherein forfeiting his $10k bond and having done 16 hours of community service was deemed good enough for having wasted police time and causing an immeasurable amount of cultural damage.
Why he was offered such an unreasonably perfect deal nobody has yet worked out. How he was allowed to still feign innocence after the fact I also can't fathom. What is clear is that, despite what his hoax aimed to pretend, his skin colour is not a hinderance to his success. It seems fame trumps even "white privilege" when it comes to being treated favourably.
I wouldn't want to see Jussie harshly punished, but his lack of remorse upsets me. If he had stated that he was utterly embarrassed by his actions and that would be seeking psychological help I would be fine with his walking away relatively unscathed, but his doubling down on his faux-victimhood is hard to swallow.
The damage done to the way society will now approach claims of hate crimes cannot be easily repaired. Maajid Nawaz was a victim of a genuine racist attack around the time that the story originally unfolded, and he was met with far more skepticism as a result of this shambles - that isn't okay.
Finally, I want to clumsily try to articulate this feeling that there appears to be a tactic of casting "just enough doubt" such that those biased in one direction can believe they were right, while those biased in another can do the same. The judicial system and the media reporting come together to be incapable of unequivocally saying that something is true. I know why it is this way, and I don't know how it could be otherwise, but it's bloody annoying.
Social Justice as Religion
The analogising of the social justice movement to religion has taken place amongst many intellectuals. I first encountered it from John McWhorter who, in 2015, wrote about anti-racism as a flawed new religion. More recently I think it was best exemplified in a video from Mike Nayna, the documentarian for those behind the brilliant Grievance Studies scandal (Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian, and James Lindsay). It’s there to be seen in many other places such as from the young Quillette contributor Coleman Hughes, the evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad in what he terms “Progressivism”, and from Jonathan Haidt in his most recent book with Greg Lukianoff “The Coddling of the American Mind”. In fact, it is in The Coddling that I heard this perfect quote:
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.
Here we understand the devil to be those who reside within the “privilege” spectrum of Kathryn Pauly Morgan’s intersectional chart. With the devil clearly established (white, straight men) the other religious parallels fall into place; blasphemy, heretics, and sin.
To blaspheme against the cause is to refute any of its’ core tenants, such as equality of outcome. The tenants grow over time with a recent problematic addition being the commandment of “believe all women”. If you dare break one of the ethereally accepted rules, perhaps you are black but don’t see yourself as a victim, you are a blasphemer and must be punished accordingly.
To be a heretic is to place yourself in opposition to the dogma. The best example of this is likely found in the very liberal, left-leaning Eric Weinstein. His vocal opposition to the demand that white people abstain from the Evergreen campus for a day marked him an enemy of “the cause”. This resulted in much upset and the eventual departure of himself and his wife from the university at which they had been professors for the majority of their academic careers.
In Christianity one is “born is sin” and this is true of anybody who falls too high up on the axes of intersectionality. Perhaps the scariest diversion from traditional religion is that in the Holy Church of Social Justice there is no repentance. As a white, heterosexual, able-bodied, English male I am expected to wake up each day acknowledging my privilege and thus my inherent sin. I should then traverse my day always somewhat aware that I am a bad person.
It is not all that surprising that there would be so many similarities between what we see in this growing movement and the religions of the past. One constant between the formation of the centuries old religions and now are the humans behind their creation. We have come a long way, but fighting our evolved tribal instincts is no easier, and human nature is such that we will repeatedly fall into the same traps. What is different now is that the scientific method has rapidly advanced our understanding of the universe, from the macro to the micro. The anti-science aspect of SJWs is therefore the hill on which we should fight most ardently. If we refuse to relinquish the sanctity of facts and truth we can repel much of the excesses of what we see today.