Social Justice
Story Stream
Rescuing Identity Politics March 29, 2024
The left is undergoing an overdue reckoning. Progressive mass movements have achieved little more than mass in recent years. Occupy Wall Street didn’t beget economic redistribution, to say nothing of Marxist revolution. Large-scale marches for gun co...
Beyond the Victimhood Grift March 13, 2024
The title and marketing of Andrew Boryga’s debut novel, Victim, promise a critique of the social-justice values that have come to predominate in works released by Big Five publishers. The book delivers that, plus something more. Victim is the story o...
Playing the Victim March 04, 2024
The tidal wave of poststructuralist discourse that crashed onto the American academic scene in the 1970s has left numerous cultural tropes that have trickled their way down into mainstream culture. Is all this talk about social justice and decolonisa...
Inescapable Disparities September 19, 2023
“Whatever the condition of human beings at the beginning of the species,” writes Thomas Sowell in his new book Social Justice Fallacies, “scores of millennia had already come and gone before anyone coined the phrase social justice.” And during those ...
I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings August 11, 2023
In 2008, when I was a writer for the blog Feministe, commentors began requesting warnings at the top of posts discussing distressing topics, most commonly sexual assault. Violence is, unfortunately and inevitably, central to feminist writing. Rape, d...
The Ultra-processed Food Scare August 10, 2023
If Jamie Oliver is the fun police, Chris van Tulleken is the Taliban. The selling point of books like Ultra-Processed People is the idea that everything you know is wrong. Van Tulleken, an infectious diseases doctor and television presenter, takes th...
Booklash August 09, 2023
In the past few years, the literary community has seen waves of activism that have galvanized much-needed and overdue change in the industry. National movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have pushed publishers to recommit to accountability, ...
Academic Freedom Is Social Justice June 22, 2023
In 2014, Harvard student Sandra Korn wrote a column in the undergraduate newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, titled “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom: Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice.” Korn, a joint major in history of science and s...
The Role Reversal of R.F. Kuang’s 'Yellowface' June 01, 2023
The Asian American literary canon has always consisted of works about Asian authors’ insecurities around white people. The Joy Luck Club author and Asian American literature’s fairy godmother Amy Tan once wrote a nonfiction story titled “Fish Cheeks....
Politics, Not Apology June 01, 2023
My book...is about the social justice movement, the efforts by activists to utilize political power to grow their coalitions and achieve certain kinds of policy ends. The George Floyd protest movement and its associated offshoots, which takes up the ...
Respectability Politics Works April 17, 2023
I first encountered the term “respectability politics” in 2016 when a local activist used it to defend herself against accusations that she was being “a bitch” on Facebook. Maybe you’ve heard this term from an annoying person in your community, or ha...
Social Justice by Algorithm March 31, 2023
When I first joined Columbia Engineering, in what became my longest job, it was like a quaint small town remarkably untouched by (post)modernity. The rot ravaging the rest of the university felt far away.Bashful nerds toiled at obscure technical prob...
Searching for Character in Identity March 27, 2023
The following is a condensed version of "Searching for Character in Identity" by Robert C. Thornett, published at Law & Liberty.A few years ago, during lunch at our school’s all-day DEI training, teachers were asked to fill in sheets with words about...
Of Course You Know What 'Woke' Means March 16, 2023
As I have said many times, I don’t like using the term “woke” myself, not without qualification or quotation marks. It’s too much of a culture war pinball and now deemed too pejorative to be useful. I much, much prefer the term “social justice politi...
How Ideologues Infiltrated the Arts February 02, 2023
The trouble began for Lincoln Jones, as it did for so many in the summer of 2020, with the black square. Jones, 47, is a longtime and celebrated Los Angeles–based choreographer. For 11 years he has run the American Contemporary Ballet company. His wo...
Publishers Refuse Book Exposing Anti-Semitism May 20, 2021
Prominent publishing houses in the U.S. and the U.K. have refused to publish Tuvia Tenenbom’s latest best-selling book exposing the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe.“I cannot for the life of me get any American publisher for my books. We tried, we got...
Social Justice Groupthink May 17, 2021
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody is one of the most important and enlightening books I have read in years.[1] It is a joint effort of Helen Pluckrose, a British p...
How the Super Rich Really Live? April 09, 2021
Mother Jones senior editor Michael Mechanic has written an engaging, informative, entertaining, and insightful forthcoming book Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All. Like actual jackpots, however, it loses a littl...
Lest We Forget November 23, 2020
Everyone interested in understanding the real scope of the challenge identity politics presents for the West should read American Awakening. Joshua Mitchell proposes that the many threads of this movement ought to be understood as a species of civic ...
Blood on Their Hands November 20, 2020
Joshua Mitchell, a Tocquevillean political philosopher with an impressive grounding in theology, has written a penetrating analysis of identity politics in the modern age. Like John McWhorter and Andrew Sullivan, he correctly views today’s dominant i...
A Double American Awakening November 16, 2020
America has been a land of religious awakenings. The First Great Awakening happened in the 1730s and 1740s; the Second Great Awakening occurred between the 1790s and 1820s. Protestant revivals and the formation of new Evangelical groups marked Christ...
A Quiet Totalitarian Revolution November 16, 2020
The following is an adaptation from Rod Dreher's "Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents".A curious thing is happening in the immediate aftermath of the US presidential election: Facebook, Eventbrite, and other gatekeepers of the electro...
The Bigotry of Social Justice September 25, 2020
Two of 2020’s best-sellers were published in 2018 and 2019, respectively: White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo, and How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi. (DiAngelo, a consultant, is white; Kendi, a professor who recently left American University ...
Colin Quinn Roasts Every State September 22, 2020
No state escapes unscathed in Colin Quinn's new book: Vermont is "The Old Hippie"; Florida is "The Hot Mess"; in Wisconsin, "The Diet Starts Tomorrow." Even Quinn's beloved home state of New York is "The quiet state with the city that never shuts up....
Ibram X. Kendi's Woke Indulgences September 22, 2020
In August 2019, as young journalists agitated for their newsrooms to pivot toward social justice, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's research center at American University secured a $50,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to develop a "racial reporting guidebook" t...
