On the Politics of Social Justice

Introduction

What the hell is the deal with social justice, where does it come from, and why does the established culture not seem to realize just how fucked it is? I’ve had some experience in a career where this stuff is dominant, and some perspectives as to why it exists. It’s important to know thy enemy. So let’s have a talk about social justice.

This video is currently on the front page of /r/videos. The TL;DR of it is that this girl says that she can't be accused of racism or sexism because she's not a white male. Only white men can be racist or sexist. The explanation that she, and lots of people of this sort, gives is that racism and sexism are forms of institutional oppressive, and since she's not part of the oppressing group it can't possibly apply to her.

This is absolutely crazy to any reasonable person. But when a lie this big becomes as popular as it is, it is likely beneficial to somebody.

The History of Oppression

There was a time when that might have been true. If you read, for example, about the history of the black migration to Northern states from Southern states, read about redlining, and blockbusting, and about the origins of the "housing projects," about how blacks faced limitations in receiving the benefits of the GI bill after WW2 that was the foundation of the modern middle class... you'll see that systemic discrimination did exist and was a very real problem.

Operative word was.

There was a time when white anglo males dominated the scene and even worthy, qualified, intelligent women and blacks were not able to fully participate in society. And there were a lot of well-intentioned people who wanted to create equality. Real equality. Martin Luther King takes to the streets and tells us that we ought to judge a man by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin and I think there is not one among us who can say that he’s wrong. But social justice is all about judging someone by the color of their skin with total disregard for the content of their character. What in the hell happened there?

Social Justice in Academia

For those of you who did not study humanities or social science in university level, or studied STEM, I can tell you that social justice is now the standard curriculum. White is bad, black is good; man is bad, woman is good; West is bad, East is good; capitalism is bad, communism is good; corporations are bad, tribespeople are good; straight is bad, gay is good.

I can say that this will depend on the field as well. The field of history tends to be more objective because everything about a proper historian’s methodology is about evidence. Political science is also tends to be very data driven and professors of this field use a lot of math. The more subjective the field, the deeper I would say is the penetration of SJ. Anthropology, sociology, education… [x] studies is the biggest offender. When I was in grad school I had colleagues from hard science backgrounds (chemistry, physics) who read what constitutes a “peer reviewed journal” in the field of education and were nauseated. In chemistry and physics, the rules for experiments are extremely strict and rigorous and anybody who studied them knows it. In education, “omg I made a feels, about race and gender” can win you the nobel prize.

Why are people SJW's?

The people who have latched onto the philosophy of social justice I would say fall into one of three categories:

1. It is useful them for political reasons

2. They use it as a grab for moral superiority / immunity from criticism or blame

3. They, mistakenly, believe that they are actually doing good in the world by helping the oppressed

Your typical Tumblerina is category 2. They’re just petty small minded opportunists taking a cheap shot at a power grab. Like a little girl on the playground who realizes that boys get punished if she cries. But, I want to talk about 1 and 3.

The Politics of Social Justice

There exist a whole lot of federal government programs which are social justice in nature. Preferential treatment for women, gays, lesbians, every minority group. Not Asians, despite being a racial minority who suffered historical discrimination, they aren't one of the "approved victims" and therefore they receive no benefits from these problems. Universities have followed suit. (Koreans suffered a history of imperialism and oppression too. Ask them if their history of oppression presents them from working hard in life.)

I have often wondered why this is. One of the biggest answers that I've found is that social justice politics allow us to pretend as though we're addressing a problem, while intentionally overlooking the real problems behind it.

For example, in education.

There exists a gigantic disparity in the field of education in the US. If you go to the nice white suburban neighborhoods you can find some of the best public schools in the world. Average students from good districts are doing stuff that, 30 years ago, would have been taught in universities. The competitiveness of passing AP exams and participating in sports and extracurriculars gives these students a very competitive exhaustingly hard working time in high school.

Then you can go into the black district in the city and find a bunch of thugs who make it to 12th grade with a 1st grade reading level. That looks an awful like systemic oppression, doesn’t it? And in some historical ways it is, but in some contemporary ways it isn’t. But that’s not the point.

The point is that this is a real problem, and there is real shit we could do to fix it. Really. This shit could be fixed. But the critical thing to understand is that we’re not going to. Every single day, myself and the vast majority of the other "urban educators" that I worked alongside had an agenda pushed down our throats about how these black communities were victims and it's because white people don't respect them enough that they have problems, that white teachers are racist, or white politicians are racist, or white police are racist. It's always somebody else's fault. We had to read academic articles about how correcting black kids' English was racist because their dialect was just as valid as White English. Are you people fucking kidding me? But every single day we were out in the trenches and saw, without any confusion, that the way we were told to understand the situation bore no correlation with the reality of the problem. Someone was pushing an agenda on us.

That isn't to say there is nothing that could be done at a policy level to fix this problem.

Fixing Bad Schools

But the things we could do to address the problem in a meaningful way simply will not happen.

Why can’t these black kids can’t read? Because their dads are in prison for non-violent drug crimes, from the very profitable drug war. Not having a dad is the single greatest factor in creating delinquency in juveniles, and we’ve actually incentivized this problem.

Oh whoops we can’t touch that.

Their moms had no incentive to have a stable family because they can earn more money having illegitimate children and collecting women-only welfare benefits than having a father at home working to support the family, raise his kids, and keep them in school and out of gangs.

Oh whoops, can’t touch that either.

We have laws structured in such a way that encouraged manufacturing jobs to be outsourced to Mexico and China and have. Domestic production is disadvantaged tremendously in a variety of ways, among them being that we allow imports without any tariffs from countries who heavily tariff imported American goods. But this benefits our corporations.

Oh whoops I guess we won’t be touching that one either.

The biggest single cause of intergenerational poverty is teen parenthood. Sex education and access to birth control are the most effective way of combatting this. Yes, sorry TRP, abstinence programs, while a good bone to throw to old ignorant voters who believe what their Sunday school teacher said more than any proven statistical evidence, don’t actually work according to all available data. Nevertheless, currently there are incentives against sex education and access to birth control for students for political reasons.

So I guess we won’t be touching that one.

The education system in the US is organized such that funding for public schools comes from property taxes. Pop quiz: which school do you think will be better funded, the white school in Beverly hills? Or the black school in Detroit where houses sell for one dollar? The solution to this would be to restructure the way that school districts are funded. But doing this would mean that you’re funneling resources away from the politically active wealthier districts.

So I guess we’re not doing that either.

The salary for school districts is attached to the general level of wealth of that district. You are paid less in the city, in spite of higher costs, than you are in that nice suburban school. In other fields, a more difficult job that requires a higher level of skill pays more. In education, it pays less. But public opinion of teachers is very low and the belief is that they are largely overpaid and not useful. The last thing we’ll be doing is paying them more, especially in the worst districts. We’ve actually changed the legislation so that we have more resources to cut funding from poor schools.

So I guess we aren’t going to do that either.

Guess it looks like we won't actually be doing shit to fix the disparity of the education system. If only there was a way we could shift the blame so that this is all somebody else's problem.

Social Justice the Rescue: Enter the White Savior

Well, shit. I just listed all the policy actions we could take to fix the problems in our education system. But, we’re not going to do any of that stuff. But here’s what we can do: we can say that the problem is white racism, then we can shift accountability for the problem.

Go get a master’s degree in education and a teaching certification and see what they teach you about. Even if you’re getting a degree that has absolutely nothing to do with urban issues, you’re going to learn about black people are victims and how it’s up to white people to fix their problems. If you ask why the historical racism experienced by Asians, or Jews, or Irish, or Indians, or Slavs, or anybody except blacks and Hispanics you will not get an answer. Poor Korean immigrants who live in the ghetto suffer constant violence and racism in black-majority schools, then they are discriminated against when they try to apply to college because there are too many smart Koreans who get good scores. Can anyone really say with a straight face that the purpose of social justice is equality?

We’ve turned the problem of our education system into a moral problem. One that requires guilty whites to sacrifice themselves on the altar of social justice. Who do you think is signing up to teach in the ghetto? I think you can take a guess.

Why Social Justice Isn’t Going Anywhere

This takes us to the grand conclusion: social justice frames the problem in a way that disperses the blame. If black failure in schools is because of white oppression, then it’s NOT because of our government policies which create this problem (which I listed above). Then we can crusade against the problem and pretend we’re trying to solve it, and have impressionable young humanitarian white (literally) knights sign up to save the day, but we’re not actually solving the problem. We're turning a policy problem into a moral/racial one so that nobody asks us any hard questions about our policies.

It is the same with feminism. If feminism remains a dominant philosophy, then the problems of women are the fault of men, and men are on the hook to foot the bill. We created a society in which single parenthood, illegitimate children, and broken families have become commonplace. We sure as shit aren't willing to create the policies necessary to correct it. But we are going to blame men for it and leave them on the hook to pay the bill. And if you're enough of a feminist/sjw/bluepill, you will not think there is any problem with men getting fucked over, and won't be asking any hard questions to those with the power to influence policy. Problem solved.

The smug little bitches you see like in the video I posted above are jumping on the train because it gives them an artificial sense of power and importance. But I would not make the assumption that they are the real engine between the culture of social justice. The real answer is that social justice is very useful because it creates a very useful distraction in society, by which those with the real power to affect social change are not held accountable and the blame for these problems are shifted around onto a very useful, very socially acceptable scapegoat.

If you travel to farther corners of the world, you will find that people experience far deeper forms of victimization than even exist in the US yet they do not identify as victims, and victimhood does not confer some special status by which they are viewed as morally superior. And I do not think that they will if power remains as it is now.

But it will appear, the minute it provides some kind of political expedience to those in power. For example, in China, if the Muslim Uygurs started started protesting and claiming to be victims, the Chinese government just sends millions of Han chinese to the region to dilute their culture until they shut the fuck up (this is what they did). But if an Uygur Social Justice Movement was politically expedient to Chinese billionaires, I gaurantee you that the universities in Beijing would start teaching Uygur Studies.

Class is dismissed.