Reified means “made into a real thing,” and it refers to abstract concepts that are treated as though they were real. Beginning in around 2010 and steadily gaining steam ever since, the scholarship undertaken under the broad banner of “social justice”—which we’ll call Social Justice scholarship—took shape within a new, third phase in the postmodern project. In this phase, scholars and activists have come to take for granted a reification of the once abstract and self-doubtful postmodern knowledge principle and postmodern political principle.
As we discussed in chapter 1, these foundational postmodern principles held that objective knowledge is impossible, that knowledge is a construct of power, and that society is made up of systems of power and privilege that need to be deconstructed. As we discussed in chapters 2–7, this view was made actionable in the applied phase in the 1980s and 1990s, which saw postmodernism fragment into postcolonial Theory, queer Theory, critical race Theory, intersectional feminism, disability studies, and fat studies. Subsequently, especially since 2010, these postmodern ideas have become fully concretized in the combined intersectional Social Justice scholarship and activism and have begun to take root in the public consciousness as allegedly factual descriptions of the workings of knowledge, power, and human social relations.
The postmodern knowledge principle and the postmodern political principle were used primarily for deconstructive purposes in the first phase (roughly 1965–1990) and made applicable for reconstruction during the second phase in the form of applied postmodernism (roughly 1990–2010), yet they were confined principally to specific academic fields and activist circles. In this third phase of postmodernism, these principles are treated as fundamental truths both within these two settings and beyond. After decades of being treated like knowns within sectors of academia and activism, the principles, themes, and assertions of Theory became known-knowns—ideas taken for granted as true statements about the world that people “just know” are true. 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.
The reification of the two postmodern principles means that the original postmodern radical skepticism that any knowledge can be reliable has been gradually transformed into a complete conviction that knowledge is constructed in the service of power, which is rooted in identity, and that this can be uncovered through close readings of how we use language. Therefore, in Social Justice scholarship, we continually read that patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism, cisnormativity, heteronormativity, ableism, and fatphobia are literally structuring society and infecting everything. They exist in a state of immanence—present always and everywhere, just beneath a nicer-seeming surface that can’t quite contain them. That’s the reification of the postmodern knowledge principle. This “reality” is viewed as profoundly problematic and thus needs to be constantly identified, condemned, and dismantled so that things might be rectified. Consequently, we now have Social Justice texts—forming a kind of Gospel of Social Justice—that express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person with racist or sexist intentions or beliefs (in the usual sense of the terms), sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized. That is the reification of the postmodern political principle.
This approach distrusts categories and boundaries and seeks to blur them, and is intensely focused on language as a means of creating and perpetuating power imbalances. It exhibits a deep cultural relativism, focuses on marginalized groups, and has little time for universal principles or individual intellectual diversity. These are the four themes of postmodernism, and they remain central to the means and ethics of Social Justice scholarship. There has, however, been a change of register and tone. Within the new Social Justice scholarship, Theory’s principles and themes have become much simpler and much more straightforwardly expressed as its Theorists have grown more confident of their fundamental tenets. Social Justice scholarship represents the evolution of postmodernism into a third stage: its culmination as a reified postmodernism. A moral person aware of The Truth According to Social Justice must serve its metanarrative by actively asserting a Theoretical view of how the world works and how it ought to work instead.
Because of the reification of the underlying principles, which began as postmodernism began to be applied, Social Justice scholarship does not neatly fit into any one category of Theory. It has become so intersectional that it calls upon all of them according to need, continually problematizing society and even aspects of itself, and abiding by only one golden rule: Theory itself can never be denied; Theory is real. Social Justice scholarship has become a kind of Theory of Everything, a set of unquestionable Truths with a capital T, whose central tenets were taken from the original postmodernists and solidified within the derived Theories.
If we think of the first postmodernists of the late 1960s as a manifestation of radical skepticism and despair and the second wave, from the late 1980s, as a recovery from hopelessness and a drive to make core ideas politically actionable, this third wave, which became prominent between the late 2000s and the early 2010s, has fully recovered its certainty and activist zeal. The first postmodernists were reacting largely to the failure of Marxism, the longstanding analytical framework of the academic left, and suffering from major disillusionment. Because their theoretical framework of choice was falling apart, they adopted the cynical attitude that nothing could be relied upon anymore. The metanarratives they were skeptical of included Christianity, science, and the concept of progress, among others—but, with the loss of Marxism, came a loss of hope of restructuring society towards “justice.” They therefore sought only to dismantle, deconstruct, and disrupt existing frameworks ironically, with a kind of joyless playfulness. This was the state of cultural thought in the 1970s.
By the time this first wave of despairing skepticism—the high deconstructive phase of postmodernism—had worn itself out twenty years later, the academic left had somewhat recovered hope and was looking for more positive and applicable forms of Theory. It took postmodernism’s two key principles and four themes, and tried to do something with them. Thus, postmodern Theory developed into the applied postmodern Theories, plural. Within postcolonial Theory, there were attempts to reconstruct the East’s varied senses of itself (although Bhabha and Spivak remained highly pessimistic about this). It would, if it could, rescue the “other” from the West, mostly by tearing the West down. Within queer Theory, the belief that all categories are socially constructed and performative produced a kind of activism. By continuing to deconstruct categories, blur boundaries, and see everything as fluid and changeable, queer Theory sought to “liberate” people who did not fit into those categories of sex, gender, and sexuality from expectations that they should. Critical race Theory was more concrete and applicable due to its beginnings in law, but it drew on black feminist scholars to form intersectional approaches that ultimately came to dominate feminism. Above all else, intersectional feminism sought empowerment through identity politics and collective action, which largely defines the current cultural mood. Disability studies, and the newcomer, fat studies, produced some densely Theoretical work that relies heavily on queer Theory, but their approach and premises were quite straightforward—regard medical science as a social construct and be proud of and militant about disabled and fat identities. So, by the 1990s, the applied postmodern turn had arrived, made postmodern Theory actionable, and focused on identity and identity politics.
As these Theories developed through the late 1990s into the 2000s within various forms of identity studies—such as gender studies, sexuality studies, and ethnic studies—they increasingly combined their aims, to become steadily more intersectional. By the mid-2000s, if you studied one of the key topics—sex, gender identity, race, sexuality, immigration status, indigeneity, colonial status, disability, religion, and weight—you were expected to factor in all the others. While scholars could—and still can—have particular focuses, there was much mixing and merging. This resulted in a form of general scholarship that looks at “marginalized groups” and multiple systems of power and privilege.
One startling omission in this list of intersectional identities is any meaningful mention of economic class—they sometimes raise the point but almost never substantively. Traditional Marxists could be criticized by focusing so single-mindedly on economic class as the key factor in society that they sometimes overlooked or underestimated other axes of oppression, notably those against women and sexual minorities. The feminist movement starting in the early 1970s, and the gay rights movement shortly thereafter, provided useful correctives to this sole focus on class. Nowadays, however, economic class is barely mentioned unless combined “intersectionally” with some other form of marginalized identity. It is therefore no surprise that many working-class and poor people often feel profoundly alienated from today’s left—Marxists rightly identify it as having adopted very bourgeois concerns. 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.
As so many of these marginalized groups united and the various streams of thought merged to create a single large pool of similar, competing issues, Social Justice scholars and activists also became much more confident in their underlying assumptions. As the 2010s began, the ambiguity and doubt that had characterized postmodernism up until then had almost entirely disappeared, and, with them, the dense, obscure language that Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont famously called “fashionable nonsense” in the mid-1990s.1 By the 2010s, the language, while still technical, was far clearer. These were stronger words, words of conviction.
This certainty has its roots in the previous applied postmodern stage, in which scholar-activists distanced themselves from radical skepticism, to assert that systematic oppression must be accepted as objectively true in order to combat it. In Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1991 “Mapping the Margins,” the foundational intersectionality text, for instance, significant attention is paid to the importance of distinguishing “I am Black” from “I am a person who happens to be Black.” Other scholars in critical race Theory, such as bell hooks, echoed this sentiment, and queer Theorists made similar statements about gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, gender non-conforming, and queer identities. Identities based on national origin and history rapidly gained prominence through postcolonial Theory, and fat and disabled identities—including identities based on mental illnesses like depression and anxiety—became commonplace due to the influence of fat and disability studies. By the 2010s, both this approach and the postmodern principles and themes used to interact with these “realities” had become articles of belief, and activists and Theorists were unafraid to assert them.
Social Justice scholarship is now heavily invested in identity, which it uses as a lens through which to determine what is true, and identity politics, which it uses to act for change in the world. Much of the scholarship since 2010 is therefore labeled “feminist,” “queer,” etc., epistemology (the study of knowledge and how it is produced) or pedagogy (theory of education). Even when it does not use the words “epistemology” or “pedagogy,” nearly all Social Justice scholarship is concerned with what is said, what is believed, what is assumed, what is taught, what is conveyed, and what biases are imported through teaching, discourses, and stereotypes. All this scholarship starts from the Theoretical premise that society works through systems of power and privilege maintained in language, and these create knowledge from the perspectives of the privileged and deny the experiences of the marginalized. Social Justice scholarship therefore targets science2 and any other analytical methods that contradict these assumptions or claims made under them.
As a result, Social Justice scholarship takes umbrage with anything that foregrounds reason and evidence as the way to know what is true and demands “epistemic justice” and “research justice” in their place. By this, it means that we should include the lived experiences, emotions, and cultural traditions of minority groups, consider them “knowledges,” and privilege them over reason and evidence-based knowledge, which is unfairly dominant. Research justice often involves deliberately avoiding citing white, male, and Western scholars in favor of those with some intersectionally marginalized status. This can even involve glossing over the contributions of those from privileged identity groups, a practice that makes it difficult to track ideas back to the white male founding fathers of postmodernism. In a rather stunning, but typical, example, black feminist philosopher Kristie Dotson cites Gayatri Spivak copiously on “epistemic violence,” but never mentions Spivak’s reliance on Michel Foucault.3 This is unlikely to be simply an example of lazy scholarship or oversight (Dotson is thorough, and Spivak mentions the Foucauldian origins of the idea on nearly every page of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”), and much more likely to be a deliberate erasure of the earlier postmodernist in accordance with research justice. As has been noted in a similar case,
One of the friendly critiques I made about the paper regarded its engagement with intersectional theory, specifically its use of Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of power instead of Patricia Hill Collins’s articulation from Black Feminist Thought. My claim was twofold: if the author intended to meaningfully engage issues of diversity and feminist thought in an intersectional way, then using the work of a leading Black Feminist theorist’s formulation of intersectional power would make sense. Second, it was not clear to me that the reliance on Foucault could meaningfully contribute to advancing intersectionality scholarship specifically, given the distinctions.4
When an ideology—that is, a philosophy plus a moral imperative—reifies its central tenets, its adherents often develop a keen interest in knowledge and its production. This is because the ideology needs to prove that its assumptions are based on reality. Usually, this is a primarily philosophical endeavor—the work of theologians, metaphysicians, and theorists, who tinker with the concept of knowledge to make sure their moral beliefs qualify as such. (This is why Plato described knowledge as justified true beliefs.) Thus, Social Justice scholarship is profoundly interested in the relationship between identity and knowledge. This means identifying, demonstrating, and attempting to disrupt alleged injustices characteristic of systems of knowledge and knowledge production (sciences, construed broadly) and the way they are passed on through education.
This is a timeworn habit of ideologues. Even before the influence of postmodernism, identity studies have always focused on the relationship between one’s identity and what one is able to know. For instance, feminist philosophy devised various epistemologies—theories of how knowledge is produced and understood—in the 1980s. Three primary methods were used to justify feminist claims: feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, and postmodern radical skepticism. Feminist empiricism asserts that science, as a process, generally operates correctly except that, before feminism, it was plagued with male-centered biases that prevented it from being truly objective. This method fell out of fashion in the 1990s, during the applied postmodern turn and as a casualty of the “science wars”5 of that era. The second and third methods are of considerably greater interest to Social Justice scholarship, because they accord with the postmodern knowledge principle that knowledges flow from identity; they now form the backbone of the intersectional approach to epistemology. Above all, they are centrally concerned with how to connect knowledge and knowledge production to Theoretically derived notions of justice and injustice. They have also been mainstreamed throughout society since 2010.
To this purpose, the term epistemic injustice was coined by Miranda Fricker, in her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing.6 Fricker describes epistemic injustice as occurring when someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. According to Fricker, this can happen in a number of ways: when someone is not recognized as someone who can know something; when her knowledge is not recognized as valid; when she is prevented from being able to know something; or when her knowledge is not understood. Fricker divides epistemic injustice into testimonial injustice—when people are not considered credible because of their identity—and hermeneutical injustice—when someone’s knowledge cannot be understood.
Fricker’s analysis—which assumes that certain groups are intrinsically disadvantaged because of their identity—is not wholly without merit. People often do trust the knowledge of some individuals or groups more than others, and this may sometimes be due to social prejudices (e.g., racism) rather than to those people’s actual degree of relevant expertise. Also, members of marginalized groups are sometimes impeded in their striving for knowledge: for instance, lesbians and gay men in small communities may find it hard to understand their own sexuality, and atheists may struggle to comprehend their own lack of faith if they have never heard these issues talked about before.
However, Fricker regarded these as problems created and faced by individuals, rather than properties of groups. Accordingly, she advocated that everyone cultivate certain “virtues,” so they do not commit epistemic injustices. Her individualistic approach did not go down well with the Social Justice postmodernists, who believe that knowledge is intrinsically tied to identity, and who criticized her for being overly simplistic and neglecting the need for widespread structural change.7 Since Fricker’s work is directed at individuals, it does not primarily address social justice. Scholars have since drawn upon, expanded, and reoriented her work, to depict injustice as a property belonging to social groups and caused by the social power dynamics within which they operate. Since 2007, Social Justice philosophy, particularly in education and law, has focused heavily on how knowledge is treated unequally—always, allegedly, as a result of identity.8
This has spawned a vast specialized vocabulary. In 2014, Kristie Dotson expanded and recontexualized Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice, which she sees as a superficial aspect of a bigger, less tractable, identity-group-based problem she calls epistemic oppression.9 This form of oppression is alleged to occur when the knowledges and knowledge-producing methods said to be used by marginalized groups—including folk wisdom and witchcraft—are not included within our prevailing understanding of knowledge. Influenced by both the postmodern knowledge and political principles, Social Justice scholars categorize the different approaches to knowledge as “marginalized” or “dominant,” and of course they prefer the former. But they are not much interested in knowing whether these competing methods are effective in the sense of bringing beliefs into closer accord with reality; that is at best a secondary concern. On the other hand, because Critical Social Justice scholarship assumes that knowledge is dependent on power dynamics, it is deeply interested in the ways in which one’s identity impacts whether and how one is understood and listened to and has coined many terms to describe this. Dotson’s work on epistemic oppression was a continuation of her earlier (2011) work on epistemic violence—having one’s cultural knowledge repressed by that of a dominant culture, which, for Dotson, is the result of pernicious ignorance on the part of hearers who refuse to understand.10 These terms proliferated in the early and mid-2010s. Epistemic exploitation was coined by Nora Berenstain in 2016, for instance, to describe the injustice caused when marginalized people are expected to share their knowledge.11 Thus, it is an act of oppression not to make an effort to understand a marginalized knower on her own terms, and it is an act of exploitation (read: oppression) to ask a marginalized knower to explain her knowledge on her own terms.
In 2013, Theorist José Medina coined the melodramatic term hermeneutical death, which describes a failure to be understood so profound as to destroy the person’s sense of self. At the opposite end of this spectrum is the concept of hermeneutical privacy, which describes the right not to be understandable at all.12 So, marginalized people can be oppressed to the point of psychic death by not being understood, but their right to be completely incomprehensible should also be respected. Negotiating this minefield must be very difficult for the well-meaning individual determined not to oppress anybody. Fricker’s testimonial injustice has inspired a growing number of related ideas like testimonial betrayal,13 epistemic freedom,14 and epistemic responsibility.15 While we could go on, we think you get the idea—“knowledges” and demands for respect for those “knowledges” are the point of focus throughout Social Justice scholarship.
What are the reason and purpose behind this obsession with knowledges and knowers? To circumvent more rigorous methods when rigor stands between them and their ideological aims, theoretical or practical. Social Justice scholars attempt to justify this with an attitude that sees science and reason as unjustly privileged—regardless of their ability to accurately describe reality and make predictions about it—over the wide variety of identity-based “ways of knowing.” The problem, for them, is that scientific forms of knowledge production aim to be objective and universal, and (at least in most people’s view) frequently succeed at that aim. Because there are evidence-based scientific explanations for some of the social issues that impact identity groups, science often finds itself in direct contravention of the postmodern principles, especially the belief that everything important is socially constructed. In addition, many philosophers, scientists, and other scholars have offered reasoned arguments that identify flaws in Theory and in Social Justice scholarship’s assumptions, methods, and conclusions. This type of criticism does not tend to go down well with the postmodernism at the heart of Social Justice scholarship and activism, so Social Justice–based attacks on science and reason are usually open and direct. This is not only because science and reason have an irritating habit of revealing the flaws in Theoretical approaches; it is also because they are universal and thus violate the postmodern knowledge principle and the postmodern theme of centering group identity, around which Social Justice scholarship is organized.
This violation is dealt with through the postmodern political principle. Because science has such a high prestige as a reliable producer of knowledge—and because postmodernists from Lyotard to Foucault have disparaged it as a discourse of power for the last fifty years—it is commonly regarded with deep suspicion by Social Justice scholars and activists. Often, this is rationalized by pointing to the fact that people have sometimes attempted to use science and reason to prop up injustices—especially if you read the history as cynically as possible.16 Claims like this often refer to much earlier periods of science—citing, for example, nineteenth-century arguments in support of colonialism that would now be dismissed as pseudoscience. At other times, the suspicions result from the fact that science has discovered things that do not conform to social-constructivist ideas, such as that differences between the sexes exist. And sometimes these objections are based on alleged discrimination: “formal and informal barriers to the participation of women and racial minorities in scientific enterprises [that] have had the effect of disproportionately favoring white males’ presence and influence in science.”17 These complaints, however, are often vague, begin with the cultural constructivist assumption that all inequalities must be the result of oppression rather than, say, men and women having different interests on average, and are typically accompanied by appeals to attitudes and problems that have not been much in evidence for decades.
Instead of science, Social Justice scholarship advocates for “other ways of knowing,” derived from Theoretical interpretations of deeply felt lived experience. It argues that reason and evidence-based knowledge are unfairly favored over tradition, folklore, interpretation, and emotion because of the power imbalances baked into them. Without the slightest awareness of the racist and sexist implications, Theory views evidence and reason to be the cultural property of white Western men.
Examples of this are common. Dotson famously called the dominance of reason and science a “culture of justification” in 2012 and argued instead for a “culture of praxis,” which would incorporate multiple ways of knowing in order to include more diverse groups of people in philosophy.18 Other scholars have argued that rational and scientific approaches limit Anglo-American epistemologists from accepting broader and multiple ways of knowing.19 Still others recommend emotion, as an unjustly neglected means of arriving at reliable knowledge. Allison Wolf calls this the “reason/emotion divide” and describes it as a construct of the Western philosophical tradition. She advocates foregrounding feelings as a way of knowing.20
Despite postmodernists treating it as though it is novel and profound, this divide between facts and experience is not particularly mysterious to philosophers outside of postmodernism: it is the difference between knowing that and knowing how. “Knowing that” is propositional knowledge, while “knowing how” is experiential knowledge. The trouble is not that this divide exists or that there is valuable information on both sides of it. The problems arise when we fail to recognize that interpretation colors, biases, and distorts experiential knowledge—at times profoundly—and makes it an unreliable guide to understanding the associated phenomena.
This confusion nevertheless forms the basis of the argument of another Social Justice–oriented Theorist, Alexis Shotwell, who argues that “focusing on propositional knowledge as though it is the only form of knowing worth considering is itself a form of epistemic injustice. Such a focus neglects epistemic resources that help oppressed people craft more just worlds.”21 Here, we see the assumption that the experiential knowledge of oppressed people is of paramount importance in dealing with the associated real-world phenomena. And of paramount value because of the postmodern political principle—it provides “resources that help oppressed people craft more just worlds.” There is also the assumption that “oppressed people” all have the same experiential knowledge, presumably defined by their identities. Shotwell’s commitment to the postmodern principles is confirmed when she writes, “A richer account of forms of knowing and a richer attention to people’s lived experiences in the world helps us identify, analyze, and redress epistemic injustices.”22 This is not just a concern about “the unlevel knowing field.”23 This is standpoint theory.
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. From this follows the assumption that these experiences will provide them with a more authoritative and fuller picture. The other is that one’s relative position within a social power dynamic dictates what one can and cannot know: thus the privileged are blinded by their privilege and the oppressed possess a kind of double sight, in that they understand both the dominant position and the experience of being oppressed by it. As the feminist epistemologist Nancy Tuana puts it:
Standpoint theory was designed to be a method that would render transparent the values and interests, such as androcentrism, heteronormativity, and Eurocentrism, that underlie allegedly neutral methods in science and epistemology, and clarify their impact. Such attention to the subject of knowledge illuminated the various means by which oppressive practices can result in or reinforce epistemic inequalities, exclusions, and marginalizations. In this way, feminist and other liberatory epistemologists aimed to transform the subject of knowledge in the sense of focusing on knowledge obscured by dominant interests and values and thereby to identify and provide tools for undermining the knowledges and practices implicated in oppression.24
Roughly, the idea is that members of dominant groups experience a world organized by and for dominant groups, while members of oppressed groups experience the world as members of oppressed groups in a world organized by and for dominant groups. Thus, members of oppressed groups understand the dominant perspective and the perspective of those who are oppressed, while members of dominant groups only understand the dominant perspective. 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.
Standpoint theory often finds itself criticized for essentialism—for thinking something like “all black people feel like this.”27 This isn’t quite wrong because it rests, in a way, on a concept we’ve encountered before: strategic essentialism, wherein members of an oppressed group can essentialize themselves (or, here, the authenticity of their lived experience in relationship to power) as a means of achieving group political action. Its advocates don’t defend it that way, however. They generally get around this accusation by arguing that the theory does not assume all members of the same group have the same nature but that they experience the same problems in an unjust society, although they can choose which discourses they wish to contribute to. Members of these groups who disagree with standpoint theory—or even deny that they are oppressed—are explained away as having internalized their oppression (false consciousness) or as pandering in order to gain favor or reward from the dominant system (“Uncle Toms” and “native informants”) by amplifying Theoretically dominant discourses.
Standpoint theory is at the root of identity politics and it is the main thing that fundamentally differentiates it from the liberal civil rights movements. For influential black feminist Patricia Hill Collins, the relationship between standpoint theory and identity politics was explicit and represented a crucial element of progress.28 Similarly, but perhaps more profoundly, Kristie Dotson, arguably the most influential black feminist Theorist of knowledge, argues that it is almost impossible for dominant social groups to see outside of their own system of knowledge, which is simply considered knowledge per se by mainstream society. In her 2014 paper “Tracking Epistemic Oppression,” she sets out orders of oppression. The first two are Fricker’s two forms of epistemic injustice. The third and most profound order is “irreducible.” By this, she means it is an epistemic injustice that cannot simply be attributed to an unjust social system but that exists within the system of knowledge itself. Hence, changing it from within is almost—if not entirely—impossible.29 For Dotson, the systems of knowledge—“schemata”—have been specifically set up to work for dominant groups and exclude others, but, because they work for the dominant groups so smoothly, they do not even realize that there are things they don’t know, things that can only be known from within the knowledge systems that they oppress.30
Dotson ultimately asserts that knowledge is inadequate unless it includes the experiential knowledge of minority groups. This knowledge is assumed to be consistently different from that of dominant groups because of the power dynamics between the groups. Furthermore, the knowledge produced by dominant groups—including science and reason—is also merely the product of their cultural traditions and is not superior to the knowledge produced by other cultural traditions. Dotson explicitly proceeds from the two postmodern principles. Her argument, which is central to standpoint theory, denies that science and reason belong to all humans and are the same for all humans and, in effect, assigns them to white Western men. Dotson goes further than this. The logical implication of her third-order oppression is that if someone from a dominant group does not agree that her knowledge-producing systems are limited by their failure to include experiential knowledge from outside them, that is because she is unable to step outside of her own culture. In other words, legitimate disagreement is not an option.
José Medina sets this view out in an accessible and seemingly rigorous way in his 2013 book, The Epistemology of Resistance. Medina characterizes the members of privileged groups as “epistemically spoiled” and argues that they “have a hard time learning their mistakes, their biases, and the constraints and presuppositions of their position in the world and their perspective.”31 The study of knowledge within Social Justice scholarship is based on a premise that privilege spoils people and makes them unable to appreciate other ways of knowing. Medina argues that this spoiled state generates the “epistemic vices” of epistemic arrogance, epistemic laziness, and active ignorance. Being oppressed, for Medina, confers the converse “epistemic virtues” of epistemic humility, epistemic curiosity/diligence, and epistemic openness.32 These vices and virtues, associated with relative privilege and oppression, feature prominently in critical race Theory and postcolonial Theory, where an oppressed standpoint allows a double or multiple consciousness, because oppressed people operate in different systems at the same time.
The line of thought, which grants double sight to the oppressed but not to her oppressor, is often attributed to Marxism, but it’s more accurate to say that postmodernism and Marxism share a common philosophical ancestor in the work of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,33 though Marx may have been a significant conduit of these ideas for the postmodernists. 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. Theorist Charles Mills states this difference from the Marxist idea,
The racially subordinated—victims, after all, of genocide, expropriation, and slavery!—are often quite well able to recognize their situation. It is not (or not always) that the imprisoned lack the concepts, the hermeneutical resources, to understand their situation, but that the privileged lack the concepts and find them incredible or even incomprehensible, because of their incongruity with white-supremacist ideology. Even if they were to “hear” what blacks were saying, they still would not be able to “hear” them because of the conceptual incoherence of the black framework of assumptions with their own dominant framework. Whites are imprisoned (reversing the metaphor) in a cognitive state which both protects them from dealing with the realities of social oppression and, of course, disables them epistemically.34
What this means is that Social Justice scholarship reifies the postmodern knowledge principle—makes it “real”—and combines it with the postmodern political principle, which is a drive to change the underlying systems of power that it assumes are baked into every social interaction. It does this by utilizing the four postmodern themes with an unprecedented level of conviction.
Perhaps what is most worrying about Social Justice scholarship is the increasing difficulty of speaking about issues relevant to social justice—or about Social Justice scholarship itself—in any way other than under its own inflexible terms. This means doing so only with the approved terminology and accepting the validity of standpoint theory and identity politics. Disagreement is rarely tolerated, now that the postmodernist assumptions have been reified. This can be seen in the fact that disagreement is often regarded as, at best, a failure to have engaged with the scholarship correctly, as though engagement must imply acceptance, and, at worst, a profound moral failure. This kind of claim is more familiar from religious ideology—if you don’t believe, you haven’t read the holy text properly or you just want to sin—but applied to what is supposed to be rigorous academic scholarship. This is a more or less direct consequence of having reified postmodernism.
Many people (especially academics) remain unaware of the depth of this problem, which presents as ideological closedness, unwillingness to accept any disagreement, and an authoritarian will to enforce a Social Justice conception of society and moral imperative on others.35 Caring about justice in society is not a problem—indeed, it’s necessary to a healthy society. It is also not inherently a problem if bad ideas enter the academy and gain popularity. This is how knowledge advances—by giving space to all kinds of ideas within our centers of learning, where they can be examined, tested, and criticized. (Some of the most well-established ideas of today—like the “Big Bang” theory of cosmology—were considered mad and unethical at one time.) A problem arises, however, when any school of thought refuses to submit its ideas to rigorous scrutiny, rejects that kind of examination on principle, and asserts that any attempts to subject it to thoughtful criticism are immoral, insincere, and proof of its thesis. To get a sense of the severity of this problem, let’s look at three examples from the 2010s.
Example 1: Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy
by Barbara Applebaum (2010)
In this 2010 book, Social Justice educator Barbara Applebaum uses the postmodern knowledge and political principles to argue that all white people are complicit in racism, because of their automatic participation in the system of power and privilege described by critical race Theory. Though this book is not well-known among the general public, it is a landmark text in critical whiteness and critical education Theory circles, because it represents an advance on the idea that all white people have privilege (a concept that dates to 1989 and the applied postmodern turn) to insist that all white people are therefore actively complicit in racism. She writes,
White students often assume that responsibility begins and ends with the awareness of privilege. By admitting to or confessing privilege, however, white students are actually able to avoid owning up to their complicity in systemic racism.36
This really does say that confessing to white privilege is far from sufficient. White students must accept their ongoing complicity in perpetuating systemic racism simply by being white. It is assumed that they must have learned, internalized, and been perpetuating racism even if they do not know it. If this reminds you of Foucault’s notion of powerful discourses working through everyone in society—you’re right. “Integral to the understanding of how discourse works,” Applebaum informs us, “is the Foucaultian notion of power.”37 “Not only is discourse the prism through which reality is given meaning,” she tells us, “but also power works through discourse to constitute subjects.”38 Again, we get this image of power working as a grid, through the people positioned on it, each performing and speaking according to its directives—rather like (nerd alert!) a Borg hive.
Applebaum demands people believe this paradigm—even though she is quick to point out that she is not technically forbidding disagreement. She writes,
One can disagree and remain engaged in the material, for example, by asking questions and searching for clarification and understanding. Denials, however, function as a way to distance oneself from the material and to dismiss without engagement.39
So, one can ask questions about Applebaum’s thesis and try to understand it, but denial of “The Truth” (what we usually think of as disagreement) can only mean one has not engaged with the material enough or in the right way. In other words, Applebaum proceeds upon an assumption that her thesis is true. She is certain that she is in possession of The Truth (According to Social Justice)—and scolds those who disagree: “[T] he mere fact that they can question the existence of systemic oppression is a function of their privilege to choose to ignore discussions of systemic oppression or not.”40 One might be forgiven for thinking that Applebaum is not really open to the possibility that people might disagree with her. Her students certainly appear to think so:
[S]tudents in courses that make systemic injustice explicit often complain in teacher evaluations that they have not been allowed to disagree in the course. Students often maintain that such courses indoctrinate a particular view about racism that they are not willing to accept.41
Applebaum advocates shutting down such student disagreement. She gives the example of a male student, who questioned the gender wage gap,
Allowing him to express his disagreement and spending time trying to challenge his beliefs often comes at a cost to marginalized students whose experiences are (even if indirectly) dismissed by his claims.42
Critical education Theory holds that it is dangerous to allow students to express such disagreement. This is because of its reliance on the postmodern knowledge principle—social reality and what is accepted as true are constructed by language. Disagreement would allow dominant discourses to be reasserted, voiced, and heard, which Theory sees as not safe. As Applebaum explains, “language constitutes our reality by providing the conceptual framework from which meaning is given.”43 She adds, “Even if one retreats to the position where one only speaks for oneself, one’s speech is still not neutral and still reinforces the continuance of dominant discourses by omission.”44 Given this understanding of the power of language (a postmodern theme) and its impacts on social justice (through the postmodern political principle), it is essential to control what may and may not be said. This imperative permeates Social Justice scholarship.
Having already defined the only legitimate form of “disagreement” as putting in more effort to understand (read: agree) and dismissed actual disagreement as refusal to engage with The Truth, Applebaum continues,
Resistance will not be allowed to derail the class discussions! Of course, those who refuse to engage might mistakenly perceive this as a declaration that they will not be allowed to express their disagreement but that is only precisely because they are resisting engagement.45 (emphasis in original)
Resistance is indeed futile.
Example 2: “Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes”
by Alison Bailey (2017)
In this essay, Bailey argues that anyone who disagrees with Social Justice scholarship is insincere and simply trying to preserve unjust power structures, in the service of a knowledge-producing system that privileges straight white men and prevents Social Justice. She defines it thus: “Privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that dominant groups habitually deploy during conversations that are trying to make social injustices visible.”46 She assumes that criticisms of Social Justice scholarship are simply attempts to deliberately ignore The Truth According to Social Justice. Furthermore, criticism of Social Justice work is immoral and harmful, Bailey tells us:
I focus on these ground-holding responses because they are pervasive, tenacious, and bear a strong resemblance to critical-thinking practices, and because I believe that their uninterrupted circulation does psychological and epistemic harm to members of marginalized groups.47
Since Social Justice scholars like Bailey assume that disagreement with their work must be a result of intellectual and moral failings, no such disagreement can ever be brooked:
Treating privilege-preserving epistemic pushback as a form of critical engagement validates it and allows it to circulate more freely; this, as I’ll argue later, can do epistemic violence to oppressed groups.48
It should therefore be shut down and replaced with Social Justice scholarship. In fact, for Bailey, critical thinking itself is a problem: it needs replacing with “critical pedagogy” (in which the word “critical” means something different). She explains:
The critical-thinking tradition is concerned primarily with epistemic adequacy. To be critical is to show good judgment in recognizing when arguments are faulty, assertions lack evidence, truth claims appeal to unreliable sources, or concepts are sloppily crafted and applied…. Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities. Its mission is to teach students ways of identifying and mapping how power shapes our understandings of the world. This is the first step toward resisting and transforming social injustices.49
This is an explicit admission that Bailey’s aim is not to seek truth, but to teach a specific understanding of Social Justice, for the purposes of activism. Although this essay has not been very influential, it is worth looking at because it is a very clear example of how philosophy classes can be used to instruct students in The Truth According to Social Justice. That this paper was published in Hypatia, the leading feminist philosophy journal, gives us an alarming indication of what is considered acceptable in the fields of Social Justice scholarship, how it can influence education, and how confident and clear this current manifestation of reified postmodernism is.50
Bailey refers to disagreements with Social Justice approaches as “shadow texts,” to suggest that written criticisms of Social Justice are neither sincere nor helpful, and should not be regarded as genuine scholarship. The image of shadow texts, she tells us, comes from the idea of an investigator shadowing her mark: “The word ‘shadow’ calls to mind the image of something walking closely alongside another thing without engaging it.”51 The two examples of shadow texts she gives involve a male student pointing out that men can be victims of domestic violence too, and a female student arguing that one can mention a racist slur in order to discuss it, without using it as a slur. Bailey responds,
We are discussing institutional racism. Jennifer, a white philosophy major, shares a story about racist graffiti that uses the “n” word. She says the word, animating it with that two-fingered scare-quote gesture to signal that she is mentioning it. I ask her to consider the history of the word and how it might mean something different coming from white mouths. I ask her not to use it. She gives the class a mini lecture on the use–mention distinction, reminding me that it “is a foundational concept in analytic philosophy” and that it’s “perfectly acceptable to mention, but not to use the word in philosophical discussions.”52 … If Jennifer continues to press philosophical concepts into the service of a broader refusal to understand the dehumanizing history of the n-word, then “I mentioned but didn’t use the word ‘n-----’” is a shadow text.53
Rather than consider the validity of these arguments, or give the students the chance to discuss them, Bailey assumes that they are simply trying to preserve male and white privilege. She therefore uses them as object lessons of failures to genuinely engage. “Learning to spot shadow texts can offer epistemic friction: they help the class focus on what shadow texts do, rather than just on what they say,” she writes.54 That is, Bailey is instructing those in her philosophy classes not to engage with the argument but rather to recognize which discourse of power they could be feeding into. This is perfectly consistent with the two postmodern principles.
Students in Bailey’s philosophy classes are taught to immediately identify counterviews as resistance to Social Justice’s take on The Truth and as a kind of “ignorance.” She thinks that, when people disagree, it’s because something “triggered the resistance.”55 She writes,
I ask our class to consider how identifying shadow texts might help track the production of ignorance…. It’s essential for them to understand that tracking ignorance requires that our attention be focused not on a few problem individuals, but on learning to identify patterns of resistance and tying ignorance-producing habits to a strategic refusal to understand.56
It is hard to miss the militant activist tone here. Like Applebaum, Bailey has a priestlike certainty of her own rightness and the concomitant need to reeducate and shut down anyone who disagrees. This marks a significant change from the earliest postmodernists’ radical skepticism, but it is in keeping with how the postmodern principles and their application have evolved over the last half-century.
In this book, lecturer in “whiteness studies” Robin DiAngelo develops the concept of “white fragility” that she first laid out in a highly cited paper of that title from 2011.57 She begins with a strong objective truth claim:
White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility.58
By itself this might be a useful insight, leading white people to reflect more deeply about their possibly unconscious prejudices. But DiAngelo goes on to insist that society is permeated by white supremacy and that any disagreement with her ideas is the result of a weakness that has been socialized into white people through their privilege:
White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.59
Any negative feelings about being racially profiled and held responsible for a racist society are taken as signs of being “fragile” and as evidence of complicity in—if not collusion with—racism. White people are complicit beneficiaries of racism and white supremacy. This is The Truth According to Social Justice—disagreement is not allowed. DiAngelo is quite explicit about this. If disagreeing, remaining silent, and going away are all evidence of fragility—mere “defensive moves”—the only way one can avoid being “fragile” is to remain put, show no negative emotions, and agree with The Truth—after which one must actively participate in discovering the Truth, that is, learning how to deconstruct whiteness and white privilege, which is billed as the necessary work of “antiracism.”
This is quite staggering. DiAngelo, a white woman, contends that all white people are racist and that it is impossible not to be, because of the systems of powerful racist discourses we were born into.60 She insists that we are complicit by default and are therefore responsible for addressing these systems. Like Applebaum, she argues that it does not matter if individual white people are good people who despise racism and are not aware of having any racist biases:
Being good or bad is not relevant. Racism is a multilayered system embedded in our culture. All of us are socialized into the system of racism. Racism cannot be avoided. Whites have blind spots on racism, and I have blind spots on racism. Racism is complex, and I don’t have to understand every nuance of the feedback to validate that feedback. Whites are / I am unconsciously invested in racism. Bias is implicit and unconscious.61
This personal approach pervades White Fragility. So do collectivism and rejection of individuality. DiAngelo writes as a white person addressing other white people and insists “we” should see the world the way she does,
This book is unapologetically rooted in identity politics. I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic. I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective.62
For Theorists like DiAngelo, white people are a collective because of their position within the power grid of society—they cannot help benefiting from racism and therefore must work through it. Moreover, white people are, according to DiAngelo, “socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves.”63 All white people can do is become more aware of their relationship to power and consciously address it—over and over again. This is the postmodern political principle at work.
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.64
DiAngelo’s is probably the purest manifestation of the postmodernist conception of society. Like her contemporaries, she displays an unshakable conviction in the postmodern principles and themes. This indicates that these have been reified as the foundation of the Social Justice metanarrative.65 Worryingly, her ideas, more than any other, have successfully broken the bounds of academia and entered the mainstream. The book White Fragility was a New York Times best seller for over six months: Di-Angelo was able to promote it on an extensive world tour. Another book by DiAngelo on confronting racism, as she sees it, is already on its way.
Social Justice scholarship does not just rely on the two postmodern principles and four postmodern themes: it treats them and their underlying assumptions as morally righteous known-knowns—as The Truth According to Social Justice. It therefore constitutes a third distinct phase of postmodernism, one we have called reified postmodernism because it treats the abstractions at the heart of postmodernism as if they were real truths about society.
To understand how the three phases of postmodernism have developed, imagine a tree with deep roots in radical leftist social theory.66 The first phase, or high deconstructive phase, from the 1960s to the 1980s (usually simply referred to as “postmodernism”), gave us the tree trunk: Theory. The second phase, from the 1980s to the mid-2000s, which we call applied postmodernism, gave us the branches—the more applicable Theories and studies, including postcolonial Theory, queer Theory, critical race Theory, gender studies, fat studies, disability studies, and many critical anything studies. In the current, third phase, which began in the mid-2000s, Theory has gone from being an assumption to being The Truth, a truth that is taken for granted. This has given us the leaves of the tree of Social Justice scholarship, which combines the previous approaches as needed. The constant in all three phases is Theory, which manifests in the two postmodern principles and four postmodern themes.
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.” We see this in the obsessive focus on who can produce knowledge and how and in the explicit desire to “infect” as many other disciplines as possible with Social Justice methods.67 This is reflected in a clear wish to achieve epistemic and research “justice” by asserting that rigorous knowledge production is just a product of white, male, and Western culture and thus no better than the Theoretically interpreted lived experiences of members of marginalized groups, which must be constantly elevated and foregrounded.
The four postmodern themes are not generally treated by Critical Social Justice scholars as a reification of postmodernism. They are facets of The Truth According to Social Justice. 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). Group identity is treated as so integral to the functioning of society that those invested in Social Justice have elevated divisive group-identity politics to a fever pitch. Belief in the overwhelming power of language, which must be scrutinized and cleansed, is simply taken for granted.
Social Justice scholarship represents the third phase in the evolution of postmodernism. In this new incarnation, postmodernism is no longer characterized by radical skepticism, epistemic despair, nihilism, and a playful, though pessimistic, tendency to pick apart and deconstruct everything we think we know. It now seeks to apply deconstructive methods and postmodernist principles to the task of creating social change, which it pushes into everything. In the guise of Social Justice scholarship, postmodernism has become a grand, sweeping explanation for society—a metanarrative—of its own.
So let’s return to the contradiction at the heart of reified postmodernism: how can intelligent people profess both radical skepticism and radical relativism—the postmodern knowledge principle—and at the same time assert the Truth According to Social Justice (Theory) with absolute certainty?
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. If different members of the same marginalized group—or members of different marginalized groups—give incompatible interpretations of their “lived experience,” how can this contradiction be reconciled? The common-sense answer—that different people have different experiences and different interpretations, and that there is no logical contradiction in that—cannot suffice here, because Social Justice epistemology under the reification of postmodernism claims that these “lived experiences” reveal objective truths about society, not merely some people’s beliefs about their experiences.
The radically relativist answer—that two or more contradictory statements can be simultaneously true—is sometimes attempted, but it does not, after all, make much sense. 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. In this sense, we are not so far, in fact, from the apocalyptic cults who predicted that the world would end on a specific day, but reaffirmed their beliefs with added fervor when that day passed uneventfully. (The spaceship coming to destroy the earth really did come, but the extraterrestrials changed their minds when they saw the cult members’ devotion.)
It is therefore no exaggeration to observe that Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation, and disagreement of any kind. Indeed, the whole postmodernist project now seems, in retrospect, like an unwitting attempt to have deconstructed the old metanarratives of Western thought—science and reason along with religion and capitalist economic systems—to make room for a wholly new religion, a postmodern faith based on a dead God, which sees mysterious worldly forces in systems of power and privilege and which sanctifies victimhood. This, increasingly, is the fundamentalist religion of the nominally secular left.68
Theory has not remained confined to the academy. First applied, then reified, postmodernism in the form of Social Justice has left the universities, spread—with evangelical zeal—by graduates and through social media and activist journalism. It has become a significant cultural force with a profound—and often negative—influence on politics. It may seem like an obscure and peculiar brand of academic theorizing—but it cannot be ignored. What does all this mean? What will happen next? And what needs to be done about it? The last two chapters of this book will address these questions.