Are We Confused About Social Justice? (Helen Pluckrose)

About this episode:

The stated goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are often reasonable, if not noble—to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment for all. Yet, as more and more people are discovering, DEI as commonly practiced isn’t a natural extension of past civil rights movements or an ethical framework for opposing discrimination on the grounds of race or sex. Rather, it is inextricably connected with an illiberal and authoritarian ideology—Critical Social Justice—that demands adherence to its tenets and punishes any dissent from its dogma.

In this episode, Helen Pluckrose analyzes critical social justice and its impact on workplaces and universities. She explains that critical social justice is a particular approach to social justice that focuses on identifying and subverting hidden power structures, and argues that this approach is being conflated with social justice as a whole.

Helen Pluckrose is a liberal political and cultural writer and one of the founders of Counterweight. A participant in the Grievance Studies Affair probe that highlighted problems in Critical Social Justice scholarship, she is the coauthor of Cynical Theories and Social (In)justice. She’s on X @HPluckrose