Who gets to define what’s ‘racist?’ (2020)
My employer recently required me to take a training course on privilege, allyship, implicit bias and intersectionality. It was something like 2 hours total spread over 4 trainings.<p>I found it hard to directly criticize anything they said as the majority of it was common sense and anything objectionable wasn&#x27;t so egregiously objectionable to warrant any real complaint from me (not that they gave me the option, feedback in the series was suspiciously absent).<p>The main problem with it as mentioned in the article is the incessant fixation on victimhood. I feel that our culture&#x27;s relationship to victimhood is no better than the ancients but just in the opposite extreme. Before there were precious few &#x27;celebrated&#x27; victims (victims lifted up and supported by society) - they mostly lived and died in obscurity perhaps not even knowing the nature of their victimhood.<p>Now we want to explore each person&#x27;s past and expose anything that could possibly be construed as oppression&#x2F;victimhood and expose it to the world. We end up with the other type of error: people presented as victims who aren&#x27;t (relative to our perception, of course victimhood is on a spectrum).<p>No one wants a society full of victims, but we equally can&#x27;t have a society organized via victim hierarchy (intersectionality).