Third-wave antiracism makes sense, but it's a dead end
&gt; Feminist history is typically described in three waves:<p>No, even when using the (profoundly flawed, but not entirely useless) “waves” framework, it&#x27;s usually described in at least four waves now.<p>&gt; The struggle to secure voting rights, then workplace rights, and third—roughly—to upend stereotypes.<p>This is not an accurate summary of the usual description of the first three waves of feminism; first wave feminism is typically associated with the early struggle for legal rights in terms of access to basic political and economic institutions (suffrage, independent property rights, access to work, access to education).<p>Second-wave feminism is typically associated with a fight for equality within institutions to which women already had access as a result of successes of first-wave feminism (especially education and employment) and recognition of rights addressing areas where women were uniquely situated either inherently or by traditional gender roles (reproductive rights including contraception and abortion, protection against domestic violence and marital rape, etc.) Third-wave feminism is associated not merely with upending stereotypes (that&#x27;s part of it, but more in the context of recognizing a diversity in the female experience and the challenges of women that feminism should be addressing; intersectionality is probably a better short summary than upending stereotypes.)<p>&gt; The battle against racism and its effects is often described in a similar three-part timeline, with movements against slavery and segregation, and then—vaguely—the post-civil-rights era.<p>No, it&#x27;s not often described that way especially by people in the activist community, who describe themselves as civil rights activists, not add part of some vague post-civil-rights antiracism wave. To the extent that multiple waves are identified in racial justice activism in the US, they tend to be abolition, the immediate post-abolition civil rights movement, and the modern civil rights movement.<p>&gt; third-wave antiracism may seem parallel to third-wave feminism in moving on to a different form of abuse, psychological rather than institutional.<p>Third-wave feminism doesn&#x27;t focus on psychological abuse (though that&#x27;s an emergent focus of <i>fourth wave feminism</i>, though it does focus on informal social and institutional discrimination (as opposed to legal and other formal social and institutional discrimination.) The author here send to conflate the two concerns.<p>&gt; But this focus on the psychological has morphed, of late, from a pragmatic mission to change minds into a witch hunt driven by the personal benefits of virtue signaling, obsessed with unconscious and subconscious bias.<p>No, it hasn&#x27;t; first, virtue signalling is a social hack targeting members of a movement by those who are not genuinely committed who wish to be seen as part of it. Second, feminist virtue signalling had been around at least as long as the suffrage movement, and continuously evolves to target current tends in feminist thought, ditto with racial justice since at least the immediate post-abolition period; the current level is nothing novel. Third, targeting unconscious and subconscious bias isn&#x27;t a recent evolution compared to either “third-wave” (by feminism standards) style thought it the second-wave style thought the author misattributes to as characterizing third wave initially (or, a fortiori, the fourth-wave style thought he later claims is the focus of the third wave.) It&#x27;s classic third-wave feminism (and, if anything, even older within the racial justice movement), because sucks and unconscious vitae at the individual level is a pillar on which informal structural and institutionalized discrimination rests. But, moreover, while it is a concern of modern feminist and racial justice movements, is not the central focus on either a genuine or virtue signalling sense; this is particularly obvious if you look at the marquee hypercurrent racial justice group, BLM. They aren&#x27;t focussed centrality on vague psychological bias, whether as a witch hunt or any other way; their central focus is material accountability for concrete instances of material injustice.<p>&gt;  The virally popular Stuff White People Like blog of 2010 was a wry self-parody of the cultural mores that had settled in by roughly the late 1990s amidst a certain stripe of educated white people. “Being Offended” was one of the cleverest entries, describing a kind of almost recreational quest to take umbrage on behalf of people other than whites. Already, the satirical tone of this entry dates awkwardly: Many of the people it describes would read it today as disrespectful to the urgency of attesting to one’s white privilege.<p>The whole point of the original satire “of the cultural mores that had settled in by roughly the late 1990s amidst a certain stripe of educated white people” if that <i>everyone</i> it describes would eat it that way. That&#x27;s what was being satirized. White knighting isn&#x27;t a new thing, not yet or suddenly become obligatory in the perception of the wider recital justice community, which is now, more than ever, not defined predominantly by the attitudes of the “educated white people” that are, of try to be by virtue signalling, associated with it.<p>And then, after all this confused, muddled inaccurate mess of framing, the examples (still generalizations that are far from concrete) he points to are all about efforts targeting institutional acceptance of concrete offensive behavior directed at members of minority communities or institutional endorsement and involvement in racist speech. While there might be valid complaints about these, either genuine or virtue signalling adherence to a movement that has moved on to a phase that has gotten away from dealing with concrete institutional discrimination to focus on un- or sub-conscious bias isn&#x27;t among the them.<p>As it progresses from the most abstract background to the more detailed (but still fairly abstract and generalized) complaints, this piece builds a narrative that is both internally inconsistent at frequently misrepresents facts. But it manages to fit a litany of the standard complaints by elite defenders of the status quo about the modern racial justice movement (a perfect blackout of the bingo card is avoided only by the failure to work in the phrase “identity politics”.)<p>Perhaps the author is genuinely confused enough to believe this incoherent mess, or maybe it&#x27;s just virtue signalling for a different audience. Whatever it is, it&#x27;s not a useful or meaningful or even well-thought-out contribution to the discussion of racial politics in modern America.