Read on Twitter
Read this thread. My team & I are also receiving an utter deluge of SOS calls from individuals outside academia whose employers have suddenly announced or implied that verbal & public affirmation of Critical Social Justice beliefs are required to keep one's job. https://twitter.com/glukianoff/status/1276506208342544386
I have been getting very little writing done. It's difficult to focus on writing abstract ethical arguments when someone is in your inbox telling you they are going to lose their job if they don't affirm something they don't believe to be true or ethical in the next 24 hours.
I have been having conversations with many people who have been addressing these concerns & the problem we all seem to be facing is how to triage most effectively in this sudden crisis of freedom of belief & speech.
This is because of a need to do two things at once.
1) Write about what is going on right now, why it is happening, how it works & why it is a problem.
2) Provide personal assistance to people facing a Critical Social Justice related catastrophe.
1) Write about what is going on right now, why it is happening, how it works & why it is a problem.
2) Provide personal assistance to people facing a Critical Social Justice related catastrophe.
It is mostly people in universities & employment, but also people who are worried about their children. Next on my list is someone who wants to ask a school to stop teaching their mixed race small child that her race is central to her identity & the world is hostile to her.
So, this weekend will be about getting this discord server up & running & inviting people who have written to us to join it where we can connect them with others having the same kind of problem & also provide helpful information & templates in a more efficient way.
If you are having issues with Critical Social Justice threatening your freedom of belief, employment, social circle etc, email me at the email in my bio & I will put you on the list for an invitation when I am reasonably convinced you are genuine.
I could be convinced of this by something like you DMing me from an anonymous Twitter account that has been expressing concerns about this stuff for a while. But users will be anonymous anyway & can reveal identities privately to others they trust.
Yes, we really are in a situation where someone who *doesn't* believe individuals should be evaluated by their race, sex, sexuality or gender identity have to discuss this anonymously for fear of losing their job or being publicly dogpiled as a Nazi.
Yes, excellent. Thank you. Also email me if you are not personally in any danger for failing to comply with the Truth of Critical Social Justice but can provide advice & support to people who are. https://twitter.com/Grimasaur/status/1276838535014817792
The thing is, it is possible for an individual to push back at this relatively safely & I know this because of people I have helped to write letters to their employer who have since told me it caused them to back down from going full authoritarian SocJus.
The problem is that it needs to be specific to the situation. You can't reply to an employer who wants to declare their business to fully support the Black Lives Matter movement the same way as one who wants all employees to read White Fragility & meet to affirm its truths.
The devil is in the detail. People need to respond to the specific details of whatever communication they have received from their employer with a deeper knowledge of them than the employer has & an irrefutable ethical argument against imposing them on people.
This is effective because in most cases the employer isn't actually a committed CSJ believer but is just trying to do the right thing both ethically & optically for their business & assumes the current wisdom is it. Showing them what the current wisdom actually is can fix that.
The problem is that the vast majority of employees don't actually have a deep understanding of how it works either & are therefore limited in their ability to effectively dismantle it & risk looking like they are not committed to genuine anti-racist policies & codes of conduct.
Nevertheless, I find myself reusing the same bits of different letters and tailoring them to each individual's situation so spending time on creating a template of some kind that people can select appropriate bits from & apply relevantly is probably the best use of my time rn.
So, goodbye. See you later. I will be back when we have saved the world or I am having a tea break.
