The second wave of studies on implicit bias tests largely discredited them. @jondavidchurch & @PsychRabble have gone into this. However, I am quite positive that humans, whose ability to learn works largely by seeing patterns, develop all kinds of biased assumptions. 1/? https://twitter.com/beta_co_/status/1280195086849126403

What I am unconvinced by is the claim that we all develop the same biases due to a consistent socialisation into dominant discourses, that Critical Social Justice scholars are the ones who have managed to see through them & that they've done so correctly in their simplistic way.

It is undeniable that culture has significant impact. It's not a coincidence in the same year that 1% of Pakistani Muslims said homosexuality was OK, 42% of American Muslims supported same sex marriage. Previous generations of Brits held views that were deeply racist & sexist.

SocJus did not discover the existence of cultural biases & the need to challenge assumptions. This attitude defines the modern period, the Enlightenment, secularism, the Scientific Revolution, & the Civil Rights Movements before SocJus existed & screwed it all up.

We were being skeptical of metanarratives long before Jean Francois Lyotard noticed this. But we were being specifically skeptical. "How do we know this particular thing is true? How could we find out if it wasn't?" Postmodernism brought radical, indiscriminate skepticism.

After about 20 years of deconstructing everything, theorists around the 1990s started to talk about how to reconstruct things & this developed into various forms of theory and then combined into the mother of all metanarratives around 2010 & has been escalating ever since.

It looks like this, the current simplistic metanarrative at its most basic. And it is absolutely sure that this is objectively true. This is really quite ironic.

Our book refers to this as The Truth According to Social Justice & it is deeply dogmatic & sure that only those who have seen the light & become woke to very precise systems of power & privilege know what's going on. The rest of us walk around in a haze of dominant discourses.

Any attempt to suggest that other people with different views might also be able to do cultural analysis & critique narratives and evaluate ideas & could legitimately disagree rather than just be trying to preserve privilege or uncritically accepting the 'Status Quo" is rejected

So sure of themselves are they, that they actually see other kinds of progressives & particularly liberals as the greatest danger to them. DiAngelo & Saad particularly dwell on this. We're particularly dangerous because we're also critiquing the status quo including them.

Critical Social Justice scholars & activists spend much more energy on attacking liberalism & insisting that it is actually racist, sexist, transphobic etc than they do attacking genuine racists, sexists & transphobes on the far-right. Why is that, do you think?

It's because we are the main competition. Liberalism also opposes racism, sexism, homophobia etc, but it does not do so with this discourses of power nonsense. We'll actually care if you call us 'racist' while genuine racists won't. DiAngelo:

Really? Liberal progressives are the most dangerous to racial minorities? Are you sure you don't mean we are the most dangerous to your ideology because we are offering another way to oppose racism that isn't both nuts & morally abhorrent?

So, do I believe I have learnt biases? Yes, of course. Many of these will be culturally informed & many will be individual because individuals do actually exist. Strangely, my biases do not map neatly onto 1950s socially conservative America as the heavily US-centric CRTs insist.