… away from ambiguity and to either submit or lash out at those whom we think might threaten us.

Shame rules community, and not only the social justice kind: In every tight-knit, ideologically steeped community that I have known — Chinese-Canadian, Christian, queer — shame and judgement pervade. In the movement, privilege is our original sin, and the doctrine is our Hail Mary. The political w…

· Critique vs Compassion: My final struggle with social justice culture is its tendency to centre critique at the expense of creative thinking. The strength of social justice ideology are its sharp eyes and tongue, its ability to reveal and tear open the hidden logic of oppressive systems — a powerful and important revolutionary tool. My fear is that the valorization of critique, and the central role that criticism plays in the performance of goodness, has resulted in a rigid way of thinking that prioritizes the endless re-enactment of outrage and conflict while preventing us from developing strategies for reconciliation, necessary compromise, and collective action.

· Bullying and Call-Outs: A lot of public debate has already been had about the benefits and drawbacks of call-out culture in activism, so I won’t go too deeply into it. Suffice it to say, a culture in which the majority of political education is done through public shaming neither all that socially transformative nor psychologically healthy. Call-out culture, in my experience, can also spin into dynamics of punishment through bullying and intimidation, ie doxing, online harassment, etc.

· Righteousness and Exclusion: The moralizing paradigm of social justice Discourse (as the kids are callin’ it these days) when unchecked also leads to a frankly unpleasant tone of superiority and self-righteousness. Those who are not “rad” or “woke” are considered either unworthy of respect or treated as unenlightened potential converts. Frequently, these unworthies are elders, working class/poor individuals without access to the language of social justice, or whose cultures of origin hold differing belief systems. Social justice movements, then, become counter-productively centred around white, middle-class, university-educated Millenial Anglophone North Americans and those of the rest of us who are able to force our way in.

…uently, ferociously dragged, and meaningful dialogue is rare in comparison (though it does occur). The cultural atmosphere is thus more conducive to anxiety-driven attempts to prove one’s goodness through faith to the dogma than it is to the creation of authentic relationships in which we are allowed to be imperfect (which is to say, human) or the development of meaningful social change. The performance of virtue often relies on adherence to startlingly simplistic political slogans tha…