Sensitivity to oppression and awareness of history is crucial.

I guess I’m about to step in it, because I suspect this won’t make either side happy. 🤣

This was posted and here is my reaction:

You object to the student’s rally against determinism, against fate, against being a pawn or a cork on the ocean, against not mattering?

Sensitivity to oppression and awareness of history is crucial. But it’s clear from passages like this that, unsurprisingly, it crushes some people, who on their own as as it’s taught begin to see themselves as cogs in a narrative they play a role in but are never the author of. It’s not a good place to be for a teen trying to individuate.

I’m pretty down with the left. I think a lot of pushback on “identity” issues by the right is anxiety about facing racism, or is implicit or even outright racism.

But it isn’t all that. There is a genuinely well-motivated and even altruistic worry that categorization can eliminate individualism, and even one’s drive for self-determination. If it’s not a valid worry then we can find ways to address the mistake, but it’s not a trivially false anxiety and it’s not always a rejection of accurate characterization of oppression to reject it.