What a silly installment in the ever-expanding category of holier-than-thou-social-justice-posturing. Like many other pieces in this category, the point of this article, to the extent it has one, is of interest only to those who are already very low down the many-runged ladder descending into the social justice abyss, with social justice warriors constantly clamoring to overtake each other in the race to the bottom. The core of the article that explicitly connects it to this larger category is this paragraph:
This is the way privilege works. People of privilege co-opt a marginalized position or perspective, whitewash it to their liking and then hand it back. It happens all. the. time. Men who know little or nothing about women mansplain feminism to women. White women are shockingly bad about whitesplaining racism to black women.
Another way of saying this would be that the only way to win in the social justice hierarchy is to belong to the group that is seen as “marginalized.” Whoever is lower down on the ladder (i.e., more “oppressed”) is automatically entitled to opine authoritatively on the subject of their alleged oppression, while everyone else has to dutifully get in line and march in lockstep. If you want to be an ally but aren’t in the right pigment range, chromosomal category or weight class, then as the Rock used to say when he was a WWE wrestler, you’d better “know your role and shut your mouth.” So … uh … who exactly is “privileged” here?
One thing is clear. Medium and Medium Staff clearly “privilege” authors who write garbage like this by putting their fat fingers on the scale and making these kinds of identity-politics-peddling articles that contain no actual useful facts, knowledge or signs of erudition or deep reflection rise to top of the Medium slush pile and show up as recommendations to those of us who’d rather never see this kind of stuff (ever). This is precisely what I explained in some detail recently in my examination of Medium’s incredible bias that makes it unsuited as a publishing platform on which pure quality can ever hope to compete on a level playing field.
