Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“It is a curious thing,” D. H. Lawrence wrote, “but the ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next.” The ideas of critical theorists became the instincts of millennials. It wasn’t necessary to have read Foucault or studied under Judith Butler to become adept with terms like “centered,” “marginalized,” “privilege,” and “harm”; to belie

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As a political theorist, hooks believed fiercely in the power of naming systems—her recurring phrase, in defining what we are up against, was “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”5 But she was far more ambivalent about the impulse to attach identity signifiers to our beings, to brand ourselves as a this, or a that. In her landmark 1984 book, F

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Critical theory upends the universal values of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationality, science, equality and freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which dominant groups subjugate other groups. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maint

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