However, sometimes these demands are mutually contradictory, as when J. K. Rowling was condemned for not including people of color among her main protagonists and having no explicitly gay or trans characters in the Harry Potter books,48 yet was also criticized for including Native American wizarding lore.

For example, a person with deafness was previously considered to be a person who cannot hear, and who is disabled to some extent by her impairment. After the shift, she was seen as a Deaf person, someone who cannot hear and whom society has “disabled” by failing to be equally accommodating to those without hearing as it is to those with hearing (by

liberalism respects people both as individuals and as members of the human race. It does not respect identity groups or collectives per se: it values the individual and the universal; the human and humanity.

Throughout even the most recent applications of Theory, then, we see radical skepticism that knowledge can be objectively, universally, or neutrally true. This leads to a belief that rigor and completeness come not from good methodology, skepticism, and evidence, but from identity-based “standpoints” and multiple “ways of knowing.”

Critical race Theory formally arose in the 1970s, through the critical study of law as it pertains to issues of race.

Not altogether unironically, the axis that has replaced class in social theory is privilege. As we have noted, privilege is a concept most closely associated with the Theorist Peggy McIntosh, a well-off white woman, and the author of a 1989 essay called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”41 Influenced by critical race Theory, McInt

Because they focused on self-perpetuating systems of power, few of the original postmodern Theorists advocated any specific political actions, preferring instead to engage in playful disruption or nihilistic despair. Indeed, meaningful change was largely regarded as impossible under the original postmodernism, due to the inherent meaninglessness of

As noted, the number of axes of social division under intersectionality can be almost infinite—but they cannot be reduced to the individual.

Listen and consider asks us to take seriously some important information that we might otherwise ignore, and then evaluate fairly and rationally the totality of the evidence and arguments; listen and believe encourages confirmation bias, depending on who we feel morally obliged to listen to. If we follow that rule, we will get a lot of consequentia