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

4 QUEER THEORY Freedom from the Normal

Despite postmodernists treating it as though it is novel and profound, this divide between facts and experience is not particularly mysterious to philosophers outside of postmodernism: it is the difference between knowing that and knowing how. “Knowing that” is propositional knowledge, while “knowing how” is experiential knowledge.

Robin DiAngelo calls anything except deferential agreement “white fragility”; Alison Bailey characterizes disagreement as “willful ignorance” and a power play to preserve one’s privilege; Kristie Dotson characterizes dissent as “pernicious”; Barbara Applebaum dismisses any criticism of Social Justice Theoretical methods as “color-talk” and “white i

For cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, it is vital that we appreciate how much progress we have made in liberal democracies—and that we owe that progress to Enlightenment humanism—if we wish it to continue: A liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it’s better to solve those problem

If even the Newtonian philosophy were not permitted to be questioned, mankind could not feel as complete assurance of its truth as they now do. The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attem

Equal access to rubble is not a worthy goal.

Crenshaw argues that (identity) categories “have meaning and consequences”;28 that is, they are objectively real. She distinguishes between a “black person” and a “person who happens to be black,”

The postmodern knowledge principle: Radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism.

Progress occurred fastest of all in the 1960s and 1970s, when racial and gender discrimination became illegal and homosexuality was decriminalized. This all occurred before postmodernism became influential.