Back in March 2022 as national gas prices were rising rapidly, the satire website Babylon Bee wrote an article titled "Biden Sells Alaska Back To Russia So We Can Start Drilling For Oil There Again". Despite the fact that the Babylon Bee has been generating nothing but satire since its inception in 2016, USA Today felt it necessary to fact check the article. Believe it or not, USA Today concluded that the article was indeed "Satire".
As nuts as USA Today's decision to fact check satire, a lot of the ideas and talking points in today's culture seem just as preposterous and could easily be confused as satire:
A man in the UK was turned away from giving blood because he refused to give his pregnancy status
Queer-owned Philly business shut down by staff for not being woke enough, called ‘gentrifiers’
A home that is part of the Berkeley Student Cooperative bans white guests from common spaces
In the points listed above, how did events and ideas intertwine to result in these situations? What is the genesis of the thought patterns that seek to normalize these absurdities? Although I don't have a crystal ball that allows me to definitively answer these questions, I will hypothesize that a lot of this nonsense started in our universities under fields of study that some have grouped under the unflattering name of 'grievance studies'. According to this article by Walter E. Williams, grievance studies can be summed up:
"They call these fields “grievance studies,” where scholarship is not so much based upon finding truth, but upon attending to social grievances. Grievance scholars bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview.
The worldview they promote is neither scientific nor rigorous. Grievance studies consist of disciplines such as sociology; anthropology; gender studies; and queer, sexuality, and critical race studies."
Mr. Williams' article goes on to discuss what became known as the grievance studies affair which was an effort by a trio of authors to submit hoax papers for peer review in a number of well-known journals (for those areas of study). A number of their hoax papers were accepted for review and publication, and one of them (Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at the Dog Park) was awarded the top paper of the year by the journal Gender, Place & Culture. The following video was produced by the trio to explain what they did, why they did it and what they concluded:
The video is well worth your time, as it touches on the far reaching tentacles of these study areas.
Although some of the topics that are researched in grievance studies are important, as a whole they are short on real science and long on political ideology. The goal of finding objective truth is secondary to the pursuit of Critical Social Justice. Their adherents work to find problems in systems from the standpoint of "knowing" a certain problem already exists. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the most well-known example of this type of discipline. Unfortunately, the latest craze in educational methodology, Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), has sprung from the same lineage as CRT and I fear its adoption will do far more damage to the state of public education in our great country.