My latest for @Quillette looks at campus anti-racism as a retail good. Many students are basically luxury consumers. What they want to consume is the conceit of being stunning & brave...which requires admin to pretend that they're besieged by racism. The customer is always right https://twitter.com/Quillette/status/1329060540321304577

In some ways, I disagree with other @Quillette editors and contributors, who tend to analyze this through the lens of ideology, especially critical theory and its offshoots. I think there's a simpler phenomenon at play... mostly upper middle class white hubris & status seeking

Unlike many critics of woke culture, I actually spent a few years in editorial meetings with some ppl who unironically championed the most doctrinaire tenets of wokeism. It had little to do with actual ideology. It was about perception and status seeking within their subcultures

As I argue, citing case studies from @smithcollege & @oberlincollege, this status-seeking has required leftists to betray their former Marxist postures (since blue-collars are typically the bugbears of wokeism), suggesting that those ideological attachments, too, were superficial

I'll add that there are also incentives for actors who've had difficulty attaining status thru application of their actual métier. An engineering prof recently noted the phenom of the (white) underperformer who becomes an overnight star by demanding that everyone read Kendi etc

watching college leftists betray the working class has made me realize that Marx's insights about class were more correct than conservatives acknowledge. Rich ppl always find ways to trade on their wealth to gain other forms of status. Wokeism is a new form of buying bishoprics