A few years ago I attempted to depict the new race/gender movement of the 2010s in a way as neutral, bland, and inoffensive as possible. I got strong pushback even on that much, with a denial that the movement even exists.

I knew that the movement I’m describing is highly resistant to being named. What I hadn’t expected was that even the acknowledgement of its existence is controversial. But I suppose that that controversy, at its heart, is tied to its resistance to being named: the movement tends to present its ideas as if they are just the common sense that everyone already believes, while at the same time demanding drastic and radical changes (open borders, “defund the police”).

Thus Afua Hirsch in the Guardian claims that the anti-woke “define themselves in opposition to an identity that doesn’t actually exist. They are anti-woke, even though there is no ‘woke’.” Some go so far as to claim that “woke” is a racial slur.

So, let’s get down to establishing a basic point: yes, whatever you call it or don’t call it, starting in the mid-2010s there has been a major radical movement around race and gender (including gender identity and sexual orientation), one which worked at length to limit public disagreement with it. You can support this movement or oppose it (or better yet support some parts of it and not others, as I do). But in the places where it has been influential (like North American universities or other educated urban enclaves), it has been such a powerful force that it makes no sense to deny its existence. You could more reasonably say it’s not one movement but a set of (real, existing) smaller ones – but I think there are good reasons to speak of it as one.

I identify this single movement as a relatively unified alliance of smaller movements, around closely related goals, that all began rising to prominence in the mid-2010s and reached peak influence a few years later. The three most prominent of those movements are the fourth-wave feminism most visibly symbolized by the hashtag #MeToo, the black Racial Reckoning, and the transgender movement – but these three have come closely in tandem with other movements, like the indigenous reckoning in Canada, and the “open borders” attack on all forms of immigration restriction. That these movements happened in the same very short span of time is not hard to establish – and few seem to deny that any individual one of them happened. So what we need to establish is that they are connected enough to constitute a single meaningful movement in a significant sense.

We may note first that even though they are each about different binaries of privileged and marginalized, the words “cultural appropriation”, “toxic masculinity”, “LGBT” and “transphobia” all saw a massive increase in usage in the era up to 2018 – alongside other words that the various smaller movements share in common, like “microaggressions”, “safe space”, “intersectionality” and “marginalized” itself.

That this all happened in such a short period of time is one reason to think of it together as one movement. So too, the fact that in this period activists would find ways of proclaiming the various allegiances together – like the “Progress Pride Flag” that throws together every possible colour into an aesthetics-free mess, in order to proclaim allegiance to trans and gay and racial causes all at once. Or the lawn signs, which where I live were more ubiquitous in 2020 than the American flag, that proclaim an activist Nicene Creed combining “black lives matter” and “no human is illegal” with “women’s rights are human rights” and “love is love”.

If you happened to live, as I do, in places where these ideas are all around you, it became clear pretty quickly that they were being advocated by the same set of people: if you knew a person who used the term “Latinx” and advocated defunding the police, you could be pretty confident that that person also put their pronouns in their email signature and objected to “mansplaining“. Their commonality also became institutional: throughout North America, in the same period, institutions from universities to corporations established offices of “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, abbreviated DEI, to implement their ideas together. “DEI” is never about race alone or about sexuality or transgender alone; the point is to pull them together.

A deeper reason to see the movements as a unity is that, as far as I can tell, the movements around different issues are all animated by the same underlying basic idea: that the world is fundamentally divided into binaries between privileged groups and marginalized groups of people. Not only is uplifiting the marginalized a unifying goal of the movement – a common goal being a standard definition of a single movement – but the movement has in common the further claim that the marginalized understand the relevant situation better.

The concept of privilege is core to the movement whether it is talking about race, gender, or transgender, and that concept explicitly brings them together. The essay that brought the concept of “privilege” to widespread attention is “White Privilege and Male Privilege” by Peggy McIntosh, a 1988 article that develops the concept of “white privilege” specifically through its analogy to “male privilege”: “Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon with a life of its own, I realized that since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege that was similarly denied and protected, but alive and real in its effects.”

An excerpt from this essay, “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, has been given to many American college students as part of their orientations since at least the late 1990s. I first learned about this in the 2000s through talking to friends who were among those students, who rolled their eyes cynically at the essay’s preachiness. What startled me most in the 2010s, especially after the 2016 election, was to see some of those very same cynics now become enthusiastic preachers of McIntosh’s gospel of privilege. The “racial literacy” training at my job, too, quoted McIntosh alongside the usual suspects of Kendi and DiAngelo.

McIntosh not only connects racial and gender privilege explicitly, she also makes the movement’s key theoretical claim around it, that the marginalized groups, by virtue of their marginalization, see things that the privileged groups do not see (and not vice versa). “After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious…. I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list [of racial privileges] until I wrote it down. For me, white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject.”

Consider a key and representative passage with which McIntosh opens the essay: “Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women’s disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully recognized, acknowledged, lessened, or ended.” Here women’s experience systematically allows them to see this truth in a way that men’s experience does not. It is not that men could not understand the truth of male privilege, but that they must learn about it from women, like someone learning a foreign language as an adult. The deeper philosophical idea expressed in this view is known as standpoint theory, and I plan to discuss it at more length in future posts (in keeping with this blog’s focus on philosophy). The point for now is just that something like standpoint theory – even where the term is not used – is a common philosophical or ideological structure underpinning the 2010s movements around black people, transgender, feminism, Canadian indigenous people and more.

Thus a battle cry uniting the larger movement as a whole has been the clumsy word intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw recognized that racial and gender movements often work at cross-purposes – but that whichever side won, the ones hit worst would be the ones hit by both forms of oppression (such as black women). The intersectionality concept allows the movement to claim it speaks in the name of combined oppressed identities.

Downstream from that deep commonality is the specific kind of change that each of the smaller movements ask for. Most notably, whatever else they insist on, they all insist on linguistic changes, coining their own new vocabularies (“mansplaining”, “cisnormativity”, “undocumented immigrant”, “Latinx”, “LGBT2SIA+”), and especially declaring other words newly taboo. These changes focus above all on avoiding offence or presumed emotional harm: it is presumed that the use of “slurs”, of whatever kind, harms the marginalized people, of whatever kind to whom they refer. That focus also unites all these movements and distinguishes them greatly from Marxist movements, for example, which are concerned with material conditions and don’t really care what words you use or who gets offended by them.

All of this is plenty of reason to say: yes, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the 2010s trans movement and others have more than enough in common to be referred to as a single movement. Now, of course, the Trump administration is unfortunately devoting significant resources to attacking this movement, and the movement would be better poised to defend itself if it were willing to admit its own existence. (What we call the movement is a controversy of its own, and merits its own post for next week.)