Brice Karickhoff's Reviews > Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

I really can’t praise this book enough. It is a must read for anyone interested in progression toward a more just society. I disagreed with this book at times, but overall, it was immensely helpful.

I have long believed that there is a crucial difference in the ways that one might approach social justice. For instance, with respect to racial justice, I’ve read countless books by and about the civil rights leaders, and I’ve read mostly all of the popular racial justice books of today. While they both seem to focus on race, I noticed a shift in the underlying framework that made me very uncomfortable. I appreciate that White Fragility, So You Want to Talk about Race, and others are trying to achieve a more racially just society, but I was offput by the epistemological and moral framework they hold to be self-evident.

This book exposed the difference between Classical Liberalism and Reified Post-modernism (different than the initial post-modernism of Foucault, but more relevant to today). Ideas are SO important. I would recommend this book to anyone, but beware, it is seriously dense. If you do read it please please let me know your thoughts.