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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15517 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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Many such cases. You reminded me of the Claudine Gay - the recently axed first black woman Harvard president. Apparently her family were magnates from Haiti who owned a concrete plant in Haiti, with various shenanigans especially with regards to reconstruction after earthquake with Haitian politicians having shares in the company for some reason.

But yeah, she is marginalized person who needs affirmative action.

My law school class was full of black students who recieved explicit LSAT score adjustments in admissions and a frankly obscene amount of scholarship money/free resources by both the university and the law firms trying to pump up their diversity numbers. Not a single one came from an "underprivileged" background. They were the children of bankers and lawyers. One was a literal European aristocrat on their mother's side. It's a really radicalizing experience to be lectured to about oppression by someone who went to boarding school when you're the one two weeks behind because your student loan check hasn't come in yet and you can't buy books.

I think that a case could be made that what made SJ so appealing to the upper-middle (and middle) class was that by denying class, it made them free to be as classist. Before SJP, expressing contempt of the working class would have gone badly in mostly left-leaning academic circles.

Now, it is totally permissible, because being working class does not make you oppressed. After all, with blank-slatism, everyone who does not manage to earn a degree in grievance studies despite not belonging to an oppressed group is clearly just lazy.

So if you are a white woman whose daddy paid for your college so you could work in HR, you a free to feel vastly superior to the proletariat in a way which would have utterly embarrassed any upper-middle person in the 50s. Just take care to refer to them as "deplorables" or "MAGA base" who can not even bother to educate themselves about what is really the secret handshakes of your class membership (like the updates to the pride flag, pronouns, or knowing when you are supposed to do a land acknowledgement) but what you conveniently pretend is the basis of being a decent person.

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