I should probably just ignore somebody childishly making things personal, but where do you think the ideas you cite in your post came from? It’s critical race theory. And what you’re talking about sounds an awful lot like the religious concept of confession.
This is a very long discussion of the religious aspects of critical race theory informed social justice:
https://areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-the-faith-of-social-justice/
Ritual, Redemption, and Prayer
There are only two effective paths toward redemption in the Social Justice soteriology: one, a commitment to an impossibly complicated set of behaviors that fall under the overlapping but distinct rubrics of allyship and solidarity, and, two, identifying, adopting, and attempting to legitimize one’s own status among intersectionally “oppressed” identities.
These, dare I say, performances serve the purpose of a kind of ritual, and introspection into one’s privilege is offered as the only path toward something resembling redemption...
Solidarity and allyship—which are themselves
fraught with problematicsfrom the applied postmodern perspective because of their capacity to recenter the privileged while extracting a divinity resource from oppression—are deemed the necessary response to privilege. “Allies” are what we call relationally privileged brothers and sisters in Social Justice, and solidarity is approximately socioreligious fraternity in the faith. Exercising these includes
deferring to oppressed identities and
making personal sacrifices to stand “
in solidarity” with their
claimed agendas. These deferrals and sacrifices are the costly signals that “prove”
one’s loyaltyto the moral tribe
and its ideology, and they have the
psychological effect of increasing one’s commitment to it. This occurs because undertaking this cost must be rationalized, and the rationalizations employed are the moral ones provided by the ideology, usually in some form of “doing the right thing,” “taking a stand against Hate,” or “using one’s privilege to help overcome oppression.”
Much of this is achieved through the act of Social Justice prayer, which primarily takes the form of making woke social media posts—which even Crenshaw has
complained about in an applicable way—and attending public rallies ostensibly
treated as protests. This will be, no doubt, a controversial claim to have made, so the reader is reminded that this approaches the topic of how religious-like phenomena work on a psychological (and social) level.
Psychologically, prayer serves many functions, and it’s reasonable to conclude that among these is a hope to call upon the numinous forces of the universe to shape human experience for the better. Often, though not always, prayers of this type are presented in the form of blessings—bless this food for the health of our bodies, bless this meeting that it serve not only our purposes but Higher ones, God bless the USA. For the applied postmodernists of Social Justice, the premodern numinous forces are all functionally dead, however. The living gods are societal, and they’re primarily the reification of discourses and narratives (because postmodernism, applied and less so, is ultimately
logocentric in believing that language creates society, which creates our total understanding of reality). Among other effects, including virtue signaling and hierarchy jockeying, woke-posting on social media is a way to offer a blessing to the wokeness gods so that discourses might be blessed, problematics and dissenters might
be shamed, and society might be improved.
The most overt form this behavior takes is in public rallies, which superficially resemble protests that have lost all of their focus. Rather than protesting specific issues or political concerns, Social Justice adherents increasingly appear to gather together to protest against concepts that are directly derived from the Matrix of Oppression. What, exactly, is a protest against the “right wing,” for example? What are “anti-fascism” rallies? And how are these conducted? For those familiar with the left-leaning protest scene as it has evolved from the early 2000s until now, there has been a distinct devolution of clarity, organization, and focus and increased reliance upon gathering and chanting, as though demonstrating alone can suffice to affect society in a way that effects the protesters’ goals (and, when it doesn’t, that is subsequently taken as proof that society is even more fallen than previously thought and in desperate and urgent need of even more “protests”). These aren’t protests. These are prayer rallies. This is church.
