"Performative Snobbery"
My awesome editor at Quillette, Jon Kay (who I also refer to as "You prose rapist!" -- which makes him laugh, because he's fun and not a PC ninny), has a piece in the Canadian National Post on the spreading disease that is woke-think:

"Ottawa plans to teach non-racialized Canadians about systemic racism in new campaign," read a CTV News headline on Wednesday. If you're wondering what a "non-racialized" human being looks like, the story helpfully indicates that the term means "white."

No ordinary Canadian says "non-racialized," of course. Most Canadians likely have no idea what it even means. But "non-racialized" is the jargon term that Liberals use in describing their new program, having judged (correctly) that saying the "white" part too loud is politically problematic.

Reporters traditionally have felt duty-bound to debunk this kind of self-serving government bafflegab. But since journalists swim in the same Twitter bathwater as the public officials they cover, these convenient euphemisms sometimes end up being copied and pasted into everyday reportage.

Coverage of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls similarly presented the acronym "2SLGBTQQIA" as if it were just an everyday term used by line cooks and pipefitters. And CBC Radio listeners will hear guests being casually referred to as "colonizers" and "immigrant settlers."

Conservative pundits have prattled on about "left-wing media bias" since the dawn of time. But what we often see nowadays goes beyond "bias": progressives have crowdsourced what is effectively an entirely new dialect -- one that's unintelligible to the vast bulk of the population, especially immigrants and working-class people who lack entrée to college-educated professional circles.

The idea of social justice was once based on the widely shared desire to help the poor and underprivileged. And given the obvious overlap with the Christian tradition of alms, Muslim zakat, Jewish tzedakah and South Asian dāna, there is no reason why a sincere commitment to social justice couldn't help bridge the political gap between liberals and conservatives in a multicultural Canada.

Alas, social justice has instead metastasized into a passcode-protected treehouse club, from which the privileged lecture those proles who lack fluency in the latest social-justice argot.

...Until recently, such intellectual cultism was confined to a handful of privileged professional silos. But it will be interesting to see what happens now that mass retail corporations are signing on. On Thursday, I received a set of anti-racist training documents that were circulated among employees of Sobeys, Canada's second-largest food store chain.

The documents urge workers to watch videos on "Deconstructing White Privilege," support Black Lives Matter and generally spend their free (i.e., unpaid) time reading "books and articles" that are consistent with Sobeys' new diversity and inclusion regime. (There's also a section urging employees to "reach out and check in" with Black co-workers -- the sketch comedy writes itself.)

And from the "Do as we say..." department, of course, there's this:

Sobeys is a massive, largely white-run company that depends on an entry-level workforce that is increasingly Black and brown. These low-level jobs have started to get phased out in favour of automated check-out technology.

And in 2020, Sobeys cut the meagre $2-per-hour premium that was briefly paid to front-line workers who exposed themselves to COVID-19 so that privileged people (like Butts, Carleton -- and me) could eat. One can understand why it feels more ennobling for plutocrats to lecture everyone about racial justice than actually face up to one's role in an increasingly unequal society.