Awareness of wrong carries a clear moral mandate to admit it or reject it. Admitting it carries a clear moral mandate to help fix it, or refuse to. Agreeing to fix it means paying the cost of repair.
I'd observe a lot of people don't want to know, because they don't want to pay.
This is why conservatives have set their sights against awareness itself.
Opposing "woke culture" is a tell.
Awareness is the first step on the path that inevitably leads to paying the price for being better people, and many people simply do not want to pay.
But refusing awareness reveals the intentions that were there all along.
This leads to people understanding who you are.
This is why conservatives have set their sights on what they call "cancel culture."
What they mean by "cancelled" is the natural consequence of rejecting clear moral demands—a consequence that is simply a general societal understanding of their true priorities.
Those injured by our systemically unjust society, optimized for empowered abuse—they know. They know in ways we actually can’t.
My suggestions: Stop using "viewpoint diversity" to mean "conservatives get to talk more" and recognize that the conservative reaction against academia is mainly driven by a broad *expansion* of diversity in voices, which conservatives categorically oppose.
There's a reason that conservative framing around diversity boils things down to roughly two sides of "conservative" and "liberal."
It allows them to ignore the fact that we ALREADY have broad diversity, and to frame themselves as the marginalized "side."
And so: voices of every ethnicity become not a multitude of ethnic voices, but "ethnic studies." And so with every facet of gender studies, and religious studies, and all of THAT get boiled to one side: Liberal.
Against which conservatives posit themselves the whole other side.
2016: FUCK YOUR FEELINGS
2017: YOU LOST GET OVER IT
2018: DRINKING UR LIBERAL TEARS
2019: FOUR MORE YEARS BITCHES
2020: STOP THE COUNT
2021: ummm have you guys even *tried* reasoning with us?
No reasoning with those who have rejected reason. No seeking solutions with those who want to create the problems. We’re not negotiating with terrorists.
The right to vote isn’t something to be earned through anyone’s definition of intelligence or awareness or by any other metric, and it’s not something we have to convince the right or anyone else of in order to defend it.
Think of someone who believes voting is bad. Would you ask them to convince you? Not if you have no interest in the proposition. To ask them to do so would be dishonest.
They don’t want to be convinced. They have other ends.
What they want isn’t to be convinced through data on “intelligent and informed” metric that it would be good to make voting as broad as possible.
They’ve no intention of being convinced.
What they want—ALL they want—is for the right to vote to be something that’s up for debate.
Republicans believe in "cancel culture." What they object to is "criticism culture."
They don't want scrutiny. They want silence.
They don't want dialogue. They want obedience.
They don't want democracy. They want authority.
They'll use every tool available to them to get it.
Whenever Republicans talk about "cancel culture," they never mean the violence committed against a man, pushed out of a park for the color of his skin.
They always mean the social consequences that might befall the racist supremacist doing the pushing.
Serious Aside: I love Crystal and Hines (and a really good supporting cast!) in RUNNING SCARED very much, also it’s exhibit A in how normalized the idea was by the mid 80s that police brutality and abuse of power was not only necessary but self-evidently good.