By Collin May · Monday, January 15, 2024 Gabriel Noah Brahm’s interview with Collin May appears here.
 The rapid expansion of woke ideology and its attendant cancel culture has produced both a popular and an academic backlash. The recent appearance by the trio of university presidents before the House of Representatives Education Committee has only served to focus that backlash against the conformism and anti-free speech culture that dominate many university campuses.
On a popular level, we are all familiar with concepts such as anti-racism, settler colonialism, and the ubiquitous EDI—equity, diversity, and inclusion. On the intellectual level, the backlash focuses on a growing sense of scholarly puritanism attributed to anti-Enlightenment theories that underly these public concepts. The theories include: neo-feminism; postmodernism, often with a Foucauldian inspiration; and critical theory. As far as critical theory is concerned, the spotlight shines on German-American critical theorist Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse is famous for an essay he wrote in 1965 entitled “Repressive Tolerance.” In it, he argued that tolerance in the liberal capitalist West was simply a veil that oppressive right-wing movements and state institutions used to dominate public discourse while silencing left-leaning activism. In response, Marcuse called for the outright suppression of speech and discourse deemed right-wing. In other words, intolerance for allegedly right-leaning narratives, with untrammeled promotion of the supposedly emancipatory left-leaning narratives.
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By Cary Nelson · Wednesday, December 20, 2017 The large room at the Marriott Wardman Park was filled to overflowing on Sunday afternoon for a special session billed as “Thinking Palestine Intersectionally.” The seats were occupied and scores of others stood along the walls, sat on the floor in front of the stage, and spilled out into the hallway. For many it was clearly the highlight of The Middle East Studies Association’s November 2017 annual meeting of faculty and graduate students, held in Washington, DC. Perhaps 500 people were present to hear Noura Erakat, Judith Butler, Samera Esmeir, and Angela Davis be hailed as symbolic conquerors of the Jewish state. “The peace process is over,” Erakat began, and then affirmed “the entwinement of our liberation,” offering her own take on intersectionality. The real reason the United States blocked the “Zionism is racism” framework, she declared was “to prevent itself from having to pay reparations for slavery,” a claim that would have surprised the very people who fought against the 1975 UN resolution. The days of progressive advocacy “except for Palestine are over,” she concluded. It is time “to bar supporters of Israel from feminist movements.” Even this last agenda item, a call to cast out the female devils in our midst, met with loud applause.
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By Kenneth D. Johnson · Monday, February 8, 2016 Kenneth D. Johnson is affiliated with the William J. Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies, in Boston. The following paper was presented at the 2016 Telos Conference, held on January 16–17, 2016, in New York City. For news about upcoming conferences and events, please visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website.
Introduction
The spate of killings of unarmed African American males by police and vigilante residents has continued to roil public opinion in the black community, leading to various forms of social protest, in particular by varied groups of young adult African Americans.
Preeminent among these groups is #BlackLivesMatter, which now aspires to become a national movement, sometimes in coalition with other contemporary groups formed near the same time, and displacing older Civil Rights groups and the Black Church’s ethical and protest traditions.
While #BlackLivesMatter has partly instrumentalized Black Church social protest tradition, it has done so in the service of a fundamentally secular set of ethical commitments. In the process, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has discarded the internal resources of self-critique that Black Church ethical praxis provides.
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