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One of the most manipulative habits in contemporary politics is the oppressor/oppressed binary. It takes a complicated society, flattens it into a morality play, and assigns everyone a role before the argument even begins. You are not allowed to be a citizen, a skeptic, or simply a person trying to judge a claim on its merits. You must be either a resister of oppression or an accomplice to it. There is no middle ground. There is no neutrality. There is only confession or guilt.
This is the logic behind slogans like Ibram X. Kendi’s claim that the opposite of racist is not “not racist,” but “anti-racist.” It sounds brave and morally serious. In practice, it is a trap. It abolishes the possibility that a person can reject racism while also rejecting activist dogma, racial essentialism, or race-based policy. Once the slogan is accepted, disagreement itself becomes incriminating. Silence is violence. Skepticism is fragility. Restraint is complicity. The argument is rigged before it starts.
That is what makes the framework so effective. It does not persuade. It corners. It takes a difficult moral and empirical question and turns it into a loyalty test. Once that move is made, debate stops being a search for truth and becomes a public sorting ritual. On affirmative action, immigration, policing, school curricula, crime, history, or speech, the details matter less than whether you submit to the script. You are not judged by the quality of your reasoning. You are judged by whether you have signalled the right side.
The first way to break the trap is to demand definitional precision. Ask the simplest possible question: what, exactly, does “anti-racist” require of me here, now, in practice? What specific belief, action, or policy would prove that I am not complicit? Force the slogan to cash itself out. This matters because many activist terms draw their power from strategic vagueness. They sound morally elevated precisely because they are never pinned down. Once pinned down, they often expand into endless duties of confession, endorsement, and ideological retraining. When the standard can never be met, the point is no longer moral clarity. The point is obedience.
The second move is to name the false dichotomy. Calmly, but without apology. The binary assumes that every disparity is evidence of oppression and that every refusal to endorse the preferred remedy is therefore collaboration with injustice. But reality does not work that way. Human beings are not made of one motive. Institutions do not produce one kind of outcome. Policies have trade-offs. Causes are mixed. Incentives matter. Culture matters. History matters. Family structure matters. Behaviour matters. Human variation matters. A worldview that permits only one explanation is not morally deep. It is intellectually cheap.
“The point is no longer moral clarity. The point is obedience.”
Complexity starts to look like cowardice. Nuance starts to look like betrayal. Evidence that cuts against the preferred story is dismissed as harm. The framework protects itself the way bad frameworks always do: by treating every challenge as proof that the challenge was necessary.
The third move is the mirror test. If disagreement with your theory makes someone morally tainted, what exactly are you doing to dissenters? If refusal to use your language, endorse your policies, or accept your metaphysics makes a person an oppressor, then you have not abolished domination. You have redistributed it. You have built a new moral hierarchy with yourself at the top and everyone insufficiently converted beneath you. The names have changed. The structure has not.
This is why the binary feels so powerful. It flatters the speaker while shaming the listener. It offers moral clarity without the inconvenience of evidence. It turns political disagreement into a purity test and ordinary citizens into suspects. That is intoxicating, especially for people who enjoy the feeling of righteousness more than the discipline of thought.
Racism is real. Injustice is real. But so is the danger of any framework that treats disagreement as guilt and complexity as sin. Liberalism was built on the harder truth that citizens will differ, causes will be mixed, and power must be restrained even when exercised in the name of virtue. The oppressor/oppressed binary rejects that discipline. It wants a world of permanent accusation, permanent sorting, and permanent moral theatre.
Do not argue inside that trap. Do not accept the role of defendant in someone else’s catechism. Ask for definitions. Expose the binary. Turn the logic back on itself. The moment a moral framework abolishes the right to dissent, it has stopped being a tool of justice and become a costume for power.
To illustrate how deep the ‘social-justice’ mindset has permeated the cultures of the West, consider the following – Watch the video, and then try to imagine a white person saying the same thing. Would the reactions be different? Are your expectations different?
Coleman argues that we should do our best not to judge people on their immutable characteristics, but rather the content of their character.
Educators, parents- when you start getting the smell of “anti-racist” activism coming from your local school board be prepared to go on the offensive to keep this bullshit out of your school and away from your children. Just look at the mess this activist agenda has created in the Peel School Board.
“The “serious issues related to governance” identified by Rodrigues arose as a result of the disconnect between the conclusions and directives of the PDSB review and the real-world situation in the schools. The senior administrative team at the time knew that racism in the schools was, at most, one part of the reason for lower achievement and higher discipline rates among black students. They knew that to address these issues would require a broad, community-based set of actions many of which would not be supported by the woke activists who blamed all the problems black students were experiencing entirely on “systemic racism”. The reluctance on the part of senior administration to blame the entire problem on racism and embrace Kendi-style “antiracism” as the antidote meant that they had to go. They were cut loose (with a reported severance package of half a million each for Director Peter Joshua and his Associate Director Mark Harmon).
“As supervisor, I have worked with board staff, the Board of Trustees, community members, students, and parents over the past 2 and ½ years to rebuild relationships and trust that had been eroded over a significant period of time. When I accepted the appointment, I assumed control over a board that lacked capacity to effectively govern in the interests of all students of the board. Administrative leadership and elected leadership lacked the capacity and, in some cases, – as noted in the Investigator’s Report – the willingness to provide the leadership required to ensure that the diversity of students and families in the PDSB was well served.”
The community activists have been well served, but no one else has. The supervisor was disconnected from any actual educational reality on the ground; he did not work out of the board offices but rather at Queen’s Park. He was an unknown ghostly presence in the board and most staff never met him or received any correspondence from him. His role appeared to be to ensure that the local activists, who were demanding the application of Critical Theory (wokeism) to board polices and procedures, were consulted by senior administration at every turn. Under Rodriguez, a major purge took place in which the majority of the senior administration, lifelong educators with a wealth of experience, were shown the door. Since these were firings without cause, this exercise not only degraded the administration, replacing these knowledgeable veterans with inexperienced, ideologically-driven neophytes, it was also very expensive. Millions were spent on severance pay and early retirement packages, which essentially amounted to paying an administrator his or her full salary while they sat at home until they reached that date at which they could retire with an unreduced pension. Of course, receiving these handouts was predicated on keeping their mouths shut about what was really going on at the board. The point is that the effect of Rodrigues’ supervision was the replacement of highly experienced, traditional liberal, and relatively apolitical administrators with inexperienced, identity-obsessed followers of Kendi-style Critical Theory. As you might expect, the resulting impacts on student learning environments and teacher morale have been devastating.
“I have also invested significant time and resources to build the capacity of the Board of Trustees (Board) to position them to govern the PDSB in a manner that is accountable, transparent, respectful, and responsive to the issues and concerns of the communities it serves….”
The only people Rodrigues was accountable to were the race-essentialist activists. He has done absolutely nothing to model respect or responsiveness to community concerns about the hostile and divided climate he has created in the schools and offices of the board, in which all white people (especially heterosexual males) are characterized as oppressors while black people and other “marginalized groups” are cast as victims.
“While the newly elected board has begun its term of office in a productive and positive way, it is appropriate for regular updates to be sent to the minister to confirm that relationships are professional, respectful, and collaborative among the trustees and between the Board and the senior leadership team. The minister would be advised to similarly request confirmation and evidence that the Board is responding to community concerns in a respectful, timely and meaningful manner”.
It is clear from this statement, that while the board may have been handed back control of its operations, Big Brother will be watching. That means that Critical Theory will continue to govern PDSB policy as long as it remains the mainstream thinking in academia generally. And that could be a very long time.”
Divide and conquer is the preferred method on display here. The former board was isolated and those that did not buy into the program were purged in the name of ideological purity.
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