If you haven’t been on a college campus recently, it can be easy to underestimate how completely incomprehensible everything has become. It’s like traveling to a foreign country. Really, they’re not even using the English language to educate students anymore. Instead, academics believe that their job is to constantly come up with new, overwrought terminology that doesn’t mean anything. They’re inventing terms like “environmental racism” and “racialized communities” and “housing justice” and “lived experience” and “minoritized peoples” and so on. And then, academics will often string all of these nonsense terms together, creating a disfigured, lovecraftian patchwork of wokeness. They’ll say things like, “Minoritized people and racialized communities, seeking housing justice, must wrestle with their lived experience of environmental racism.” And then everyone will nod, like they just heard something profound. It’s Mad Libs posing as scholarship.
It’s not hard to mock these professors, and point out what a scam all of this is. And all too often, I’ve done exactly that. At the same time, we shouldn’t ignore everything that’s going on in academia, because the truth is that some of these terms — which might seem meaningless to the sane population — actually have a very real meaning to leftists. Take the idea of “decolonization,” which became a very popular topic in universities starting in the 1960s. This is a word that, on its own, without context, could mean pretty much anything. What does it mean to “decolonize” the United States, for example? Does it mean we need to recite land acknowledgements all the time? Does it mean we need to physically leave our property? Does it mean we need to be more mindful of our microaggressions towards “indigenous folks”?
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