Social Justice

Virtue signalling is really status signalling | The Spectator

What critics of these trendy initiatives fail to grasp is that concepts like ‘white privilege’ are not intended to be taken at face value nor have any real-world impact. Rather, they are almost wholly performative. To be clear, when the teenage son or daughter of an Anglo-Saxon power couple is told to denounce ‘whiteness’ and affirm that it is a toxic affliction responsible for all the injustices in this world, they are not being asked to forego their place at a Russell Group university in favour of a student of colour or prepare themselves for a life of atonement.

On the contrary, they are being taught a kind of catechism that they’ll need to re-cite several times a day to preserve their privileged status. Think of it as like joining an exclusive dining society. Part of the initiation process involves being given a special item of clothing that they can wear to signal their membership of the ruling class. In the Bullingdon, it was a fancy waistcoat. Today, it’s a T-shirt saying: ‘White silence is violence.’