Critical social justice

Critical social justice is an approach to social justice issues derived from the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory. Critical social justice is differentiated from Social justice generally as a marker of its “specific theoretical perspectives" that recognise inequality as "deeply embedded in the fabric of society (i.e., as structural)", adding that the practice of Critical social justice means "actively [seeking] to change this".

Principles
Authors Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo (a writer later made famous for her 2018 book White Fragility) wrote in their preface to their 2017 book Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, outlined the key principles of the filed. They defined this as its emphasis on groups rather than individuals and how social injustice results in unequal access to resources in society between those groups.

Critical social justice does not draw boundaries between scholarship, education and political activism. According to DiAngelo, one of the features uniting academic fields taking a "critical" stance is their view “that education is a political project". The authors wrote that "those who claim to be for social justice must be engaged in self-reflection about their own socialization into these groups (their “positionality”)" and that “this action requires a commitment to an ongoing and lifelong process”.

Citing Joe L. Kincheloe, DiAngelo contended that though social justice practitioners may appeared biased, they are only "stat[ing] their positionality", and that "all knowledge is taught from a particular perspective; the power of dominant knowledge depends in large part on its presentation as neutral and universal".

The authors (Sensoy and DiAngelo) traced the roots of critical social justice back to the Frankfurt School of Social Theory, and more broadly, to Continental philosophy and stated the theory “merges in the North American context of the 1960s with antiwar, feminist, gay rights, Black power, Indigenous peoples, The Chicano Movement, disability rights, and other movements for social justice.”

Response
James A. Lindsay, a writer who describes his "ideological enemy" as social justice, has rebranded his opposition to social justice movements with the phrase, arguing that "it’s nearly always best to name your enemy something that they would or do call themselves." He argued that critical social justice's commitment to an "ongoing and lifelong process" of changing "the fabric of society" means that "signing up for Critical Social Justice carries with it signing on to a badly designed bid for social revolution". Lindsay, Pluckrose, Boghossian and Nanya maintain that critical social justice is "a kind of religious worldview". Lindsay and Pluckrose had coauthored the 2020 nonfiction book Cynical Theories, which criticizes critical theory.

Calvin Robinson, a writer sympathetic to critiques of social justice theory, followed the lead of Pluckrose, Lindsay, Boghossian and Nanya in adopting "critical social justice" as an umbrella term to supersede the earlier term "grievance studies", "applied postmodernism and Social Justice", "woke", "critical race theory" and "anti-racism" when describing what they argue is an illiberal left-wing ideological movement.

In 2021, Pluckrose founded Counterweight, a hotline for the stated purpose of supporting people at work, school, and university wanting to "resist the imposition of critical social justice on their day-to-day lives".