What Is Social Justice?

This was, admittedly, a hard assignment for me. Not hard in the sense that it was difficult to go out and find an article about social justice but hard in a sense that I harbor a bit of resentment over "social justice warriors," which are always the people that come to mind when I think of social justice.

The article I found discusses what's gone wrong with social justice in the last year. The people who are fighting so valiantly for "equality" have seemingly steamrolled any opinion that "offends" them. There was recently an incident at a college where several students were riled up over the hypothetical situation of Halloween costumes and what should be done to police students and what they chose to wear. Keep in mind, Halloween had not happened at this point; most people probably hadn't even bought their costumes yet. But a handful of students comprised an email that asked (paraphrased), "Who is going to make sure that nobody wears any offensive costumes?" The dean of students fired back an email that basically said, "I'm not sure who should police these students, but it's not going to be me."

All hell broke loose. The offended students demanded that the dean resign because they felt he had not handled the situation with tact. And maybe he didn't. But these are college students. College students who, literally, screamed in this man's face and wouldn't let him get a word in edge wise about why he didn't want to police a bunch of adults. Because that's not what you do. You don't tell people they can't wear something because it offends you. That goes against every single thing every social justice warrior stands for. Maybe I'm just jaded. Maybe I've just been told that I'm offending people because I use the wrong gender for them one too many times. One of the only girls who would let the dean get a word in responded to the dean, telling him, in so many words, that things that needed policing were things that offended her. I can assure you, she gets offended by a lot of things.

Our children needn't be coddled. There's a real world after high school and, seemingly unknown to some college students, after college as well. You can't be offended by everything. I'm not saying that a teacher needs to be at the front of the class dropping racial slurs into the conversation; flat out, that's wrong and that's not at all what I mean. People who get offended because you don't know that they subscribe to different pronouns than what they look like? Slow it down. Hate is bred; it is learned. The hate that social justice warriors have for everybody outside of their cause is ridiculous.

Social justice is not making sure everybody is equal and on a level playing field; it's making sure that everybody can be on the field in the first place.