The Grievance Studies Hoax was the work of Helen Pluckrose, editor of the online magazine Areo, Peter Boghossian, a professor of philosophy at Portland State University, and James Lindsay, a mathematician and writer. The three wrote papers detailing fake research, which they designed to look similar to what they term “grievance studies,” and got several published in peer-reviewed journals. The hoax would have continued if not for Wall Street Journal’s Jillian Kay Melchior, who realized that one of the authors, Helen Wilson, did not exist. Some digging eventually led her to the hoaxers.

This essay is not about the hoax itself. Nor is it about some of the troubling excesses that run in parallel with grievance studies, such as deplatforming speakers or the tendency to call any one in disagreement a racist, sexist, or homophobe.

My goal in this essay is to add nuance to the public’s understanding of the knowledge produced in the disciplines labeled grievance studies. I orient the essay towards those who freely employ the grievance studies label or agree with the overall sentiments the term suggests. They levy at least two major criticisms: (1) the research produced by grievance studies is at best inferior to other fields, at worst outright false, and (2) the research is overtly political.

These two criticisms are misplaced. First, while the research is indeed less rigorous if one applies the yardstick used by standard research methods, these fields are deliberately attempting to produce a different kind of knowledge. It is different, rather than inherently worse (or inherently better). Second, the research is indeed overtly political. This is a feature, not a bug. It is meant to be that way. And while these fields embrace it more than others, politics is embedded in all research, grievance or no.

Critical Studies, Not Grievance Studies

In an interview with Andy Ngo in Quillette, James Lindsay commented that the label grievance was a “succinct way” to describe the fields the hoax was meant to expose. These fields are interdisciplinary and almost always end in “studies” — Queer Studies, Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, and so on. Given the number of fields and their apparent relationship to each other, the use of some general term to describe them is not unwarranted.

In that same interview, Pluckrose added that the grievance studies label was meant to connote a “power imbalance.” This is correct. Much of the research within these fields study phenomena that imply a gap in social or political power — racism, sexism, nationalism, classism, homophobia, and the differential outcomes associated with those “isms.”

So far, so good.

But there are connotations attached to the label grievance that equates these studies to a caricature: the woke student yelling their “grievances” at a college administrator who is inevitably a white, heterosexual male. “Grievance” implies a single-minded, irrational focus on getting something from “the man” who is always a racist, always a sexist.

Any serious review of critical studies scholarship would disabuse one of those ideas.

Take for example the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, a paradigmatic grievance studies outlet. First, it is edited and produced within a “grievance” context. The journal is published out of the Department of Gender Studies at Queens University in Canada. Here’s how the journal’s website describes its focus:

The Journal of Critical Race Inquiry advances Canadian and international scholarship on race and racialization, and encourages interdisciplinary approaches to critical race inquiry. Following the insights of critical race feminism, JCRI highlights analyses of interlocking systems of oppression and of the intersectionality of race with gender, sexuality, class, nationality, indigeneity, region, religion, disability, and age.

Second, it is not a top ranked journal nor a pay-to-publish journal, which makes it representative of most research found in grievance scholarship.

Looking at the articles from the most recent issue, published May 2019, the journal is clearly of interest to scholars who, given their affiliations, would be well-versed in “grievance” ideology. The authors hail from mid- and top-tier institutions: University of Toronto, McGill University, and Mount Holyoke College. Here are my quick synopses of the articles.

“Whose Values, Who’s Valued?: Race and Racialization in Québec,” by Rosalind Hampton and Michelle Hartman. The authors explored the media narratives around the accidental deaths of Naïma Rharouity, a Muslim woman, and Alain Magloire, a black man. The authors use evidence from media outlets to argue that both Rharouity and Magloire were blamed for their own deaths and that their identity was a major reason.

“Multiculturalism and Diversity in Urban Revitalization,” by Vanessa Rosa. The author examines the revitalization efforts of a public housing project in Toronto. The term diversity, the author argues, is really a way to justify changes in the housing project without addressing the underlying problems of segregation and exclusion. Diversity of incomes sounds nice, but it really means that we are bringing in wealthier people. Her evidence for this conclusion comes from interviews and an analysis of the revitalization documents.

“Cultural Wealth: Key Factors of Success for Canadian Women of Colour in a Doctoral Program,” by Sharon Leonie Brown. This study explores the factors associated with Canadian women of color enrolling and succeeding in doctoral programs. Evidence for her conclusions comes from 10 in-depth interviews with women of color who were in Canadian doctoral programs or received their PhDs. The author identified six dimensions of “cultural wealth” that contributed to their success.

If one reads these articles, one will find no shortage of criticisms to levy. For example, many critics have derided the byzantine language in grievance studies. I tend to agree with this and saw examples of sentences that were rather convoluted. Consider this one from Rosa’s paper:

I suggest that the use of diversity becomes a legitimizing tactic because diversity hinges upon the cachet of multiculturalism in Canadian society by tapping into the ideology and discourses of multiculturalism as a result of the assumed value of diversity in liberal democratic societies.

What?

However, reducing this research — exploring media narratives of race, the implementation of a revitalization program in a housing project, and strategies used by women of color to succeed in doctoral programs — to “grievance” oversimplifies it.

The research that detractors call grievance studies come from interdisciplinary fields in liberal arts that focus on historically disadvantaged groups in society. This description is more accurate and less value-laden. Going forward, I will describe these studies using the same term as Columbia Sociology Professor Musa al-Gharbi: critical studies.

Many detractors of critical studies attempt to link it to postmodernism. To be sure, students will read selections of Bourdieu and Foucault in many graduate seminars. I myself was subjected to this as a graduate student and I used Bourdieu’s classic work on social class and taste heavily in my dissertation. And it’s true that an emphasis on subjectivity courses through both postmodernism and critical studies.

But I suggest that what we see on college campuses is bigger than postmodernism. It is, at its heart, an acceptance by scholars of the post-WWII attempt in Western society to extend equal rights and privileges to all groups. It is an extension of the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movements, and the Gay Rights Movement. In pursuit of that goal, researchers have developed an epistemology, norms of discourse, teaching strategies, and cultural valuations.

It is the scholar as activist, using research to critique society and affect social change. As such, the label “critical studies” is more appropriate.

On the Lack of Rigor

As it happens, I am condemned to teach Social Research Methods at my university (I say condemned because it is not a course that faculty clamor to teach). One of the more thorough texts for teaching research methods, by W. Lawrence Neuman, now in its 7th edition, describes critical research as producing reflexive knowledge:

[R]eflexive knowledge is self-aware, value-oriented knowledge. It is principled and oriented toward an ultimate value or end in itself. We create reflexive knowledge to build on specific moral commitments, consciously reflect on the context and processes of knowledge creation, and emphasize the implications of knowledge. When we create reflexive knowledge, we ask questions such as: Why and how are we creating this knowledge? What is the relevance or importance of this knowledge, and for whom? What are its implications for other knowledge and for moral principles such as justice, truth, fairness, freedom, or equality?

This description hits upon the main themes of the type of knowledge that critical scholars are attempting to produce — value-oriented, subjective, with an awareness of how knowledge is being created and its political and social implications.

Neuman’s chapter section on “Critical Social Science” provides a basic understanding of the assumptions underlying a critical orientation. These are the main takeaways:

The purpose of research is to liberate and empower people. Therefore, the purpose of a study is to address a social issue of some kind.

The research assumes that social reality has multiple layers. By examining social life, research can uncover hidden meanings and understand how some groups generate different narratives than others.

Abduction — the process of using multiple theories to try and reflexively understand the data — is used to create explanatory critiques. This is different from the natural sciences which usually start with a theory (deduction) or research that starts with data and generates a theory (induction).

A reflexive-dialectic orientation is adopted towards knowledge and is used from a transformative perspective. Our reality is based upon both subjective and objective understanding, therefore individuals and groups see the world differently. Understanding this can provide insights for political action.

Social reality contains a moral-political dimension, and moral-political positions are unequal in advancing human freedom and empowerment — therefore research should be used to change social policy leading to greater outcomes for people.

Why am I going through the trouble of summarizing part of an undergraduate textbook?

First, the assumption that research from critical studies is less rigorous or of a lower quality assumes that critical scholars are trying to produce research that follows the scientific method everyone was taught in grade school.

The scientific method depends on a commitment to objectivity. It assumes that the knowledge process must consist of a research question, hypotheses — null and alternative — some data collected objectively, and either support or refutation. That method produces a lot of valuable research, but it’s not what critical studies scholarship is trying to do.

A second reason to examine critical studies methodology is to illustrate how ingrained this strand of research is within the social sciences. While it is not the dominant mode of knowledge production, it is common enough that various disciplines place it on equal ground with other forms of scholarship.

I have had many experiences with scholars who conduct critical research. My department has a strong critical component and most of our PhD graduates would self-identify as critical in their approach. They understand that some see their chosen mode of knowledge production as less rigorous than more standard methods. But they are also aware that they are trying to produce a different type of knowledge.

The Main Axis of Contention: The Importance of Lived Experiences

The term “lived experiences” gets special treatment from opponents of critical studies (for a humorous critique of lived experiences, I recommend watching this video from Janice Fiamengo). They argue that it is a way of privileging minorities and makes it impossible to get an objective understanding of a given phenomenon. And they are correct on both accounts. But, as should be clear by now, that is the point.

“Lived experiences” refer to firsthand experiences and the subjective meanings generated from these experiences. As per the function of critical studies, the lived experiences one needs to understand to affect social change are those of the marginalized.

While prioritizing lived experience makes it impossible to apply the traditional scientific method to critical studies research, it helps produce insight. For example, as a black male, my lived experience gives me some insight into how whites and blacks perceive racial phenomena differently.

In her (infamous) book White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo writes about how whites use the language of violence to describe anti-racist efforts. They are hurt and feel attacked by the way racial minorities — especially black folks — talk about racism and discrimination. These reactions — this fragility in the face of comments about race — is a defense, protecting whites from grappling with their white privilege.

In the long run, DiAngelo argues, white fragility becomes a type of offensive stance or bullying. Racial minorities know that bringing up their concerns will be met with white fragility. They may face social isolation or other negative sanctions. They reason that it does them more harm than good to discuss race in interracial settings. And so they stay quiet.

From many white folks’ perspective — from the reality they have constructed — this may seem like nonsense. They might point to Antifa protests they see on television, or note the symbolic gestures of Black History Month or Hispanic Heritage Month. They might point to critical studies departments themselves, loaded with minorities writing this and that. Thus, DiAngelo’s work is dismissed as so much social justice pablum.

On the other hand, I suspect that many racial minorities will see value in DiAngelo’s work. They can recall in the workplace where they have either been met with white fragility or decided to not bring up racial concerns because they know the consequences. When they read from DiAngelo that whites conceive of race as individual acts of meanness, while people of color experience race as subtle acts of racialized behavior or in group level dynamics of voting behavior and friendship networks, they can immediately connect it to their “lived experiences.”

The same logic applies to other disadvantaged groups. For example, it is often difficult for men to understand what it is like to be sexually objectified in the workplace. Critical studies, and their emphasis on the lived experience, generate important insights about this and other subjective social processes.

I cannot stress enough the importance of acknowledging that people come to different conclusions about the same phenomena. It is callous, and a bit naïve, to imagine one can assert that the black or brown person who is telling you they have experienced microaggressions is somehow “false” or “incorrect” because a deductive conclusion about objective reality can be generated from one’s couch.

There is something of an irony here. Opponents reject the notion that there is value in work of critical theorists, yet the dynamics at play are exactly what critical scholarship would predict. One of the tenets of critical studies is that our reality is based upon both subjective and objective understandings (the dialectic), and individuals and groups will interpret phenomena differently, even if they share the same objective world. Therefore, one would expect that opponents of critical studies tend to be white, male, and straight— not exclusively, but more frequently — because they have not had the experiences minorities have had.

This is not a moral indictment of white folks. I could have just as easily put the emphasis on minorities and said that racial minorities see the world differently because they have not experienced it the same way whites have. Or if I were a woman, I could argue that men cannot fully know the experiences of women as it relates to something like childbearing or being the only woman in an environment dominated by men.

The Political and the Principled

Individuals who are not in critical studies, yet spend their time critiquing critical studies research, are in a sense aggrieved themselves. In this light, their use of the label “grievance studies” looks like a type of projection.

To be clear, I am not talking about the troubling phenomena that is often found in critical contexts — deplatforming, social media pile-ons, resistance to alternative viewpoints, and so on. I am talking about the actual published research.

In particular, why would non-academics care? Why would a talking head from Fox News or a radio show single out a piece of research and discuss it? Why would Joe Rogan or Benjamin Boyce want to do a show about the hoax?

Moreover, how can someone who lacks training in producing critical research make anything but superficial comments about it? I am amazed at how sure people are when they say that critical studies research is, in so many words, “nonsense.” Reading comments from YouTube videos or Twitter threads is instructive here. How can they possibly know?

Would these same people be so sure that the conversations Neil deGrasse Tyson has with Janna Levin on “StarTalk” are “nonsense”? I enjoy listening to “StarTalk,” but I am not in a position to evaluate the credibility of their work. I’m even skeptical of my ability to evaluate the work of the guys who replaced my roof a few months ago.

A similar question applies to academics or knowledge producers who are not in critical studies. Neither Pluckrose, Lindsay, nor Boghossian are practitioners of the work they disparage. As an academic, I can say it is uncommon for someone to levy criticisms about another discipline, because we usually do not have the expertise to do so.

I separate opponents of critical studies — the grievers, as I will call them — into two categories: the political and the principled.

The political grievers object to critical studies because of the potential impacts of the scholarship emanating from those fields. Even if the research was done at the highest standards of normal science, they would still, à la critics of global warming research, reject the conclusions because it does not fit with their political ideology or material interests. If you are making money in fossil fuels, you are less inclined to explore alternative energy resources.

Many who denounce critical studies are political grievers. Research identifying more instances of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth bear with them implications. At the least, it accuses whites, men, heterosexuals, and cisgendered people as a class — though not necessarily as individuals — as being in need of change. At the most, the research suggests adoption of policies that reduce racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. People who benefit from the status quo, or who are otherwise opposed to changing it, are less inclined to explore its flaws.

Political grievers are usually outside of academia and other forms of knowledge production, and often have only a passing interest in the actual production of knowledge.

Meanwhile, the principled grievers object to critical studies because they believe the research is not of a high quality, and they worry critical studies’ practices are influencing other types of research for the worse. However, this measures the conclusions of critical studies through a lens of the traditional scientific method.

This is a much smaller group. Most people do not have the intimate understanding of research methods within social science to identify flaws in critical studies.

Although these are two distinct groups, the political and the principled overlap. Political grievers, especially if they see themselves as liberal, do not want to explicitly reject notions of diversity and multiculturalism. Instead, they adopt the language of the principled, and look to devalue the research behind these claims.

Meanwhile, the principled grievers may be genuine in their objections, but their backgrounds suggest they have not had the lived experiences to appreciate the insights of critical studies. So the research appears intellectually vacuous, as if it’s accusing people that share their demographic of odious behavior without evidence to back it up.

In other words, the political and the principled are linked by demographics. They are — in comparison to supporters of critical studies — more likely white, male, and straight.

This statement is low-lying fruit, as someone can easily say “I am not male but I oppose critical studies,” or “I am not white…” and dismiss the claim. But we’re talking about averages, not individuals.

Any random population of political and principled grievers will likely be different in race, gender, and sexuality than any population that supports critical studies. If a random sample of 10,000 self-identified Grievers and 10,000 self-identified critical studies supporters were collected, we would see demographic differences that cannot be attributed to random chance.

The Place of Politics

Grievers — both political and principled — may believe they are removing politics from academia. But this notion rests on a faulty premise. Knowledge production is always political and never more so than in the 21st century. There is too much money flowing, with governments and private foundations doling out billions of dollars to researchers. You will have to look long and hard to find groundbreaking research done without the support of a donor. And donors usually have an agenda (often a positive one, but an agenda nonetheless).

I didn’t always have this understanding of the politics of knowledge production.

I used to scoff at many of my professors’ critical stance towards knowledge production. But now I see the value in that insight. They would tell me that knowledge is not benign. They would tell me that all knowledge production is powered by self or group interests. They were right.

I see this with clarity at my current university, Old Dominion University, in Virginia. In 2015 and 2016, the Obama administration and the state of Virginia decided to pour money into cybersecurity research. Since then, the university has started numerous cybersecurity-oriented majors and research initiatives.

The overarching question guiding cybersecurity research is: How can we protect the computer networks deemed critical to national security — banks, corporations, military, government? If you choose not to do research oriented around that question, your chances of getting funding are severely limited. Given that tenure in many academic departments hinges on securing grant funding, there is a tremendous amount of pressure to bend one’s research to suit the funding opportunities.

A great deal of the knowledge cybersecurity research generates will be used to more accurately identify and surveil people online. If I were a libertarian, I may be unhappy with this line of scientific inquiry. There is little emphasis placed on local or family computer networks. If I were an old school Democrat, I might wonder why we are not protecting the little man. A lot of the research will be used to build up strong offensive cyber-capabilities of our military. If I were a non-interventionist, I may take umbrage to this. One can take this type of logic and apply to every piece of knowledge.

Many grievers — both political and principled — genuinely believe they are trying to remove politics from academia and replace it with something benign. But the production of knowledge is always political. If the politicized nature of a given path of scientific inquiry is not apparent to you, it is because you are either unaware of how it can impact policy, or it already aligns with your political sensibilities.

A Way Forward

There is, I believe, a more constructive way of approaching the research emanating from critical studies. Let me start with a recent article from the Journal of Higher Education highlighting research from the journal Sex Roles on bias in hiring:

Consistent with their hypotheses, the researchers found that scientists operated on a slew of stereotypes when asked to consider hypothetical postdoc candidates with identical qualifications but different names: apparently female or male, and white, black, Asian, or Latinx.

This is not surprising to me (or any reader, I hope). The brain looks for shortcuts when analyzing data collected from our senses, and this leads to the stereotypes we hold about people. Some are better at navigating this than others, but no one is immune. The value of the study is that it takes this obvious claim and further specifies it using standard research methods:

Candidates with women’s names were rated as more likable than men by both physicists and biologists. Physicists rated male candidates as more competent and worth hiring than female candidates, and Asian and white candidates as more competent and hireable than black and Latinx candidates. Black women and Latinx women and men candidates were rated significantly lower than all other candidates in physics, as well.

No study is perfect, and anyone with the appropriate knowledge base can find some reason to doubt the findings. However, this study is a variant of an audit study with a reasonably high response rate of 40 percent. This study, while not complicated, is one of the more rigorous one can undertake in social science. This is standard social science, not critical studies.

For the political griever, the rigor does not matter. But for the principled griever, it should. If several studies like the one in Sex Roles show similar findings, we can begin trusting those findings (by the way — they do, and we can).

The role that critical studies research has in this process is identifying relevant phenomena that more traditional social science can subject to hypothesis testing and other standards of scientific rigor. This should somewhat alleviate the concerns of people who are genuinely worried about the value of critical research, the principled grievers.

Sex Roles published one of the more snicker-friendly papers from the hoax trio — “An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant.” If that research would have been done in good faith, then their ethnography may have revealed patterns that could have been studied in more standard ways. White privilege is a phenomenon that is testable. As are microaggressions. As is toxic masculinity.

Earlier, I applauded DiAngelo’s work on white fragility. I see it as identifying some important phenomena that conforms with the lived experiences of many minorities. But I am not a critical scholar, and can see that more questions need to be answered. Just a few:

Under what conditions, exactly, do whites defend themselves from accusations of racism?

How does white fragility vary with age, gender, or education?

Does the person who is broaching the subject of race matter? Are whites more receptive to the possibility of being racist when it comes from a male or female?

These are empirical questions, and can be researched using standard social science methods. But I probably would not have thought to ask them without DiAngelo’s work.

Working Together

I do not identify as a critical scholar. Most of my research and teaching time is in the area of cybercriminology and I apply standard methods to answer my research questions. And although I teach a course on racial inequality, my graduate level course does not reflect a critical approach. In fact, students (and my colleagues, I imagine) are surprised that I take a rather heterodox approach, and look at several different explanations for racial inequality, including the biological, the cultural, and the structural.

But that does not mean I do not appreciate the important function that critical studies have in academia. I find great value in understanding the meanings that people generate as they navigate their lives, and I do not need hypothesis testing or sound statistical reasoning to find value in it.

I see these studies as being idea hubs, producing new concepts and ideas that can further advance the post-WWII goal of extending equal rights to all groups. I am happy that there is a segment of academia that is not restricted in their research questions by government funding, that is willing to ask difficult social questions, and as it were, think outside of the box.

At the same time, like the Grievance Studies hoaxers and other principled grievers, I am concerned that the ideas emanating from critical studies gain far too much currency too quickly.

Science is by nature a slow march towards deeper understandings. I am dismayed when someone coins a new term, the media picks up on it, a book is written, the book is assigned in classrooms, and suddenly the idea becomes taken for granted. I am discouraged when ideas that have merit but have not been studied enough are bandied about by politicians pandering to the electorate. This can be incredibly damaging — just as damaging as a drug being sold without proper testing.

To be sure, I believe that the lived experiences of people are valid and relevant. Toxic masculinity, microaggressions, white privilege, white fragility, and many of the other concepts that have bubbled up and out of critical studies scholarship have merit. But I also know that good social policy requires a more objective, measured, evidence-based approach.

The best way forward is not to denigrate critical studies. Instead, I suggest that the ideas emanating from these fields be taken seriously. And the best of them should lead to new lines of inquiry for scholars using more standard social science.