social justice activists: who are they and why do they do it?

a critical appraisal of the social, emotional, and ideological roots of CSJ activism

This article offers a critical examination of the individuals and motivations driving social justice activism (SJA) that is currently reshaping psychotherapy and counselling. Drawing from historical, cultural, and psychological perspectives, Colin Feltham skilfully challenges the assumption that this movement speaks for all marginalised groups and explores the deeper emotional forces behind its rise.

social justice activists: who are they and why do they do it?

We could assume that all right-minded people align with social justice claims. Put differently, it is axiomatic that a white, male group of human beings have oppressed and continue to oppress people who are not white, who have a LGBT identity, and/or who are female, disabled or neurodivergent. Social justice activists (SJA) have a rock-solid belief that this is the case, and furthermore that action must be taken to advance their cause. However, it is rarely asked who the SJAs are, whether they do in fact all share the same belief, and what drives them. Here I attempt to begin to address these questions in a necessarily brief summary.

1. Given their long history of being excluded and persecuted, many Jewish people feel aggrieved and threatened, particularly since the Holocaust in the 1930s and1940s.

2. Given the history of the transatlantic slave trade from the 1480s to the 19th century, and the subsequent racism in the Americas and Europe, it is clear that African-origin black people were oppressed.

3. The British Empire and associated European empires colonised many parts of the world, from the 15th to 20th century.

4. Wars, colonialism and diasporas have affected most parts of the world. One significant factor is Islam, which has spread in relatively recent times from the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia to the west. This has resulted in new religious and ethnic tensions, with some claiming a rise in Islamophobia.

5. Although the nature and origins of patriarchy are disputed, by some accounts it began about 12,000 years ago and is still going strong, oppressing all women but some more than others. Feminism of different kinds strives to highlight and overturn patriarchal power.

6. Many gay men were killed in the Holocaust, homosexuality was illegal in many countries and still is in some.

7. Disabled, mentally distressed and neurodivergent people are numerous and disadvantaged.

Migration has been a large factor, with an unprecedented multiculturalism in western (global north) society, that has thrown oppressed and oppressor groups together. Historical inequality cannot be denied, although the current demographic picture is much more complicated than SJAs admit. The end of the 1960s was a pivotal time for cultural revolutions, waves of which continue into the present. Immigrants to the west who have historical grievances may carry these into the present, with resentments among second generation immigrants often festering. However, those who are successful in the west tend not to be SJAs, but enjoy their prosperity. A core of ‘non-white’ malcontents forms a large part of the radical social justice movement. Jews and Asians are often among the successful. Naturally, many of the less successful either initiate political objections or go along with them. The concept of cultural Marxism is disputed or labelled antisemitic but has deep roots, especially in the Frankfurt School and its critical theory stemming from the 1920s and being boosted in the 1960s. This topic is, however, surrounded by taboos.

It looks as if most of those involved in the CSJ movement are driven by emotions. The very sense of chronic injustice itself can fuel a mixture of resentment, envy, and hatred. But there is also a feeling of hurt and hypersensitivity; this is associated by some with the ‘bleeding heart liberal’, the ‘snowflake’ or ‘pathological altruism’ (Oakley et al., 2012). The holders of such feelings seem sincere but appear odd when they claim to be oppressed by alleged microaggressions. ‘Lived experiences’ of psychological hurt then look like exaggerated bids for attention and compensation. Many of those writing in Winter and Charura (2023), a text purporting to represent social justice in psychotherapy, appear disproportionately emotional and lacking in judgement, might belong in this category. Academic activists in this assembly are well-paid, respected members of society, with a meaningful stake in psychotherapy, but it isn’t enough. Not satisfied with their own middle-class and income privileges, they want something more; as in the subtitle of this book, they wish to change the contents of their profession and in the process to arouse heightened concern, guilt, and compensatory action in those who do not share their views.

This is the relatively genteel side of social justice activism. John Amaechi, gay ex-basketball player turned psychologist, has been uncritically promoted by the BBC on its website, explicating white privilege and antiracism (Amaechi, 2020). Activist sociologists like Kehinde Andrews (2024) want to take things much further, first by designating white people as psychotic, then by advocating anti-white and anti-capitalist revolution. Arguably, SJAs straddle a spectrum from moderately peeved to borderline terrorist. In 2021 Aruna Khilanani, a Pakistani-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst gave a talk at the Yale School of Medicine titled ‘The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind’. In it, she said she had ‘fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any White person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step’ (Castronuovo, 2021). Khilanani was widely condemned but claimed that her words were simply metaphor and hyperbole. Taleb Jawad Al-Abdulmohsen, a Saudi Arabian immigrant to Germany, killed six people and injured 300 in a car attack in Magdeburg in 2024. He was a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. Confusion surrounded his claims to be an ex-Muslim and anti-Islamist.

The early British feminists, the Suffragettes, organised a bombing campaign between 1912 and 1914 in which four people were killed and 24 injured. In 1967 Valerie Solanas published her S.C.U.M. manifesto, said to stand for ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’. Solanas objected, insisting that it was not an acronym, although the expanded term appeared in a Village Voice ad she had written in 1967. She was advocating violence against men. Solanas shot Andy Warhol and Mario Amaya, both gay men, in 1968. Not all feminism is misandrist but much of it is. Despite many social and legal advances, some feminists are never satisfied. Along with black activists, they achieve equal opportunities but demand more changes economically, politically, and linguistically. Recently, LGB activists have been relatively quiet as transgender activism has increased. In 2021, the CEO of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, a transwoman called Mridul Wadhwa, said that ‘sexual violence can happen to bigoted people too’ and that some rape victims hold ‘unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature’ (McCall & Stalker, 2024). Wadhwa, of Indian origin, also raised accusations of racism when criticised for making rape victims uncomfortable, as if forcing these women to speak in therapy in only trans-positive terms.

These examples tell us that some SJAs are capable of anything from genteel academic critique of their opponents, and bitter sniping, to hateful rhetoric, advocating revolution, violence, and murder. Some of these are extreme examples and none tell us how critical social justice (CSJ) is organised and carried out. Certainly since the 1960s all such ‘liberation’ movements have been highly active, and many are associated with the New Left. The alleged, unproven ‘long march through the institutions’ of cultural Marxism has coincided with the rise of political correctness in the 1980s and of ‘wokeness’ in the 2010s. Majorities of those in the creative industries and media, the civil service, publishing, early education and academia have been identified as politically to the left. See Kaufmann (2021) for evidence of extreme political skew in universities, and remember that most psychotherapy training today is university-credentialled.

At the time of the BLM protests at the death of George Floyd in 2020, Black Lives Matter (BLM) had openly Marxist credentials and aims. At the same time Antifa was very active, and its spokespeople took care to avoid open leadership or centralisation, preferring to call on local activists to disrupt speeches and activities deemed unacceptably ‘far-right’ (Bray, 2017). University campuses have been major sites of protest against any academic daring to espouse traditional causes and right-wing politics. Many conservative academics have been hounded from their jobs, most notably the clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson from the University of Toronto. But most personnel and students in psychotherapy training learned to remain silent if their views on social justice, Brexit, Trump, BLM, and other non-left wing groups were deemed unacceptable.

It is tempting to imagine that a unified far-left movement is headquartered somewhere funded by the billionaire George Soros, but we have no focused, substantial evidence for this. The CSJ movement remains a shadowy force. What we can say is that it’s influence and demands are ever escalating and its cultural revolutionary direction - via attacks on white men, Christianity, and capitalism - is ultimately towards a totalitarian, borderless one-world order. Those who push CSJ from the genteel end are soft-hearted ‘useful idiots’; an isolated early occurrence of this phrase can be found in ’Party Spirit in France’, published in The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art (London, England), 1864). The phrase designates a naive or credulous person who can be manipulated or exploited to advance a cause or political agenda. They know not what they do but feel strongly that they are on the right side of history fighting for the ‘oppressed’. Some of them, in adolescent mode, appear bitterly anti-authoritarian against their phantom of a far-right, and may have personal problems with dictatorial fathers and strong leaders. But there is an angry brigade who manipulatively steer events, eager to disrupt ‘heteronormative, colonialist, racist, patriarchal capitalism’ by ‘dismantling the master’s house’.

Two hopes exist for the downfall of this movement. One is that sane, rational traditionalists guided by a neo-Darwinian realism will better articulate the dangers involved and offer forceful resistance. The other hope is that the inherent contradictions of the CSJ movement will cause its collapse. Antiracist fury tries to ignore the voices of successful, middle-class non-whites, who SJAs usually dismiss as coconuts or Uncle Toms, but some pushback is evident. Women who spurn a feminist identity are plentiful, yet they are ignored or vilified by radical feminists. Conservative and ‘anti-woke’ gay men like Douglas Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos, Dave Rubin, Peter Thiel and others challenge the myth that all LGBT people are leftist. The LGBT community has been torn apart by the pro-transgender versus gender critical factions. Jews and Muslims have a longstanding enmity, made more acute in recent times. Black activist Jesse Jackson referred to New York as ‘hymietown’ (a slur for Jewish) in 1984, and the Labour Party is exposed as riddled with antisemitism. Islam contains systemic patriarchal attitudes, sexism and homophobia, not to mention anti-Christianity, in its darker corners. Class hatred of working-class white men is obvious among SJAs, especially as regards Brexit, anti-immigration sentiments and anti-multiculturalism (a critical stance toward the idea that cultural diversity should be celebrated or institutionalised. It argues that multicultural policies can fragment social cohesion, suppress open dialogue, or impose identity politics over shared values or individual rights). Older people with long memories are disfavoured, while impressionable young people are recruited to the CSJ cause.

CSJ has captured professions like teaching, social work and psychotherapy, sometimes pretending to be simply promoting kindness and anti-discriminatory practice. Docile students unwilling or unable to apply critical thinking have largely swallowed this propaganda for the time being. It is very clear what’s being done in the name of social justice. It’s clearly anti-democratic in its certitude and its shutting down of debate and free speech. Although it’s not always clear who its champions are, its tactics are transparent, and it should be very clear that its endgame is the totalitarian silencing of dissent. When CSJ psychotherapists claim that their doctrines are nothing but the axiomatic way forward, they must be exposed. Counselling and psychotherapy have traditionally offered an oasis for the free expression of all thoughts and feelings. If this freedom is surrendered to the intolerant dogma of social justice, our society, our western civilisation, is in terminal trouble.

I shall return to a closer examination of Winter and Charura (2023) in future.

afterthought: Sue Parker Hall

This overview of social justice activism and its ideological underpinnings provides a vital and thought provoking perspective on the psychological, political, and historical forces shaping contemporary psychotherapy. But it’s worth pausing to consider the emotional atmosphere in which this movement thrives. What makes it so attractive to many young therapists and students is not simply the politics, but the promise of certainty, belonging, and moral purpose in an increasingly complex and anxious world. In this sense, social justice functions not just as an ideology, but as a psychological defence against any number of uncomfortable feelings for example, ambiguity, grief, shame and loss and uncomfortable existential realities.

For those receiving the rhetoric, the impact is more silencing than liberating. In a profession devoted to reflection and exploration, it’s sobering to find so many colleagues afraid to speak their minds, retreating into self-censorship for fear of course failure or reputational damage. The traditional ethos of ‘processing together’ has been replaced in many training rooms and professional spaces by linguistic adaptation, anxious conformity and an atmosphere of moral surveillance.

Yet all is not lost. The backlash, if slow, is growing; driven not by reactionary hatred, but by a deep desire to preserve what is best in the therapeutic tradition: open inquiry, emotional honesty, and relational depth. Those of us who resist ideological capture are not extremists, we are professionals who still believe in the value of uncomfortable truth, of respectful disagreement, and of the messy, transformative process that real dialogue requires.

If psychotherapy and counselling are to survive as something more than a tool of political re-education, it must reassert its commitment to psychological freedom. The alternative is not justice but dogma. And that, as history repeatedly shows, serves no one in the end.

References

Amaechi, J. (2020) Non-racist vs anti-racist: what’s the difference? London: BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zs9n2v4

Andrews, K. (2024) The Psychosis of Whiteness: Surviving the Insanity of Racism. London: Penguin.

Bray, M. (2017) Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. New York: Melville House Publishing.

Castronuovo, C. (2021) Psychiatrist says remarks to Yale audience about killing white people were hyperbole. The Hill, 10 June.

Kaufmann, E. (2021) Academic freedom in crisis. Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

Academic Freedom in Crisis

McCall, M. & Stalker, F. (2024) Charity boss apologises to rape survivors over rape centre failings. BBC Scotland News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj310jvzpd8o

Oakley, B., Knafo, A., Madhavan, G. & Wilson, D. S. (2012) Pathological Altruism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Solanas, V. (1967) SCUM Manifesto. New York: Olympia Press.

Winter, L. A. & Charura, D. (2023) Handbook of Social Justice in Psychological Therapies: Power, Politics, Change. London: Sage.