#colour blind

Great essay.

The majority of people who are same sex attracted do not adhere to the tenets of Queer Theory and have a variety of political and philosophical views. Some strongly object to the concept of 'queer' and oppose same-sex attraction being regarded as a transgressive, subversive political identity. They may instead want to live in a society where homosexual is recognised as something that some people are and for this to be largely unremarkable and not assumed to include any particular social status or kind of belief system.

This has been the liberal stance with regard to gay rights as well as women's rights and the rights of racial minorities. Liberalism, which foregrounds the right of all individuals to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has focused on removing barriers that prevent some demographics from achieving this and then leaving them alone to decide what they want to believe and do. This was the leading approach to securing rights for women, racial minorities, religious minorities and sexual minorities from the end of the 19th century upto the 1980s. In relation to gay rights, it is best summed up by the slogan, "Some people are gay. Get over it."

This was very successful because the individual and universal elements of liberalism appealed to intuitions of fairness commonly held by people on both the left and the right. However, beginning in the 60s, a movement of radically deconstructive postmodern thought on the left arose to disrupt it. The central belief of this was that what we consider to be knowledge is, in fact, a construct of oppressive power, perpetuated in discourses (ways of talking about things). Objective truth is unobtainable and the best we can do is theorise about what political forces caused knowledge to be constructed in this way in the first place and try to deconstruct it. This remained almost entirely within the bounds of academia where it troubled the general public very little due to being largely incomprehensible until the end of the 1980s. (I have written about this here). At this time, it was mutated into an accessible and actionable form by scholars developing a cluster of 'applied postmodern' theories that were known as postcolonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory and intersectional feminism along with the lesser known dis/ability studies and fat studies. Central to this wave of theories was identity politics.

Identity politics works very differently to liberalism in that, instead of focusing on the rights of the individual to universally granted rights and freedoms and objecting when any group is denied this, it focuses on the group specifically, rejecting both individualism and universalism. The group then becomes a collective defined by specific theorised interests which are political. People from within those groups who hold those political beliefs are presented as the authentic 'voice of colour' or 'queer voice' while those who hold different views are regarded as inauthentic and not truly a member of the group whose opinions should be considered. In relation to race, it looks like this:

These babies right here are colour blind tests designed in 2023 to be able to test for colour blindness more accurately than the old ones, which were known for causing a lot of people to mistakenly believe they weren't colour blind.

(The numbers are also laid out in a font that makes it easier to read them, so as to make sure you're not missing them due to some other cause)

Thanks to @about-that-teenie-girl2 for the poll request! Keep 'em coming, folks.

i did the Cambridge colour test and 11 of the 25 photos didnt even have a number, and a few of the others just barely had one

and i did the Farnsworth 100 hue test and i did it really well. but the best score you could get was 0, and i got 62