British academic Helen Pluckrose helps people avoid succumbing to the pressures of woke-ism through her firm Counterweight
An academic who specializes in liberal ethics has set up a 'support group for the unwoke' that is helping to push back against social-justice culture in the workplace.
Helen Pluckrose, founder of the social justice ideology advice firm Counterweight, said she helps about 100 clients a month, mostly people who are being forced out of their jobs for defying social justice dogma in schools and the workplace.
Pluckrose, who previously researched medieval religious writing, set up Counterweight last year, after the brutal police killing of George Floyd inspired Americans to combat racism and social injustice.
She said Floyd’s murder triggered a flood of emails from people who were suddenly ordered to comply with new workplace social justice standards that forbade them from having independent thoughts on racism, gender norms, and sexism.
She says her clients have included a black man who ‘didn’t want to be told what black people think and feel constantly,’ and a Muslim woman who failed a course on Islamic attitudes toward woman because she doesn’t ‘think they’re that great.’
And an academic who was bullied for using the term ‘mother’ to describe someone who gave birth.
‘People want a way to say “I don’t believe what you’re trying to get me to pretend I believe,” Pluckrose told Dailymail.com.
‘I want to be able to be able to oppose racism, or homophobia, or sexism from my own moral values and not from these particular America-central theoretical ones.’
The brutal 2020 police killing of George Floyd reignited social and racial tensions in the US
Pluckrose said 99 percent of her clients are at risk of losing their jobs or volunteer positions for refusing to acquiesce to their employers’ social justice guidelines.
Most of her clients are in Britain and the US, with others scattered mainly in Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, and France. Counterweight is based in the UK.
Through Counterweight, the married mother of one helps people facing problems related to critical social justice by providing them with resources, supporting them, and connecting them with others who are experiencing similar challenges.
The organization also educates people, and helps employers build liberal policies that don’t interfere with freedom of thought or belief.
‘We are a liberal humanist organization and then we define that broadly so that we're there for anybody who believes that it's important to fight racism and other forms of discrimination but doesn't want to be compelled to do so using what we call critical social justice theories, which are colloquially known as woke-ism,’ Pluckrose said.
‘Someone, for example, who believes racism is wrong might believe it's wrong because they're a Liberal, and they think people should be treated as individuals, or because they're Conservatives who believe that individual responsibility is important, or because they're a Muslim who believes we’re all children of God.
‘They shouldn't have to pretend to believe that racism is a particular system of power and privilege that manifests in whiteness which permeates all levels of society through people's unconscious brains and then needs to be dug out using a particular theory developed in America.’
The woke-ism trend is beginning to temper in the US, but doesn’t appear to be seeing much improvement across the pond.
Pluckrose has written a template for Black and South Asian Brits who want a list of assurances they won’t be racialized by an employer before accepting a new job.
The primary problem, she said, is that people are being called upon to pretend to believe things they don’t.
Robin DiAngelo, an anti-racist author who wrote a NYT bestseller 'White Fragility'
She referenced the approach of academic and author Robin DiAngelo, whose work suggests white people are inherently racist, and that all Black people have common experiences of racism.
DiAngelo believes that people must recognize and dismantle their inner racism, but Pluckrose takes issue with that position.
She likened it to making all employees recite the Apostles' Creed every morning, regardless of their religion.
‘This goes against beliefs in freewill, essentially, the liberal belief in free will that
