Essay · March 2026
From Affirmative Action to the War on DEI: How the Liberal Fallacy Sabotages Social Justice
How do we create a truly just society? For most of my life, this question was not academic; it was a matter of survival. When I was 18, I did not believe in white privilege. Growing up poor and navigating periods of homelessness, the idea that I possessed any kind of "privilege" felt like a moral accusation that ignored my material reality. I was uninformed, and I viewed social justice initiatives as a direct threat to my own ability to survive in a world defined by artificial scarcity.
I now recognize this as a perfect example of the liberal fallacy. In a capitalist architecture engineered for competition, we are socialized to view structural interventions as the enemy rather than the coercive environments causing the harm. We mistake the effects of a burning building for the water used to put it out.
My latest work at Materialist Psychology explores this exact phenomenon. By analyzing the long-standing debate between Kimberlé Crenshaw and Thomas Sowell through the lens of Affective Socialization Theory (AST), I examine how the "War on DEI" is a predictable outcome of a system that wires us for competition instead of cooperation. When our Material Strain (MAT) is high and our environment is volatile, our nervous systems enter a survival state that makes collective agency feel impossible.
This analysis moves beyond simple polemics to provide a neuro-sociological diagnosis of our current cultural divide. We cannot achieve a level playing field by simply being "colorblind" in a damaged architecture. We must understand the material roots of our perspectives and build the social scaffolding necessary to move from individual despair to collective power.
Read the full analysis and join the research at Materialist Psychology.
Here is the full article on substack, please subscribe to support my work: From Survival to Science: Decoding the Liberal Fallacy