Jason D. Hill, professor of philosophy and Honors Distinguished Faculty at DePaul University in Chicago, is the author of five books, including We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People (2018) and his forthcoming book to be released later this year, What Do White Americans Owe Black People: Racial Justice in the Age of Post Oppression. In this episode, Hill discusses with Julian Vigo the problems of victim culture and the managerial class of liberal elites which denies people the ability to navigate their way through the world assuming that certain groups of people are necessarily handicapped, unable to speak for themselves. Focussing on the problems of cultural relativism, the decolonisation of university courses, cancel culture, and identity politics, Hill locates the ways in which the liberal left puts reason and logic under attack by positing the primacy of the individual’s feelings. In this phase of late stage capitalism, he notes how subjectivities need to be maintained and persistently curated, echoed and validated in the name of one’s victimhood, a posture claimed most often by those who are the most privileged individuals latching onto signifiers of oppression so as not to have to address actual oppression.
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