Professor Rowe admits that no evidence of “overt prejudice” against women and minorities has been found, but he nonetheless hopes to inflict discomfort on those deemed sufficiently pale. As if, in itself, this would be some kind of triumph. “We are mindful that previous attempts at addressing such imbalances have not been successful,” says the professor. And so, rather than revisiting his own egalitarian assumptions regarding the distribution of interest, aptitude, and talent, he and his team will be searching for witches and racial ectoplasm.

It’s not unreasonable to suppose that the role of “reverse mentor” will attract people already sympathetic to the hokum being peddled – people intrigued by the personal leverage it affords, and who may feel an ideological obligation to unearth some damning but invisible sin, fairly or otherwise, if only to validate their own conceits. Which is to say, the so-called mentors – who’ve agreed to participate in a project that by definition assumes white guilt regardless of evidence or lack thereof – seem more likely to be racially bigoted than any random member of staff.

I suppose the above is what happens when otherwise clever people are encouraged to cultivate worldviews that depart from reality, often quite dramatically, but which nonetheless convey in-group status, which they choose to value more. The implication that referring to, say, a populated outpost on the Moon as a colony or a settlement will somehow be “harmful,” resulting in distress, or the raping and pillaging of all that indigenous lunar dust, is somewhat comical and contrived; but evidently that doesn’t matter. What matters is letting your peers know just how woke, and therefore statusful, you are, at least compared to the heathen rabble. 

Mr Guzmán, whose tweet appears below, describes himself as “a marginalised writer,” and an “artist and influencer,” thereby signalling to lower beings both his suffering and his modesty.