Via Darleen in the comments, a tale of coal dust and woe: 

A few weeks ago, I attended a holiday party at a downtown Phoenix restaurant. I walked around to view the photographs on the wall. Then a photograph caught my attention.

This one here, since you ask. 

Friends said, “It’s coal miners at a pub after work.” It was a photograph of coal miners with blackened faces. I asked a Latinx and white woman for their opinion. They said it looked like coal miners at a pub after work. Then they stepped back, frowned and said it’s men in blackface.

The author, incidentally, a “poet and essayist” named Rashaad Thomas, seems determined to racially categorise every person who features in his tiny drama. And so, we’re informed, pointedly, that this person is white, and this other person is not.

I spoke with a white restaurant owner. I explained to him why the photograph was offensive.

He was white, you see. Be careful not to trip over the implications.  

Yet the photograph remained on the wall.

Feel his pain, you heathens.

My concern that the photograph of men in blackface was a threat to me and my face and voice were [sic] ignored.

For once, rather surprisingly, the world did not bend to the demands of a whiny, racially neurotic narcissist.

A business’ photograph of men with blackened faces culturally says to me, “Whites Only.” It says people like me are not welcome.

If we peel away the affectations of racial victimhood, clung to so tightly, and instead take “people like me” to denote something more specific – say, a poet of limited talent whose every other tweet mentions race, who refers, seemingly without irony, to “Amer’KKKa,” and who claims that an old photo of coal miners drinking beer threatens his wellbeing – then Mr Thomas may be onto something.

From time to time, I wonder whether I overuse the word psychodrama. And then, within days, I find another one of these:

The Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania sent out an email to parents after a photograph of a student in a white hooded robe made the rounds on social media and caused some sort of panic. The individual was in a hallway in Lower Merion High School.

Run, children! The Klan are in town! 

The student was wearing part of a monk costume from the play Romeo and Juliet, which was being used by a 9th grade class. The student appeared to be returning to the classroom.

The image, of a child dressed as a monk for a school play, was deemed “disturbing” by school administrators, and as a result of this mind-shattering trauma, “The costume will not be used in future enactments of Romeo and Juliet.”

With expectations of competent spelling:

[Professor Inoue] will lecture about “language standards that just kill our students” by subjecting them to “single standards,” which perpetuate “White language supremacy.”

You see, those composition classes you’re paying for, or that some poor sap is paying for, shouldn’t teach students how to write clearly. Instead, “compassionate” classrooms should be grounded in “dimension-based rubrics” and “labour-based contracts,” which presumably reward the length of time a student spends getting something wrong, repeatedly, irrespective of whether they actually, eventually, get it right; thereby avoiding “white racial habits of language.” It’s the path to “a socially just future,” apparently. And not, as one might suppose, somewhat narrowed hopes of employment. Because an “anti-racist” education, at a university, should ideally leave its beneficiaries sounding uneducated. With mangled conjugation, missing verbs, and saying axe instead of ask.

Professor Inoue has, of course, been mentioned here before.

Very much related, this. In which, fellow “social justice” enthusiast Dr A W Strouse informs us that correcting errors of spelling and basic grammar can “make students feel bewildered, hurt, or angry,” and should therefore be avoided. We’re also told that job applicants who, as graduates, struggle with even elementary spelling, should bristle at any acknowledgement of this shortcoming, telling potential employers – and I quote – “Fuck you.”  

Update, via the comments: 

Christopher Rufo on excusing habitual crime, in the name of “intersectionality”: 

The latest fad in criminal-justice activism is the concept of “survival crime.” The theory holds that the homeless, the poor, and people of colour commit property crimes and low-level infractions in order to secure their basic survival. Any enforcement of these laws is thus a violation of their basic human rights… Survival-crime theory argues that local governments should decriminalise [property crime, drug possession, and public nuisance] offences because vulnerable individuals have been compelled by social conditions to commit them… Over the past five years, the classification of survival crime has expanded well beyond stealing the proverbial loaf of bread. In California, for instance, Proposition 47 downgraded theft of property valued at less than $950 to a misdemeanour, meaning that the police are unlikely to pursue even habitual shoplifters and thieves. The predictable result: a state-wide rise in petty theft. 

Exempting favoured identity groups from the normal consequences of predatory and antisocial behaviour is the Hot New Fairness, apparently, at least among the enlightened. And if someone steals your phone or laptop, it would be wrong of you to protest, especially if the thief happens to be “of colour” and therefore, obviously, entitled to your stuff. Mugging, it turns out, is a form of “social justice.” We’ve been here before, of course. As when the Harvard-educated sociology professor Crystal Fleming championed the recreational looting of trainers, in bulk, and other fashion items, on grounds that the law-abiding are “hoarding resources.” 

Somewhat related, Heather Mac Donald on school indiscipline and so-called “disparate impact” policies: