The out-of-hospital birth community tends to be full of privileged white women. Most of them cannot support themselves with their work; they rely on spouses to pay their way. Most of them are also feminist, and advocates and allies of disadvantaged communities.

Most of them, however, do not participate in these disadvantaged communities because... well, they're privileged white women.

The past two years have engendered a truly perverse reckoning. Turns out woker-than-thou is a bloodsport.

- An entire graduating class has rendered themselves unhireable because they demanded changes of wokeness. These are all white women, being taught by white women. They forced out three faculty members, but the one they most wanted to force out remains because no one else will do her job for as little money as she makes.

- A minority-focused collective imploded because it didn't hire enough minorities. The founder of the collective was ejected from her professional membership because she did not resign before everyone quit. The professional membership, meanwhile, elected to disband itself because it lacked minority representation.

- Another professional organization asked its leader to resign because she wasn't a minority. No one else has stepped up to lead it (minority or otherwise) thus it has disbanded.

- Still another organization insisted on changes to increase minority participation without having any minority members to participate. Several people were forced to resign because they were not minorities. We are not a large company? But we represent double-digit percentages of the minority involvement in the community and our people sent out an open letter telling everyone to calm the fuck down, not to put too fine a point on it. However, the leadership of that organization doubled down, causing everyone else to resign.

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This is, fundamentally, what white guilt looks like: you signal your superiority by espousing concern for the less privileged, but if they aren't around, the only people you can signal to are those exactly like you. Note that it doesn't benefit the less privileged in the first place, nor is there any remedy: when your virtue measurement metric is "zeal" there is no one with the moral standing to put a stop to it other than zealots, and a reduction in zealotry is capitulation.

We've long since decided to hunker down and let it burn out. It is, fundamentally, a cancer of conscience and the only thing you can do is not get any on you. We dealt with it early and often and in retrospect, got out lucky.

But the minority representation in privileged white circles is not going to increase, which is not going to give the woker-than-thous an opportunity to discover the flaws in their approach, which is not going to temper their approach.

And so long as you can demand changes of others rather than changes of yourself, your discomfort at the very real unfairness of the situation can be assuaged without actually fixing anything.

People act like you can get rid of the outgroup, but you can't. It's baked into human nature. There will always be an outgroup, an "othered" group that you perceive as dangerous and whose motivations seem malicious or unknowable, unless maybe if you practice metta every day or something.

A lot of wokeness seems to be shifting who the outgroup is, rather than actually making meaningful systemic changes.