I am saying I don't know enough about the relevant history to know whether you're right or not... "It is widely agreed that the history of the social justice movement can be traced back to a Maoist movement among students in the United States in the late 1960s" ...
Eh, it's not likely that you would find overt Maoism among radical U.S. students. Such attitudes were common in Western Europe however, and by all evidence they filtered over in a derivative form. Even in a possible world where your wording was correct, however, it would simply be too controversial and 'non-NPOV' for Wikipedia to include. Wikipedia is not faultless; it's a product of writing-by-commitee and this shows in any politically contentious article.
I am saying I don't know enough about the relevant history to know whether you're right or not
This is not that surprising to me. It often happens that acquiring high-quality, reliable evidence is just too expensive to bother, and thus one must stop short of fully-assured knowledge. However, in this case, a simple application of Occam's Razor would tell you that if Maoist-influenced attitudes were nearly ubiquitous among Marxist student protesters from the 1960s onwards, and these Marxist protesters are responsible for much of the popularization of Marxism in Western countries since then (especially in academic environments, as opposed to e.g. labor unions!), and modern SJ theorizing is heavily reliant on Marxist theory and was gradually developed in the relevant time period, maybe this makes my earlier claim at least plausible if not overly likely. If something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck, we generally assume it's a duck, not a zebra.
it's not likely [...]
Just to be clear, that was intended as an example of the sort of thing one might expect to find, not a claim about what specific thing ought to be there.
Wikipedia is not faultless
Very true indeed, which is why thought you might like to suggest some better sources. (Which so far you have not done, preferring to rely on repeated assertions that what you say is uncontroversial.)
Wikipedia is usually not so faulty as to completely omit any mention of what is in fact the expert consensus about the topic of a given article. Still, it c...
The lead article on everydayfeminism.com on March 25:
3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism
(The link from "decolonization" is to "Decolonization is not a metaphor", to make it clear s/he means actually giving the land back to the Native Americans.)
I regularly see people who describe how social justice activists act accused of setting up a straw man. This article show that the bias of some SJWs against reason is impossible to strawman. The author argues at length that rationality is bad, and that justice arguments shouldn't be rational or be defended rationally. Ze is, or was, confused about what "rationality" means, but clearly now means it to include reason-based argumentation.
This isn't just some wacko's blog; it was chosen as the headline article for the website. I had to click around to a few other articles to make sure it wasn't a parody site.
But it isn't just a sign of how irrational the social justice movement is—it has clues to how it got that way.
The author came to hate "rationality" because s/he thought "rationality" meant "conventionality".
S/he didn't realize that white cis people don't use rationality either to understand their gender and social role. These are cultural values that parents deliberately program in before a child can become rational and come up with their own version.
Making my own inferences, I'd guess that
1. The author has had many unpleasant social experiences because of zis refusal to adopt a gender, and
2. The author is not a good reasoner, and while arguing over these experiences, often makes bad arguments, and gets told ze is irrational, and
3. The author is unable to distinguish discomfort with zis gender non-choice, from resistance to zis bad ideas, as having separate causes.
The 3 reasons are:
1. Being Rational Has No Inherent Value
2. Rationalism Is a Tool Made to Hurt Us
3. We Are Enough Without Rationalism
Also see the same site's recent article "4 Reasons Demanding ‘Objectivity’ in Social Justice Debates Can Be Oppressive".
ADDED, since I'm 50 karma in the hole anyway:
Ironically, today's "social justice" program demands a radical rationalism.
Social justice used to be a rationalist program on its surface, pointing out the irrationality of prejudice and the illogic in narratives used to justify oppression. But as society adjusted its pre-judgements closer to targets that were rational but still unequal, e.g., from "Women can't do engineering" to "Most women don't want to do engineering", the emphasis switched from being rational about our beliefs to irrationally assuming equality of everyone and everything, not just as a default starting point, but as a mandated endpoint. (Historically, this was tied to an influx of reality-denying continental philosophy into social activism in the 1960s.)
De-emphasizing rationality on its surface requires a more radical rationalism for its practical implementation. Changing social conventions has a cost. When we extend social justice beyond respect for difference that people have no choice over, such as race or sex, to roles that they choose, such as religion or gender, the justification for allowing everyone to defy any particular social convention must be a rational cost-benefit assessment. Many people enjoy the ritual interactions specified by social roles; they are part of their identities and one of their terminal values. A demand to give up these values must fall back onto consequentialist arguments.
(Is constant social pressure on the person doing the defying more important than thousands of irritations to the people who don't know how to deal with zim, and who feel their own identities inhibited in zis presence? I don't know. It's torture vs. dust specks.)
The new social justice program is ultimately to strip from human consciousness all shortcuts, biases, prejudices, pre-computations, and priors. This requires making each individual a rational consequentialist capable of reasoning zer way from every situation to a rational behavior. To know how to use social roles, people require either social heuristics (which will inevitably oppress somebody), or radical ends-based rationality. This is particularly true when people are allowed to unilaterally opt in or out of social roles, so that every situation has a mix of people demanding to be treated differently.
(It isn't clear whether priors are permissible in this rationality.)
Even the oppressed classes must be ideal rationalists (Homo economicus). If women are still allowed to prefer not to be computer programmers, or men are allowed to prefer not to raise children, a free market will make mandated equality cause, rather than alleviate, injustice.
Alternately, we could possibly say that social justice doesn't require radical rationality, provided that we allow no social roles (a commitment to radical individuality). This also imposes a cost in so far as social roles serve to increase social utility.