ABSTRACT
Empowered groups long ago established a host of stories, narratives, conventions, and understandings that today, through repetition, seem natural and true. What both types of critics tend to overlook is that majoritarians tell stories too. But the ones they tell—about merit, causation, blame, responsibility, and racial justice—do not seem to them like stories at all, but the truth. Empowered groups do not need particularity, context, and a focus on the individual. All the general rules, presumptions, and interpretations reflect them and their understandings. Empowered groups long ago inscribed their favorite narratives—ones that reflected their sense of the way things ought to be—into myth and culture. Now they profess to consult that culture, meekly and humbly, in search of standards for judging challenges to that culture.
