Elite. I don't think that word means what you think it means.

From Social-Justice Blowups Are Mostly About Intraelite Jockeying by Jesse Singal.  

Overall, in the absence of any evidence Sheng meant to cause offense, it’s genuinely unclear what there even is to ‘investigate’ here, or why his punishment should be anything harsher than a warning that he probably just shouldn’t do this again.

Really, the anger at Sheng is being driven mostly not by individuals who were genuinely harmed or who have a coherent case that this should be a very big deal, but by elites and elites-in-training jockeying for position and status. Both here and in other, similar blowups, people don’t appreciate this nearly enough. They often think that if there’s an attention-getting controversy over social justice, there’s some sort of big, important issue lurking at the center of it, some significant thing that needs to be addressed or resolved. If there’s excess, it’s excess in the service of virtue.

But really, a lot of the time (though certainly not always), these dumb blowups are just about intraelite squabbling, about people who are already in privileged situations in life jockeying to improve their position and take down their enemies. That’s the biggest there there. A pretense for outrage pops up, and then, some fresh meat having been dropped into the center of the arena, a bunch of hungry people rush in to see how much of those tasty calories they can score for themselves.

Though by ‘hungry’ I don’t mean, like, literally hungry. The people who are most motivated and best equipped to exploit a social-justice blowup to their advantage really are overwhelmingly likely to be from elite backgrounds. To know the right language to use, the right sort of hurt to express, and the right sort of redress to call for, you need to have had a lot of education and to have been inculcated in a certain very specific set of values and politics. 

It is quite important to always keep an open mind about the possible legitimacy of a person's argument, no matter how improbable it might seem.

It is getting hard, however, whenever you pick up a social justice vibe from a person making an argument, not to simply assume they are stupid and dismiss their position.  Singal is not wrong that this is an intraelite struggle for status.  It is just that most these people are not elite.  They are privileged tokens in sinecures trying to climb the social ladder.  They are the very opposite of anything traditionally known as elite.  

So when I hear an incipient social justice argument, I have a pavlovian response, based on experience, that the interlocutor is low IQ and low capability seeking to exploit attention for status.  I.e. not worth the time to listen to.