I guess it’s some combination of feeling like a victim with a fatalist attitude that’s the real issue.
Yes I 100% think this is the case. Simply creating “awareness” of a social problem, for example, is useless IMO because it leads to fatalism. It needs to be matched with a push to create change. I see this as a major failing of the internet activism of the 2010s, although I support its broad aims. IMO it leaned too hard on classifying and describing various structural inequalities, without really advancing a concrete theory of change. This ultimately squandered the energy it created, leading to this weird situation where much of its sharpest criticisms got swallowed the system and converted into HR platitudes.