yes totally agree about the importance of critical thinking , to get to the objective reality or truth...not just subjective ‘lived experience’ or ‘all ways of knowing are valid’, or ‘2+2 = 5, because 2+2=4 is only true in Western/White ideas (said with sneering contempt) of knowledge and language..which are inherently racist, oppressive and used to up held white supremacy etc. etc.’...
I agree with the overall sentiment (and that 2+2 always = 4 unless you redefine the numbers) but I think what's being rejected is not objectivity per se, but rather an illusion of objectivity that actually serves to reinforce the dominant culture.
It may be possible, just about, to make impartial, entirely objective observations, but as soon as any explanation or interpretation is put on the observations, the risk of subjectivity creeps in. And even on the pure observation side, someone first has to make a decision on what is worth observing and that's somewhere that existing values and preconceptions influence the "objective" outcome - as explored in Invisible Women.
There was a really interesting comment by someone recently, I think on FWR, about how blind marking of maths papers improved women's performance, because although the right answer is not subjective, the assessors also make judgements about how elegant or workaday the method chosen is, and they were judging men more favourably than women.
There's also the belief that people emotionally involved in something cannot be objective, and therefore that objectivity requires "no skin in the game". I see it in the debate teams so beloved of public school education, where the ultimate aim is to be able to argue either side without preference or emotion. "This House believes that Hitler was misunderstood". But it's a privilege of the dominant culture to be so insulated from a controversial topic that you can argue either side because neither side hurts you or the people you care about.
This illusion of objectivity benefits the dominant group because their narrative and focus becomes the default, neutral position, so they believe themselves to be genuinely neutral and objective and the fact that their analysis tend to lead to conclusions that are good for the dominant group just justifies that their dominance is deserved, while the people most affected by something are the ones whose voices count the least because they cannot be dispassionate about it.
I'm sure we've all come across blokes who will helpful point out that any particular instance of sexism is "not necessarily sexist actually" with a convoluted non-sexist scenario posited to justify it. The fact that it's experienced not as a one off but as one instance of a repeating pattern makes the non-sexist explanation vanishingly unlikely but that's invisible to someone without "skin in the game", so the very fact that we experience sexism is used as a reason to dismiss our ability to consider it objectively.
So, I do believe in the ideal of objectivity as something to strive for. I think of it as a process where you continually challenge your "objective" conclusions by thinking "if I wasn't me, would I think this? What sort of person would reject this and on what grounds would they challenge it? Are those grounds valid?", and through that you uncover and challenge your own preconceptions and hopefully move closer to an objective analysis.
However, I think if you ever get to a point where you believe you have achieved objectivity, you have almost certainly lost it.