As the Brits would say, “Sir, this is too damn much!” (Well, I don’t know if they’d say that, but it sounds like something they’d say.) And it shows, as reader Pyers said when he sent me the link, “You just cannot, I repeat cannot, make this up….” Indeed.
According to Laura Predergast at today’s Spectator and Colin Cortbus at The Tab, a student organization at Goldsmith’s, a unit of the University of London, banned white people (as well as males) from an anti-racism event held yesterday. As The Tab reports, the event was aimed at “’challenging the white-centric culture of occupations’, ‘diversifying our curriculum’ and building a ‘cross-campus campaign that puts liberation at the heart of the movement’”.
Here’s a FB post from Bahar Mustafa, Welfare and Diversity Officer of Goldsmith’s Student Union (“BME” stands for “Black and Minority Ethnic”):
I love the patronizing “Don’t worry lads we will give you and allies things to do 🙂 “. Yes, something other than participating in the event. Imagine if it were held by Muslim men, for example, and said, “Don’t worry ladies and kaffirs, we will give you and allies things to do. :-)” Doesn’t sound so good that way, does it?
This isn’t Mustafa’s first go-round promulgating racism and sexism. In February, Prendergast reported that
Last week, one faction of the union hosted a screening of the film Dear White People and advertised it as being ‘for BME students’.. . . [A] poster specifies that this screening is for students of ‘African, Caribbean, Arab, Asian and South American ethnic origin’. The union’s welfare and diversity officer and education officer both reiterated this message on Facebook and Twitter, then stated that before the screening, there was a BME ONLY social happening at Cafe Natura.
This woman is clearly an authoritarian.
The Tab reports:
A senior Student Union society president, speaking on condition of anonymity, slammed the event and the Track record of Bahar Mustafa.
Speaking anonymously, they said: “For Bahar to have the nerve to write this is patronising beyond belief.
“She (if that is her preferred gender pronoun) has made it very difficult for white cis males on campus who feel like they can’t say anything for fear of retribution. the irony that she (or they) think that they are diversifying the student community in the name of feminism and multiculturalism is laughable.”
Goldsmith’s SU is clearly wonky. In 2014 the student assembly rejected a proposal to “commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day and genocide.” Why?:
Education officer Sarah El-alfy urged students to vote against the proposal, rejecting it as “eurocentric”.
. . . One student added: “The motion would force people to remember things they may not want to remember.”
Another suggested she couldn’t commemorate the Holocaust because she thought the Union was explicitly “anti-Zionist”.
One of the students present said the proposal should be voted against as it would affect the Union’s stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
. . . One student named T. Walpole, present at the Assembly, objected: “Our union is anti-Zionist.”
They added: “This is a colonialist motion. Vote it down.
“White people should not be proposing motions to condemn genocides without a lot of thought. This does not have that thought.”
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have any objections to a BME Society, and I suppose if they want to hold events only for members, and bar others, then that would also be technically okay if other organizations were allowed to do the same. But it all seems deeply counterproductive if their goal is really to foster a diverse curriculum. To do that, they’ll have to have conversations with men and non-BME people. And really, banning white people from an anti-racism campaign? Did Martin Luther King ban white people from his rallies?
Finally, what’s the point of banning men from a BME anti-racism event? It’s about racism, not sexism, and even if it were about sexism, shouldn’t males get to hear what’s said?
If these young people really want to change society, they’ll have to get out of their echo chambers at some point and engage the people whose views they want to change. That, after all, is what they’ll encounter when they leave university.
Clearly this kind of identity-politics virus has crossed the pond. I’m just not sure in which direction.
How about pinkos?
“White people banned from an ‘anti-racist’ event” — I just love it when the real world tops The Onion.
I’m not sure why this is labeled news. It’s been happening for a long time. It was happening at my college in 1970.
This is a university approved student organization. But maybe times were ‘different’ then too?
The answer will probably make me groan, but what are non-binary people?
Um… those with more than two fingers!
My first thought was that non-binary people meant those who are bi-racial. But a quick websearch indicates that non-binary people are those who don’t identify themselves as heterosexual male/heterosexual female.
Binary is so last week.
The alphabet keeps growing (LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM)
This is not the Onion.
http://www.wesleyan.edu/reslife/housing/program/open_house.htm
ZOMG!!
Looking for pronunciation clues… Is it pure coincidence that the only vowel in there makes the syllable ‘FAG’?
Wait, wait, your bedroom kinks are now considered your sexuality? Or are the advertising that they have a dungeon available to residents?
Now I know what I need to be looking for in my next apartment! A dungeon!
But weren’t you after a penthouse apartment?
/@
Who says a dungeon has to be in the basement?
People who built castles, mostly. 😀
/@
Insane! Doesn’t that pretty much cover everyone?
Non-binary people are those that identify as something other than strictly male or female. I’m not sure in this context just who it applies to though – do you have to accept gender is a continum, or actually have to identify as something other than cis-male or cis-female? (Comfortable in skin.)
Whatever, I’m not sure this is a good way to go about ensuring society becomes more inclusive.
I wonder what happens if you are non binary and white or if you look white but you have one non white parent. Do they hold a colour card up to and determine if you’re too white to attend?
“You must be this dark to attend.”
Like at the carnival ride: “This tall to ride”. How about “this bigoted to speak”?
Hahaha. +1
On a social justice website that I used to comment on, a white woman with red hair accused the author of an article on Ferguson of “whitesplaining”. She told the author to STFU and leave black issues to black people, such as herself.
See, this very white redhead claimed to be black, and expected us to defer to her, even though she looked whiter than the driven snow. Of course, it never occurred to her that the author of the article might also identify as black.
Oh yeah, she accused me of being a racist sh*tlord for pointing this out.
Sorry…what?! A white redhead claimed she was black? Honestly this shit is getting embarrassing.
Considering the number of people here who have at least visited SJW forums(and often been regulars) and now don’t go anywhere near them, I sometimes imagine the whole movement devouring itself from the inside, whittling away members who don’t meet their criteria until there’s only one SJW left, a supernaturally charmless uber-prig with a sense of moral superiority you can see from space.
“a supernaturally charmless uber-prig with a sense of moral superiority you can see from space.”
You win the Internets for that one!
+ 2
😀
Now why does that remind me of certain country in the south of Africa a few decades ago?
So I can attend this event if I put on some women’s clothing (wouldn’t this group think it sexist to stereotype clothing?) and deny that I’m a man and deny I’m a woman. Perhaps I can go as I normally dress if I claim I’m wearing “non-binary” clothes.
Just bring your Orwellian approved certificate of social oppression and tell them you definitely hate the Judean Popular People’s Front.
You must mean the People’s Front of Judea.
splitters
So we can conjugate then? Hawt.
If that were sincere, yes.
/@
I was thinking :
So, as a person who self-identifies as Irish, that should be fine for me.
I think I’ll be attending. I can borrow a goat mask and posing pouch from a friend (he keeps them by the door for greeting the Mormons), so all I need is a glue on 3inch Prince Albert and I should be a shoe-in.
I there was I thinking it meant “Black and Middle Eastern” …
/@
Wear the cat head;-)
Wear the cat head and nothing else and become your own minority. Then you could order Mustafa (too white anyway) out of her own meeting.
Thanks for the definitions folks.
Doesn’t make me groan too much I guess. Although the weird need to categorize and stress differences rather than similarities does. But I guess that’s intrinsic to identity politics.
Indeed. Although Mustafa & Co. probably think their behavior is radically progressive, it’s precisely the opposite. It’s only going to reinforce the tribalism involved. It is not a way forward.
Not only that, but guilt by (extremely superficial) association is a very immature concept. By all means, call out those who deserve to be called out, but “visiting the sins of the fathers upon their descendants” is regressive even by New Testament standards.
Non binary means that one can identify as anything they want, and it can change from day to day. All without changing one’s appearance. So if someone looks like Ahnold Schwarzenegger, and xie identifies as a biological female, xie must be treated as such, otherwise xie is being oppressed.
Ramen to your last sentence.
Thanks for the clarification. I was wondering what ‘binary people’ were too.
Reading through those posts, I suppose it was ok for white women to attend, but is that right? What about (some) Italians or Spaniards? are they the right shade of brown? How about people from Japan or Korea? This variety of political correctness is so confusing! I no longer which ethnicity or gender I should tolerate!
“I suppose it was ok for white women to attend”
That’s not how I read it. The “and/or” introduces ambiguity, however.
Only BME female and BME nonbinary allowed, I thought.
/@
I got the impression no white women too, however you identify yourself re sexuality.
I thought the same hence the conundrum I proposed where one could be a non binary white person. What then?
You’d be assumed to be a white octal person. A cephalopod.
I’m a Komodo dragon, so I guess I’m in.
As a cuttle fish that can change colours I’m probably in too. If they don’t provide me a nice salt water tank then they are oppressive!
Amen!
From Nonbinary.org (which you could assume would be definitive):
Even as the supportive (I hope) father of a trans daughter (a Miss/she), and (I’d like to think) an I LGBT ally, I find it hard to know when I’m walking on eggshells.
/@
* link : http://nonbinary.org/wiki/Nonbinary
** “an
ILGBT ally”Oh is that what ‘cis’ means. I only knew it as a term for a configuration of isomers in chemistry (the alternative form being trans).
“cis” =/= “comfortable in skin”. It’s just used in contrast with “trans”, for folks whose gender identity and biological (genetic) sex align.
/@
[song]There were three in the bed and the little one said/
Roll over ….
Man, I hadn’t thought of that song in decades!! Thanks for the Ohrwurm, Aidan…
“Free Speech does not equate to freedom from accountability” … so she says –
http://www.goldsmithssu.org/blogs/blog/Bahar%20Mustafa/2015/02/23/Free-Speech-does-not-equate-to-freedom-from-accountability/
There is a link to that Guardian letter in February –
“As feminists, we do not agree that freedom of speech is freedom to speak unaccountably. We do not agree that academics and commentators are victimised or censored by trans women, sex workers or survivors of sexual and domestic violence objecting to “debates” which rehearse hateful misrepresentations about their lives.”
“…..We do not agree that academics and commentators are victimised or censored by trans women, sex workers or survivors of sexual and domestic violence objecting to “debates” which rehearse hateful misrepresentations about their lives.”
Does anyone know what this means?
I think it means: ‘we do not think that academics or commentators (maybe editorial writers –> blog commentators, etc.) are being censored if they are blocked from expressing views that misrepresent the lives of repressed women’.
But what is at hand here is that some people are being blocked from even hearing about the lives and concerns of marginalized people.
@Mal,
Freely translated: “Waaaaah! Want cookie *NOW*! Mommy bad!”
” banned from anti-racism event.”
What a time to be alive.
Alive?!? I’m a zombie, you just triggered me.
OUTRAGE! #undeadpeoplematter
Silly Transvivist, brains are for eating, not for thinking with.
Sub
This sounds very much like they are trying to get the university to pay attention to a student request and get the university to change the curriculum. To do that, you want to show that your cause is popular and has a lot of student body support…and so insisting that some otherwise supportive students stay away is really shooting your own cause in the foot. As Jerry says, its perfectly okay to have a private club with limited membership if that’s what you want, but I would think that if your goal is social activism, you would want to show the administration the breadth of support for your cause, not artificially neck it down.
***
Now for two requests for information:
I’m assuming a ‘binary’ person is a non-transgender person, but if I’m wrong, someone please correct me. I’ve never heard that term before.
Also, can someone explain to me the part about “’challenging the white-centric culture of occupations.’” Are they talking about colonialist occupation? Because I keep thinking they are saying that the idea of having a career (i.e., occupation) is a white idea and we should build a culture where nobody has one.
In this context, I assumed colonialism and all that that applies. Non-binary is explained above #3.
Yep I was writing the same time others were. Thanks.
Another term is ‘cis’, meaning XY male. Just being one puts me into a category where my views are tainted even though I think I am a feminist bleeding heart liberal.
Or XX female.
It’s an adjective, not a noun.
I’m not sure where that leaves XYY males or XX people with androgen insensitivity syndrome.
The taxonomy is a minefield compared to “atheist” v. “agnostic”!
/@
It always brings a bit of humor to mind: cis-trans isomerism? Are you calling me a boat or a chair?
I’ll always remember in General Biochem @ Rutgers, Theo van Es, who taught the carbohydrate section and was South African, in describing the conformers, leaning over the desk saying “…which, with childlike simplicity, are called Boat and Chair.”
They want occupations to be open to non-whites?
Also: don’t invite me, and then tell I can’t come kthx. Talk about triggers.
For occupation – I think she more means Occupy Wall Street style protests.
And here I thought BME stood for BioMedical Eng….
and btw: What is “Minority Ethnic”?? You have to be a Minority and british? Or non british? Wow this is complicated.
Weeell …… 20% of the world’s population is Chinese, and worldwide white is a shrinking minority, so they’re going to have to find some new terms for the future. I hope pointing that out doesn’t label me a NAZI sympathizer or something.
This issue came up at Berkeley a bunch of years back, because the student population that self-identified as Asian became larger than the population identifying as white (to be clear, neither is or was a true majority as neither was 50%+1). Do Asian groups still get to keep the benefits that go along with being a minority? Do white campus groups get minority benefits now? My memory is hazy but I believe in that case everyone just decided to keep lumping the Asian student groups in the minority category due to the historical and sociopolitical advantages whites have had in the US.
Incidentally, the same ‘reverse’ is true for women on US campuses, but much more broadly than just UC Berkeley. AFAIK, women are now a true majority on most US University campuses. I don’t think anyone is really upset or wringing their hands over whether to change how we speak about privilege though. Except for some of the more die-hard misogynists on the fringe, I don’t think anyone has a problem putting women in the same category as minorities due to the historical and sociopolitical advantages given to men (intentionally in the past, maybe unintentionally now).
I would disagree. Equal opportunity is essential for everyone. But once you start twisting the playing field, for one group after another (especially for ‘historic ‘ issues), it becomes a madhouse of special pleading.
It is then anything BUT fair.
I did not mean to start a political discussion over affirmative action or similar subjects. Suffice to say that the situation Heather envisions has already happened, and is happening, on campuses across the US. Universities are probably dealing with it in a variety of different ways, and whether you or I agree with a particular University’s way is probably a topic best left to another thread.
I remember when I had to explain “minority” to my Indonesian friend of Indonesian and Chinese background. She couldn’t understand how Chinese were a minority when there were so many Chinese people in the world. 🙂
In NZ there are 1.46 female university graduates for every 1.00 male graduate these days – men are definitely a minority. Our difference is currently the biggest in the world.
Not according to http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ENR.TERT.FM.ZS
/@
I think it’s worth bearing in mind that being a minority is not automatically associated with being oppressed. In Syria the Alawi minority rule over a majority (though it’s not going too well at the moment), the Tutsi minority rule in Burundi, and South Africa was for a long time ruled by the white minority. The Normans, who invaded England in 1066, ruled as a French speaking minority for about 300 years, before being absorbed into English culture.
Being a minority ruling over a hostile majority, is not a comfortable existence; the Spartans militarised their entire society in order to maintain their rule over their conquered territories, and the brutality necessary to maintain white hegemony in South Africa is well attested, but clearly it can be done. The extremely wealthy are a very small minority who run nearly everything and own half the planet.
Identifying the oppressed by their numbers is simplistic, and likely to lead to misidentifying those who need help.
And don’t forget Fiji where the East Indian minority ruled over the Fijian majority (the Fijians controlled the military though AFAIK so that changed things a bit). 🙂
I think that’s incorrect. The Indians came to outnumber the ethnic Fijians, and also controlled commerce by virtue of their financial enterprise, but I think never ‘ruled’ in political terms. The Fijians owned the land and (by virtue of a constitution that favoured the indigenous people) controlled the government.
That’s probably oversimplifying a complicated situation.
… so it was minority rule, but by the Fijians, not the Indians. I think. But (unlike the other examples) the Fijian minority weren’t economically privileged.
Well said!
Arrogant exceptionalism borne of a narcissistic self-pity. I particularly like the implied guilt of all white males.
Nicely summarized in less than two lines!
Kind of like holding a rally on democracy in early America. Only people allowed to attend must be male, white, land owner or a specific amount of money and you don’t get to vote for anything except for folks running in the house of representatives. Our main topics will be freedom and the always popular, liberty and equality. There will be a special reading on how we showed those British.
And don’t fergit Amuricun Exceptionalism.
Thread hijack: Here the most-excellent Nick Cohen on the rot at the heart of the UK universities.
http://t.co/guvtnUsH5g
sub
sub
> White people should not be proposing motions to condemn genocides without a lot of thought.
Which implies there can’t be a genocide on white people. Pray forgive me, but the murdered Jews were mostly white, weren’t they …
Yes, and those doing the murdering were also white. However, many genocides were not perpetrated by white people.
“However, many genocides were not perpetrated by white people.”
That’s what you think! These fanatics already maintain that racism is exclusively a disease of white people, so I’m sure they’ll have no difficulty in re-defining genocide as a crime that only white people can commit.
That one is pretty straightforward to define away. White people commit genocide. Oppressed minorities (so long as they are not white, because you know European immigrants were never oppressed in America…) act in noble, preemptive self defense. Wait, didn’t Bush call Iraq preemptive? We can’t be tied to that white guy! Let’s go with noble, well justified self defense, yeah, there we go.
How about all those murdered Armenians in 1915? Were they not white? Last time I checked Turkey is in Europe.
I hardly know what to say. These people are completely off their trolley.
Binary is so last week.
The encoding grows daily (LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM)
This is not the Onion
http://www.wesleyan.edu/reslife/housing/program/open_house.htm
Genderfuck? That’s a category now? I guess I need to get out more.
What happened to Intersex? I must be out of touch.
And I thought Wesleyan was Methodist?
Or are they getting all those who identify with those categories together in that house in the hope they’ll all suffer from lead poisoning?
I will not be making an attempt to remember those letters…
..or maybe get out less …
Yes. It means someone who presents an appearance of both sexes simultaneously. A guy with a beard but also wearing a dress would be an example.
I’m not quite sure I see the logic in conflating gender identity and kinks… Would Christian Grey be welcome?
/@
http://nonbinary.org/wiki/Nonbinary
/@
Why not just list the entire alphabet (though not in alphabetical order, which was clearly invented by some minority oppressor). I’m sure someone whose feelings have been hurt could make up some category for the missing 16.
Barring a group based on race sounds racist and barring a group based on sex sounds sexist. I can therefore only conclude that these people are racist and sexist. I’m sure they’d be shocked to hear that non whites and non males can be those things. I have a friend (I use the term loosely) who blames everything on “white people” and talks about how awful “white people” are. She doesn’t seem to see herself as racist or stop to think that she is talking to a white person. This same person has a lot of Christian friends so she has developed some anti-Semitic opinions as well that I’ve argued with her about (I don’t think she has ever met a Jew).
Ah, but it’s not -ist if you’re “punching up” …
/@
They have quite literally redefined the terms so that you can only be sexist or racist if you are in an oppressed class.
Meanwhile, back here in the real world where words can’t be redefined on the whim of a humanities professor, they are a bunch of racist and sexist bigots.
_Not_ in an oppressed class, surely?
My brain was evidently conflicted on how to phrase it. You can only be a victim of racism or sexism if in an oppressed class, and can only perpetrate racism or sexism if not in an oppressed class. I must have started with one train of thought and jump the tracks before finishing.
Gee, I can’t imagine where some people get the idea that these folks just don’t like men.
I could go on and on.
The jokes I see on FB going around. If you inverted “men” and “women” would in screamed down as incredibly sexist — which they are. But it’s perfectly OK if it’s bashing men.
I’m always tempted to comment: “Sexist? … Nah! Can’t be!”
But I don’t. Because I’d be screamed down as a sexist.
My wife (a public school teacher) had to attend a “diversity training”. The entire thing was nothing but and exercise in being called a racist about 30 different ways — when the presenters knew nothing whatsoever about you (a big room full of hundreds of people). Pretty hard to take that seriously.
I actually understand where they’re coming from, but they just haven’t thought it through. Fairly typical of young people finding their voice really. The problem is, too many never seem to fully develop their critical thinking skills and logic, and don’t move on from this stage.
Society needs to be more inclusive, and students who identify as non-binary in Britain are statistically likely to have suffered more for that if they are also people of colour. Usually, that’s because of religion, of course.
Its hard to think it through/develop/move on when you exclude from the conversation anyone who isn’t like you/doesn’t think like you. Obviously they aren’t the first (or worst) to do that, but its somewhat disturbing that they are aping the terrible social practices that their movement(s) formed to overturn.
“they are aping the terrible social practices that their movement(s) formed to overturn”
Bull’s eye.
I completely agree – that’s what I meant about them going about it in the wrong way.
I for one appreciate the warning. I can think of nothing more distasteful than accidentally wandering into room full of whining entitled BME’s who have nothing to say.
This and the previous post has been pretty distressful, but I welcome the information even so. I am sure there will be more but bring it on anyway.
Your 2nd to last paragraph hit me as an especially clear statement of what is wrong with this variety of social activism.
The LGBTQ officer at Goldsmith was amongst those who voted against the motion to commemorate Holocaust memorial day! It’s just extraordinary.
She sneered with her friends on twitter that ‘white dudes’ who participate in student politics are just ‘toddlers throwing tantrums’. She then boasted that ‘we did just collectively destroy his self-esteem if that helps’. These people, the student elected representatives, are just incorrigibly bigoted and proud of it. I’m shocked.
Apparently extroverts now need to feel guilty because of ‘social privilege ‘. Amp up the guilt.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417198/people-now-whining-extroverts-have-social-privilege-katherine-timpf
“White people should not be proposing motions to condemn genocides without a lot of thought. This does not have that thought.”
There are plenty of people in the US who will say, straight up (I’ve heard them in the national media): “It’s not possible for a black person to be racist towards a white person. They are the oppressed person, they can’t be racist.” [no matter what they say]
Very Orwellian.
I’ve come to believe there is a language problem here with the term “racist”. In my view (I suspect I am not alone) the term Racist is a synonym for Racial Discrimination. In order to discriminate, you need to have power and control. In this case, I think the word fits – the organizers of the event have control and power, and they are discriminating against “white dudes”. However, in general, when used commonly in the US, often with the modifier “reverse” as in “reverse racism” actually refers to Bigotry and not Racism. Simply hating people who are different, because they are different (typically using some false stereotype as justification) is not Racism it is Bigotry. Can I get an Amen or I am out on a limb here?
I’d say that that is certainly one usage.
/@
I struggle with the terms myself and I think you are on to something. To me, bigotry and prejudice are passive states that influence, in more and less conscious ways, the opinions that a person forms and actions s/he may take – in effect, a logical fallacy. Racism, by comparison, is an assertive stance typically founded on a feeling of superiority of one’s own race over others.
But both ways of being are pernicious and I understand why they are used interchangeably. I think of Archie Bunker (or my late parents) as bigoted, but Hitler was racist. When you put -ist and -ism on the end of a word it elevates it to a worldview: it may be a distinction without a difference, but to me it seems there should be separate terms for otherwise kindly old folks who were “raised a certain way” and people who actively work against social equality.
And it isn’t only about power and authority, either – a police officer with a tendency to challenge people of color may be operating under prejudices, wheras a penniless Skinhead in the slums might be a racist. What the kindly old folks! the police officer, the citizens he harasses, and the Skinhead may not recognize is that we are all victims of the same culture that wants us distracted and squabbling over scraps so The Man can keep us all down. I don’t believe for moment that a Mitt Romney is “racist,” but I’m quite sure he thinks of all of us as n-words and parasites keeping him from pocketing all the money.
Some police officers are just … over zealous …
/@
And that is one young Bean!
“If these young people really want to change society, they’ll have to get out of their echo chambers at some point and engage the people whose views they want to change.”
Yes, you would think so, but I fear that individuals with this mindset are so unshakeably convinced of their own rectitude that they have no interest in engaging with people holding different views. They’re only interested in shouting down and silencing dissenting opinion. “Shut up and listen!!” seems to be the popular refrain used on Pharyngula and other sites where the SJW contingent hang out.
Binary? Does that mean non-trans?
Non-bi? How does that even become some category?
It’s an exercise in saying “we hate you” without actually coming out and saying it.
They really need to view Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
I always thought “-cis” and “-trans” referred to stereoisomers.
And once upon a time cis and trans were used as geographical terms – e.g. ‘cis-Jordan’ – meaning essentially ‘this side’ and ‘the other side’
A sausage embedded in place names; e.g., Transvaal, Transylvania.
/@
This is a regression to a new dark age. Tribal thinking and the belief in multi-realities that coincide with one’s skin color and mystical belief systems. Sickening…
Well, religion is clearly not the only bastion of inanity.
How do they define “women”?
“White people should not be proposing motions to condemn genocides without a lot of thought…”
No. I think anyone can condemn genocides without much thought.
What a shameful embarrassment that these rats are pro-Palestine… you’d think Palestinian nationalism and European nationalism would go hand in hand. After all the support we gave for these rodents this is how they repay us… with rejection and our own destruction.
Sub
When a non-white person believes that all racism is perpetrated only by white people, that is a sign of a persecution complex.
It’s like banning all men from a feminism conference. Or all meat-eaters from a vegetarianism event.
Feckin’ eejits.
One sign that there is something wrong here is the reasoning about “platforms” which falls apart on a moment’s reflection. No-platforming someone does not, strictly speaking, go against the principle of free speech. But, of course, whoever does the no-platforming has to actually own the platform! If the platform is, say, a university or one of it’s rooms, no one student, or group of students, owns that platform. They can protest, certainly, but they can hardly withdraw the platform without the agreement of the rest of the people who own that platform. And they certainly can’t withdraw the platform by unilateral force.
Another sign that there is something wrong is the use of question-begging arguments. The whole point of free speech is to allow for the open exchange of opinion, to try to get at the true and the just in the most comprehensive way. So the principle of free speech holds prior to any particular opinion. An opinion about “[academic’s] complicity in oppressive systems” for instance, is just an opinion which can be expressed and take its place alongside all the other opinions in the free exchange. It doesn’t precede the principle of free speech. The circularity here is just like saying “Well, of course, we do have a democracy, it’s just that candidates who are obviously wrong are not allowed to stand”.
Some people seem to need talking points to use as they pursue goals, to give the appearance that they know what they are doing, but they just don’t care in the slightest whether the talking points make any sense.
“My whole life I thought something was wrong. I thought maybe I was gay. Or transgender. But having tried both of those, it wasn’t that. Then I found out what it was:
I hate walking!
Now, with the relax power-X motorized scooter from Ambulate, I haven’t walked in TWO YEARS! Now my cup is always half full, and thanks to the cupholder, it never spills”
I may need to re-think my position on the burqua.
Now I understand why they speak Gibberish, English is Eurocentric.
This reminds me of an article (I believe from Salon) that a FB friend posted recently. It was written by a white woman, and the gist of it was that you can’t talk about race if you’re white withing first admitting you have privilege that you don’t see (meaning white people as a whole, not necessarily you individually) and that you do indeed have a group identity as white people whether you like it or not.
There was a similar article on Alternet, may very well have been the same one, wherein the author was whining about the fact that her white oppressor *allies* had the temerity to talk to black people about what they want/need. That a good ally, if white, should leave black people alone, and instead research black issues online, as it “isn’t the job of black people to educate white allies”.
I have heard similar demands from the SJW radfems and transgendeered folks. We are not permitted to ask questions, because that is just more oppression. We are to ” shut up and listen”. Of course, if you do your research online, and get a small detail wrong, and use it in the presence of an oppressed person, you are “no ally” and must be verbally assaulted for your bigotry.
I finally deleted my Disqus account and no longer post on any social justice sites (I used to debate abortion) because it is just too stressful, wondering when I will get attacked next, for using the wrong phrase. Yes, using “woman” instead of “people who can get pregnant” will get you a verbal dressing down for bigotry.
What’s interesting is that these SJWs, much like the right wingers that I used to debate, rarely leave their safe spaces. They will attack allies for using the wrong term, or defend their safe space from the occasional rightie who has dropped by for an argument. They rarely, if ever, go to a non safe space to debate.
This reminds me of a student protest earlier this week at UC Berkeley. Some students were protesting on behalf of black people. The form of protest = blocking the sidewalk so other students couldn’t get to and from class. Now, why weren’t they down at the police station protesting police brutality? Why, instead, were they f*cking over other students? Oh right, its *safer* that way. They get to feel morally righteous with ZERO personal risk.
There certainly is a lot of similarity between the noisy parts of the left and the right these days. I don’t know if it is that they are growing bigger or that the amount of noise they make drowns out the sane people. The SJWs go into authoritarian mode the same way the religious right does and just attempt to shut down discussion. It’s as if oppressed people’s mandates are on par with William Lane Craig’s Divine Command Theory. It’s actually more ironic on the left that “oppressed” people are now allowed to make statements without criticism by fiat, whereas if an all powerful deity can burn you forever for his subjective whims, at least he can follow through without claiming oppression.
This item reads like the précis for a Stalin allegory, as conceived by Orwell.
Like the nascent Stalin, the SJW crowd on campus makes the most of a bureaucratic post (in Stalin’s case, it was Secretary General; in young Mr. Mustafa’s, Minister of Welfare and Diversity) to control lower bureaucratic appointments (Commissars, in Stalin’s case; event “hosts,” in Mustafa’s).
Campus SJWs have the same two-fold goal as Stalinists: to prescribe what is orthodox in party thought, and to punish those who break orthodoxy through banishment or exile. In Mustafa’s case, punishment took the form of assigning men, white folk, and “binary people” other “things to do” during the anti-racist event — the campus equivalent of dissidents being marched off to repair the railways transporting kulaks to the gulags of Siberia.
The time is ripe for a talented Anglophone satirist to send up this stuff in that reliable stand-by, the campus novel — to, in effect, pick up where Philip Roth left off skewering PC attitudes in The Human Stain. Our campuses are certainly thick with candidates to do so, since persons trained in the fictive arts at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (and copycat graduate programs) can be found teaching “creative writing” and English Comp at universities across the land — though it may take a writer from outside academia (one with the distance, the autonomy, and the screw-you attitude of a Roth) to do the job right.
Wow… talk about unclear on the concept…
I taught at a community college in Texas where the college had a powerful “diversity committee.” **No white people were allowed on the committee.** Members were college faculty, staff, and administrators. Guess what — this “diversity committee” did all the faculty and staff hiring. My own dept (chemistry) had no choice in whom the diversity committee hired. The only part the dept played in the hiring process was reviewing candidates’ CVs.
Unbelievable.