Category: “privilege”

The inevitable intersectional pushback for “Black Panther”

February 28, 2018 • 2:15 pm

When the movie “Black Panther” came out, with an African-American director and an all-black cast, and then it cleaned up at the box office and attracted tons of black children, I was pleased. Yes, I know there have been black superhero movies before, but this one was reputed to be especially good, and what’s wrong with having superhero role models for kids?

Well, I didn’t count on the depredations of intersectionality. Yes, a black director, an all-black cast, and a story of black empowerment, but the Pecksniffs are always snuffling around for something wrong, or for some group that was left out. And now they’ve found it—or rather, easily offended reviewer Jolie Doggett has (click on the screenshot to see her kvetching). Doggett is in pain!

The problem: the movie is set in the fictional African country of Wakanda (“fictional” is the operative word), and Wakanda excludes outsiders. Outsiders means “Americans”, including African-Americans, and that means “Jolie Doggett.” Ergo she can’t connect with the movie because, if she were in the area of the fictional Wakanda, they’d “kick her black ass out.” She would be a—gasp—colonizer! Here’s part of her beef (in toto it’s a very large cow):

But when I woke up, my excitement was extinguished by a sense of dread and disappointment. I know it’s not a real place, but if Wakanda were real, would its people actually let my black ass in? According to every Wakandan in this movie, not likely.

The film constantly drove home the point that Wakanda is for Wakandans only. Anyone trying to get in was a colonizer, seeking only to rob Wakanda of its riches. Or they were an outsider, bringing their own problems into the utopia. And this included people who shared their same skin tone.

That narrative of exclusion was painfully familiar to this black girl. To be a black American is to know that you’re descended from people who were stripped of their culture. To know that you’re forever separated from your origins. People will ask you where you’re from ― no, where are you really from? ― and you aren’t able to answer.

I went into “Black Panther” seeking refuge from that awkwardness and a piece of shared black American and African culture to hold on to. Instead, I found myself having to face the sometimes harsh reality that there is a division within our diaspora that’s not going to easily heal.

Division? It’s a movie! It’s fiction! The “division within the diaspora” exists only in Doggett’s mind, because she has to find something to kvetch about.

This I don’t get. The story of Wakanda is set in a fantasy world, and black people of all stripes have come together liking the film. The exclusionary bit was a plotline, not some nefarious plot to exclude Julie Doggett from Wakanda. That she feels excluded says a lot more about her than about the movie. For one thing, it says that she can’t suspend disbelief: even a comic-book fantasy must in every respect comport with her comfort. And if she’s uncomfortable with the isolationism of a fictional kingdom, that’s her issue, not the movie’s.

She simply puts too much political and emotional weight on the film, and, in the end, she wants Wakanda to open up its borders—but surely only to black people:

That this Marvel movie could evoke these emotions in viewers like me and start an uncomfortable but necessary conversation about black American and African relations actually makes “Black Panther” an amazing and important cinematic journey. And Wakanda becomes less of a fictional place I can never go to, and more like a real Afrofuture we all should strive toward, where everyone in the diaspora has a place to call home.

As one of my friends said after reading this article, “Doggett is confused by the concepts of African, People Of Color, and Superhero Comics; and does not seem to fully appreciate that the three may overlap, especially in fiction, but they are not the same.”

Trouble ahead: Delaware allows students to self-identify by race as well as gender

February 18, 2018 • 10:15 am

First, recall the case of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identified as black and managed to convince others that she really was an African American. Dolezal eventually worked her way up to becoming chairman of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in Spokane, Washington. When she told the local police that she’d been the victim of multiple anti-black hate crimes, her white parents finally outed her. The police found no evidence of those crimes, and she was ostracized for pretending (even if she really believed) that she was a member of a different race. Dolezal resigned from her position at the NAACP and then was dismissed from her job—instructor in Africana studies at Eastern Washington University—as well as being removed as head of the local ombudsman commission of the police department.

The anger from the black community (and many others) at a white woman passing for a person of a different race mystified me a bit. It seemed to me that Dolezal really did self-identify as black; she wasn’t playing some kind of trick or trying to deceive anyone. And if race is a “social construct”, as gender is said to be, then why couldn’t you say you’re black if you feel as if you’re black—just as you can say that you’re a woman if you feel as if you’re a woman, even if you were born with the biological sex of male? (You can’t argue that there’s a difference because the gender dysphoria rests on hormonal titer and neurology, while the racial feeling doesn’t, for Dolezal’s feeling that she was black clearly derived from her brain wiring. In both cases there’s a biological aspect to the feeling of being trapped in the wrong body.) But transgender identity is accepted by most people, while transracialism is not.

To my mind, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be permitted to choose the gender you identify with and not be allowed to choose the race you identify with if both are “social constructs”.  And I don’t really care if people determine their identity this way, though, as I show below, some authorities will have to care.

Indeed, the philosophical equivalence of transgenderism and transracialism was the subject of a now-infamous but decent article in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia. The article was written by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, and was called “In defense of transracialism“ (it’s free online if you have the free and legal app Unpaywall). Tuvel, after examining the justifications for transracialism and transgenderism, concluded this:

I have taken it as my task in this article to argue that a just society should reconsider what we owe individuals who claim a strongly felt sense of identification with another race, and accordingly what we want race to be. I hope to have shown that, insofar as similar arguments that render transgenderism acceptable extend to transracialism, we have reason to allow racial self-identification, coupled with racial social treatment, to play a greater role in the determination of race than has previously been recognized. I conclude that society should accept such an individual’s decision to change race the same way it should accept an individual’s decision to change sex.

Tuvel, however, did not automatically accept that Dolezal truly self-identified as black. But that was irrelevant to her argument, which was comparing the philosophical justifications for accepting transgenderism and transracialism.

As you can imagine, Tuvel’s views couldn’t be allowed to stand! While Tuvel’s conclusions are reasonable, it’s not ideologically convenient for the Authoritarian Left to allow people to identify with another race. After all, that could give someone from a more “privileged” group, like whites, the justification to identify with a less privileged group, as Dolezal did. And that is unacceptable, for those in the latter group will argue that “You can’t claim you’re black since you haven’t had the black experience nor been oppressed when you once identified as white.” (That’s the same argument that “trans-exclusive radical feminists”, or TERFs, make against accepting transgender women as “real” women—they haven’t had have “the female experience” when they were brought up, and haven’t suffered the oppression that is said to go with such an upbringing.)

At any rate, that authoritarian ideology is behind the huge opprobrium that came down on Tuvel for writing what, after all, was simply a philosophical examination of political positions. (See my articles on this controversy here, here, and here.) Some of Hypatia‘s associate editors apologized publicly for “the harms that the publication of [Tuvel’s article] had caused”, hundreds of her colleagues called Tuvel a “transphobe” (she’s clearly not), letters were written to the journal calling for the retraction of her article (it’s still there), two of the journal’s editors (including the main editor) resigned, and the journal’s board of directors suspended the duties of all associate editors pending an investigation and restructuring. Wikipedia now has an article called “The Hypatia transracialism controversy.” which reproduces part of the statement from the associate editors:

We, the members of Hypatia’s Board of Associate Editors, extend our profound apology to our friends and colleagues in feminist philosophy, especially transfeminists, queer feminists, and feminists of color, for the harms that the publication of the article on transracialism has caused.

. . . To compare ethically the lived experience of trans people (from a distinctly external perspective) primarily to a single example of a white person claiming to have adopted a black identity creates an equivalency that fails to recognize the history of racial appropriation, while also associating trans people with racial appropriation. We recognize and mourn that these harms will disproportionately fall upon those members of our community who continue to experience marginalization and discrimination due to racism and cisnormativity.

Objectively, no harms were done, except perhaps to people’s feelings, and those I ignore. Her article dealt with an interesting issue in a reasonable way. And what Tuvel was doing was not comparing Dolezal with a whole group: she was comparing the arguments for Dolezal’s identity to those for transgender identity.

If ever there was an academic witch hunt, and risible behavior by scholars who should know better, this was it. You may not agree with Tuvel’s arguments (I find them pretty convincing), but no sane person can say she deserves the kind of personal attacks she experienced.

Now the whole business is going to start up again, for, as Delaware Online reports (here and here), Governor John Carney of Delaware has directed his Department of Education to come up with a policy that protects children of any race or gender (self identified or not) from discrimination and bullying.  That policy allows transgender students to use whatever restroom and locker room they identify with, and also stipulates that a student can, with his or her parents’ permission, stipulate what gender and race he or she must be recognized as belonging to. Further, the student can use a name different from his/her birth name. If the school deems the parents “not supportive” of the student’s choice, the school can use the student’s self-identified gender, race, and name without consulting the parents. Here’s the part of the bill that’s causing trouble:

Here’s the pdf file of the entire bill, with this being the contentious part:

The bill is designed to bring the schools in line with Delaware’s state prohibition of discrimination based on gender identity, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation.  Curiously, only 14 of the 50 states prohibit LGBTQ students from discrimination at school, and 18 against bullying. Actually, no student should be bullied, for any reason, and action should be taken if they are. But I think these restrictions are legal ones, so criminal or civil action can follow if discrimination or bullying takes place based on the criteria above. But shouldn’t the same kind of action be taken against bullying for any reason?

The parents and some Delaware school boards are objecting, of course—largely on the basis of the Dreaded Bathroom and Locker Room Issues. As I’ve said before, a transgender student should be accommodated in those respects as far as possible, but that accommodation must also consider the well being of the other students. So, for example, I see no problem with mixed-sex bathrooms, especially having stalls, but more of a problem if a transgender female who still has male genitals wishes to change in the girls’ locker room. There one might have to put up curtained changing booths.

What brings up more problems, however, is the self-identity principle, both for race and sex. Here are some of the questions it raises:

  1. If a self-identified woman student who is biologically male wants to apply to a women’s college, how far should her transition have gone before she can attend? Will a simple assertion of gender identity suffice, with no attempt to transition, suffice? That’s a decision for the college, and I have no opinion about it. (Are there still any colleges that are all male?)
  2. How will school athletics be handled with respect to self-identified genders that don’t match their biological sex? The concern is usually that a self-identified female who is biologically male, and thus has the male upper body strength, will join a girl’s team and clean up. The Olympics has ways of handling this based on hormone titer over time, but now schools will have to develop their own policies. Again, I leave this in the hands of the experts.
  3.  If a white person claims they’re of a minority race, will they then be allowed to apply for scholarships or other perks reserved for blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities? (This is not a problem for the reverse identification: minorities identifying as white, for there are, so far as I know, no special perks reserved in statutes for whites alone?)

So down the line the schools will have to handle the problem that Rebecca Tuvel discussed. They’re already dealing with transgender issues, and now they’ll have to deal with transracial ones. Will they treat them differently, being harder on the claims of transracial students? Only time will tell.

Whatever the schools do, expect a revival of the transgender vs. transracial fight among Leftists, who haven’t yet become aware of this regulation. As I said, I don’t care what a student wants to be called or considered (well, I may draw the line at animal “otherkins’), but I’m glad I’m not in the position to have to make decisions about athletics or set-asides for members of minority ethnic groups.

Zinnia Jones: The dangers of Regressivism

December 8, 2017 • 11:00 am

Zinnia Jones is a transgender woman who nominally posts at The Orbit, a series of blogs that were once part of Freethought Blogs but separated from that site for reasons that were never explicit. I rarely read her site, and rarely look at The Orbit itself because postings at the 22 constituent blogs are rare; in fact, Zinnia’s last post was December 2 of last year, and here are the dates of the last posts from some other people whose sites I’d sometimes read when they were at Freethought Blogs:

Dana Hunter: May 18, 2017
Alex Gabriel: January 3, 2017
Aoife O’Riordan: January 22, 2017
Greta Christina: December 6 of this year, but last post before that was on September 27, 2017
Ashley Miller: May 3, 2016
Heina Dadabhoy: December 31, 2016
Jason Thibeault: September 17, 2016

Of the remaining 15 sites, eleven haven’t had a post since October of this year. It’s clear that The Orbit is dying a slow death, and probably for the same reason that the Atheism Plus site went under: off-putting authoritarianism and, in the case of Atheism Plus, horrible internecine squabbles over completely trivial matters.

Zinnia Jones, however, seems to be on Twitter almost constantly (I don’t look at many people’s accounts, but just checked), and one of her tweets from this year demonstrates in a nutshell the reason why The Orbit has put so many people off. It’s from July, and seems to have been removed, but was saved (nothing disappears for good on the Internet):

The tweet:

But of course it’s clear that ISIS in Syria and Iraq does indeed throw gay people off of buildings to their deaths. Here’s a CNN video documenting it (some of the images might be disturbing). You can find videos rather than still pictures elsewhere on the Internet, but I’ll let you suss them out yourself.

Why did Jones say that these are “suicide photos”? It’s clear: she’s trying to defend Islam from the charge of homophobia, a regular pasttime of Regressive Leftists. But the accusation won’t stand, and Ngo attributes it to “intersectionality”:

The principle of intersectionality—that people can be oppressed on the basis of several different characteristics (e.g., ethnicity and religion)—is not problematic, but what it’s done is foster each group’s defense of all the others. So, for example—as in this case—Muslims, who occupy one “axis”, must be defended by a transgender woman against any of the religion’s own oppressions. In the end, intersectionality seems to poison everything, as every “oppressed” group becomes immune to all charges of racism or bigotry, which become solely the purview of heterosexual white men. And what that does is erode basic principles of liberalism.

Let me assure you that Zinnia Jones wouldn’t last a day under ISIS, or, as a blogger, in several Middle Eastern countries.

h/t: Grania

Lecture by Cat in the Hat Woman

September 30, 2017 • 9:45 am

Thanks to a reader who sent me this ten-minute video of Massachusetts elementary school teacher Liz Phipps Soeiro, the woman who wrote a mean letter to Melania Trump after receiving a copy of The Cat in the Hat, which Soeiro characterized as not only a “clichéd”, but “racist propaganda”. She apparently forgot that she had been photographed earlier celebrating that very book, and in fact dressed up as The Cat in the Hat.

I’m not putting this up to whale on her further, as she’s already been the subject of national attention, much of it unfavorable.Besides, it sounds as if she’s done some good stuff.

I just thought you’d like to see her giving a talk. If you have any comments, please put them below.

Irony of the year: Librarian who claimed The Cat in the Hat was racist was photographed (twice) dressed like the Cat and celebrating the book

September 29, 2017 • 5:03 pm

Ladies and gentleman, brothers and sisters, comrades: here we apparently have two pictures of Cambridgeport Elementary School teacher Liz Phipps Soeiro, whose actions I described this morning. To wit: sent a copy of The Cat in the Hat by Melania Trump, Phipps went off on her, lecturing the First Lady in a public letter that said her school didn’t need such “clichéd” books, nor books like this one that were imbued with Seuss’s “racist propaganda”.

Well, here she is (I am not 100% sure, but pretty sure, since it was reported by both Fox News and MassLive.com), celebrating that racist book. Twice!

https://twitter.com/Donmatos3/status/913798247885524993

BUSTED!

Here’s a before-and-after photo ferreted out by reader Darren and noted in the comments below:

Before she pulled her little virtue-flaunting stunt, perhaps she should have realized that The Internet Never Forgets.

What a sanctimonious hypocrite! How dare she hug that feline symbol of racism?!

________

Extra credit reading: Washington Post editorial “What the librarian who rejected Melania Trump’s Dr. Seuss books as ‘racist’ got wrong.“

Caturday felid trifecta: Snow leopard cubs in Toronto; cat mayor of Alaskan town dies; cat gently pets tiny frog

August 19, 2017 • 10:00 am

Today’s trifecta includes a nice video of a rare snow leopard (Panthera uncia) with her two adorable cubs in the Toronto zoo. Sadly, there were originally three cubs but one died of pneumonia. Listen to their little squeaks! And look at mom’s tail!

They’re now three months old, and, fingers crossed, will grow up to be among the world’s most beautiful wild cats. It’s a great pity that these animals are confined in zoos. One could say that studying them there will help conserve them in the wild, but I don’t find that argument convincing, nor do I think that people seeing the cat will be moved to engage in conservation efforts.

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Several readers sent me notices of the death of Stubbs, the mayor of the tiny town of Talkeetna, Alaska (population 900). Stubbs was a cat, and, according to the CBC, was elected the real mayor in a town vote in 1998 (there’s no human mayor).  As the CBC reported on July 25:

The animal’s owners announced the cat’s death late Saturday [July 22] in a statement.

“Stubbs lived for 20 years and 3 months,” the family wrote.

“He was a trooper until the very last day of his life; meowing at us throughout the day to pet him or to come sit on the bed with him and let him snuggle and purr for hours in our lap. Thank you, Stubbs, for coming into our lives for the past 31 months; you are a remarkable cat and we will dearly miss you. We loved the time we were allowed to spend with you.”

According to Stubb’s family, Mayor Stubbs, as the cat was most commonly known, went to bed Thursday and died overnight, KTVA-TV reports.

Stubbs lived in the local general store where he became a tourist attraction. He has his own Wikipedia page, which reports another true fact:

Every afternoon, Stubbs went to a nearby restaurant and drank water laden with catnip out of a wineglass or margarita glass.

Here he is having his restorative:


And in his usual position:

Stubbs’s life had its rough spots:

On August 31, 2013, Stubbs was attacked by a dog. He was placed under heavy sedation at a veterinary hospital 70 miles away in Wasilla [JAC: former home of Sarah Palin], having suffered a punctured lung, a fractured sternum, and a deep wound in his side. A crowd-funding page was set up to help pay his medical bills. Stubbs remained in the veterinary hospital for nine days before returning to the upstairs room of the general store; he was subsequently discouraged from roaming. Donations toward his care were received from around the world; the surplus was given to an animal shelter and to the local veterinary clinic.

Other perils Stubbs escaped from included being shot by teenagers with BB guns and falling into a restaurant’s deep fryer (which was switched off and cool at the time). Other exploits included having hitched a ride to the outskirts of Talkeetna on a garbage truck.

I visited Talkeetna in April, 2006 to debate creationist Hugh Ross (the last such debate I’ll do) at the annual meeting of the Alaska Bar Association. Being lawyers, they gave me a generous honorarium, which I vowed to spend traveling a bit around the state. I drove up to Talkeetna, where there’s a decent-sized airport, to catch a bush plane to Mount Denali (former Mt. McKinley). I did know about Stubbs and tried to visit him, but, sadly, the general store was closed. But found a friendly cat at the Talkeetna airport, where I caught a plane that landed on a glacier by Denali. Here’s the cat, whose name I’ve forgotten (ten to one some reader knows it):

Here’s the view of Denali from inside the bush plane (I got to sit next to the pilot):

Our landing spot:

The plane! The plane! (It had to taxi back and forth for half an hour to pack the snow sufficiently to be able to take off again.)

And Denali (left rear) and me (yes, I know this is getting self-aggrandizing, but it was a great adventure, and all on the ABA’s dime):

And here’s Talkeetna’s main street. As you can see, it’s tiny, and serves largely as a jumping-off spot for trips into the bush or mountains:

Although Mayor Stubbs is gone, he had a long life and was well loved. The good news is that the CBC reports that a replacement is being groomed:

Although Stubbs is gone, one of his owners’ kittens might be ready to take up his mayoral mantle.

“Amazingly, Denali has the exact personality as Stubbs,” the family wrote of the kitten. “He loves the attention, he’s like a little puppy when he’s around people. We couldn’t have asked for a better understudy than Denali — he really has followed in Stubbs’ pawprints in just about everything.”

*********

Finally, here’s a kitten gently petting a tiny frog. I wonder if the frog is toxic, as the cat seems to be repulsed at the end after licking its paw. I don’t know where the meows are coming from.

h/t: Michael

Further schisms in the Left, as observed on Everyday Feminism

August 14, 2017 • 12:30 pm

I read HuffPo and Everyday Feminism (not obsessively!) to find out what the Regressive Left is up to, just as I look at Breitbart and The Daily Wire to see what the Right is thinking. Everyday Feminism is notable for its extreme denigration of white men at the expense of everyone else (they offer a course on “Healing from Toxic Whiteness“), its “listicles” about the ways you’re ideologically impure and can rectify your behavior, and courses on “self care” to help you heal from all their accusations. But it’s also notable for seeing how finely they can divide the feminist Left, by whittling away ever more people who thought they were “allies”.

So, for example, we have this piece (click on all screenshots to go to article):

Here we see that being black or Hispanic is not sufficient to participate in meetings of people of color, for if you are a Hispanic or black with lighter skin, you enjoy a privilege that you may want to consider before you start attending meetings of BIPOC (“black, indigenous and people of color”). In general, Dacumos’s answer is yes, you shouldn’t automatically count yourself as a person of color if your skin is light (note: this doesn’t automatically mean that you have white ancestry), because privilege.  As the author notes:

To be fair, us light-skinned and white-passing people cannot just snap our fingers and nullify colorism. We cannot return our privilege to the Privilege Store.

But, there are some things we can do to address our privilege, like not automatically assuming that we are entitled to be in all BIPOC spaces all the time.

And, after all, who can count themselves as BIPOC? (My emphasis in below.)

Being able to determine whether someone appears to be Black, Indigenous or a Person of Color is complicated and contested, and often depends on many different factors and contexts. For example, some BIPOC may only be seen as such when they are with other BIPOC.

But the examples of former NAACP leader Rachel Dolezal and respected Indigenous Studies scholar Andrea Smith, people who were enriched through claiming BIPOC identities even though they may not have any BIPOC ancestry, have highlighted that there might be a problem with uncritically accepting self-identification.

So we have not just a schism among BIPOC based on degree of pigmentation, but a schism about who “identifies” as a person of color. Not everybody who does that, apparently, can be taken seriously (Dolezal is a notable example). And if there’s “a problem with uncritically accepting self-identification”, where does that leave gender? After all, Everyday Feminism is an unrelenting advocate of using preferred gender identifications and pronouns. If a light-skinned black who feels black shouldn’t necessarily be regarded as black, what about a biological man who identifies as a woman, or even as a group of persons (“they”)?

In the end, Dacumos admonishes light-skinned BIPOC to think carefully before they go to gatherings of people of color, not to dominate the discussions (are the number of words you’re allowed to say proportional to your degree of pigmentation?), and to ensure that you have extra compassion for “darker-skinned Black and Indigenous people” who, she says, have been more oppressed than you.

There’s no doubt that lighter-skinned blacks have had an easier time of it: if your skin is sufficiently white, like that of Krazy Kat cartoonist George Herriman, you can actually pass for white and completely avoid racism. But by parsing people who identify as Black or Hispanic based on skin color, Dacumos is committing the error of dividing up single ethnic groups by degree of oppression, which is said to be proportional to pigmentation. That’s seems a bit on the divisive side, I think.  Barack Obama was light skinned and half white, but I was perfectly happy, as was the black community, to see him called the first African-American president.

As for further feminist divisiveness, there’s this piece on the same page:

For a short while, Israeli actor Gal Gadot, who played Wonder Woman, was sort of a feminist hero, someone who was praised for empowering young girls. Then the Regressive Left discovered that she was not only an Israeli, but had served (as nearly all Israelis must) in the IDF, the Israeli military. Oops! Well, that was it for Gadot, because, you know, and as the article says, she’s a Zionist, an agent of an oppressive regime, and of course everyone knows that “Zionism. . . contradicts the core values of the movement [feminism].”  As if Islam in Palestine doesn’t!

Author Hadiya Abdelrahman concludes this:

I, for one, refuse to celebrate Gadot’s Zionist “feminism.” It cannot take precedence over the voices and struggles of the Palestinian women who fight every day for their basic humanity.

But, while I’d love to discuss the many reasons why it is hypocritical to call yourself a feminist if you support the Zionist occupation of Palestine, we’ll leave that for another time.

For now, I’d rather make some space to discuss some badass women who exist and resist every day.

Here are five Palestinian women who have fought the world for their humanity — this is for them.

Well, one of the five Palestinian “wonder women” happens to be Rasmea Odeh (who was celebrated by Linda Sarsour), a Palestinian terrorist murderer. Convicted of involvement in a terrorist bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket in 1969 that killed two Hebrew University students and injured 9, Odeh admitted guilt, was sentenced to life in an Israeli prison, was released after 10 years in a prisoner exchange, and then moved to the U.S., working as associate director at the Arab American Action Network in Chicago. She was found out, convicted of immigration fraud for lying about her criminal past, and will soon be deported.

Yet she’s a “wonder woman”! Abdelrahman calls Odeh a “political prisoner” (wrong!), and celebrates her like this:

A few months ago, after three and a half years in court and a few months in jail, Odeh accepted a plea deal in which she agreed to give up her U.S citizenship and leave the country. She entered and left court surrounded and celebrated by dozens of supporters.

Odeh is the embodiment of the strength and resilience of Palestinian women; she holds the ability to survive and thrive and continues to build empires out of the dust of violence and loss.

Odeh embodies Palestinian resistance. I hope that, by ending with her, you might better understand why it is so important to celebrate, recognize, and learn from the strength of Palestinian women — not only as feminists but also as human beings.

Forget Gal Gadot: let’s celebrate someone who killed two civilians and injured nine as a Wonder Woman of the “Palestinian resistance.”

Seriously, doesn’t murdering civilians disqualify you as a “Wonder Woman”? Give me Gal Gadot any day.

But such are the regressives in third wave feminism, extolling a society in which women are oppressed and celebrating women who kill members of a society in which women have full rights. The world has gone mad.

h/t: Cindy