Category: “privilege”

Professor loses teaching job for approving a Black Lives Matter meeting from which whites were excluded; I disagree with the firing

June 29, 2017 • 1:00 pm

While I think it’s racist to specify that a meeting should be limited to people of a certain skin color, I cannot sanction Essex County College for firing a professor for espousing that view. On June 6, Essex’s adjunct professor of communication Lisa Durden appeared in this in this 6½-minute interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. As you can see, Durden vigorously defended the idea of Black Lives Matter having a meeting from which whites were excluded.

Tucker Carlson calls her out for racism, and I think he does a good job, though Durden’s notion of racism isn’t Carlson’s; it’s “racism = power + privilege”.  When Carlson asks her, three minutes in, whether it’s racist to exclude people on the basis of their skin color, Durden ducks the question and continues her fulmination. She is, in other words, defending a “Day of Exclusion” that resembles the “Day of Departure” that recently caused a fracas at Evergreen State College:

Note that there is no identification of Durden as being associated with Essex. Nevertheless, according to Inside Higher Education (IHE), she was fired from her teaching job for this appearance:

Essex County College hired pop culture commentator and producer Lisa Durden as an adjunct professor of communications, in part for her past appearances on such networks as Fox News. She’d also built a relationship with the college over the years by inviting students to intern with her, assisting on TV and documentary production projects. But it took just one angry phone call about her recent appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight for her to lose her teaching job, she says.

“I was publicly lynched,” she said Tuesday about being escorted from her summer-term class earlier this month to a meeting with administrators, who told her she was being suspended and investigated. “They wanted to send a message. ‘See what happened to Lisa Durden? You know it could happen to me.’ Free speech doesn’t matter if you’re a professor, make people mad and you’re in trouble.”

Durden says she was told that an unnamed person had called Essex to complain about her comments to Carlson the night before. The complaint surprised Durden because, in her words, she’s a regular commentator on Fox and elsewhere on everything from “Kim Kardashian’s ass to tough issues such as Black Lives Matter.” She’d appeared on a panel at Essex called Radical Women in Media, at the college’s request, earlier this year. And she’d satisfactorily — to her knowledge — taught two other courses in the spring term.

Pressed further, officials allegedly told Durden that she’d improperly identified herself on the show as an Essex professor. But Durden didn’t. The clip, in which she argues in favor of the right of Black Lives Matter protesters to claim all-black protest spaces on Memorial Day, includes no reference to Essex by Durden, Carlson or anyone else. In fact, Durden at one point says, “I’m speaking for Lisa Durden.”

I don’t agree with what she says, but, as they say, I’ll defend to the death her right to say it, and I decry Essex’s decision to fire her. That’s reprehensible. Why on earth should someone be fired for saying what she did? Yes, I think it’s racist to exclude whites from a meeting, just as it would be to exclude blacks or Hispanics or Muslims from a meeting, but racism falls within the purview of freedom of speech. (Do remember that many whites sympathize with the Black Lives Matter movement, so excluding whites is an exclusion based on race and not viewpoint.)

Now the American Association of University Professors has a statement about how faculty should comport themselves in such interviews. As IHE notes:

Many professors appear as commentators across networks, write op-eds or otherwise express their views as private citizens. The American Association of University Professors recognizes their right to do so and says that “professors should be free from institutional censorship or discipline.” Yet relevant AAUP policy cautions that “their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.”

Well, Durden wasn’t at all restrained, but so what? She was passionate, just like Hitchens was passionate. And she didn’t identify her affiliation with the college, where she’s an adjunct, nor did Fox News. She even said she was speaking for herself, though I don’t have a big problem with anyone, including her, identifying her college affiliation. That’s where she works.

Essex should reinstate Durden immediately and apologize. They can say that they don’t agree with her sentiments, but firing her is beyond the pale.

There’s a change.org petition to reinstate her at Essex. I’ve signed it, and if you agree, you might, too.

Bret Weinstein talks with Gad Saad

June 25, 2017 • 1:30 pm

This hourlong conversation between Gad Saad and Bret Weinstein, apostate professor of evolutionary biology at The Evergreen State College, is worth a listen. Weinstein shows himself to be thoughtful and articulate, and deals with many of questions that have arisen among this website’s readers. One in particular is whether the requested “absence” of whites from campus on the “Day of Absence” was voluntary (as Weinstein’s detractors maintain) or coerced, though not overtly. Weinstein gives the answer starting at 6:47. Weinstein also has a few choice words—critical ones—for the administration, students, and most of the faculty of his College, and argues that what happened at his school is a harbinger of things to come, and so we should pay attention to it.

And it looks as if he won’t be there in the future, though he’s not explicit about that. I hope some other school snaps up him and his wife Heather, also a whole-organism biologist.

This is just part I of the video, and I haven’t found part II.  Like many of you, my patience for long discussion videos is limited. This one is an exception, and I recommend it.

HuffPo blogger is gleeful that a privileged white man was severely punished in North Korea

June 17, 2017 • 10:45 am

I’m sure you’ve heard the story: American college student Otto Warmbier,  then 21, was taking a five-day tour of North Korea at the end of 2015, and apparently removed a propaganda poster from the wall of his Pyongyang hotel as a souvenir. (There’s a video, but he’s not identifiable.) When leaving the country, Warmbier was arrested for “hostile acts against the state”, imprisoned, supposedly confessed (remember, this is the DPRK), and in March was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.

After the U.S. interceded, Warmbier was released five days ago, but government officials learned only a week before Warmbier’s release that he was in a coma, which the North Koreans attributed to his getting botulism and then having taken a sleeping pill. He was flown home on a stretcher, where doctors determined that, contrary to the North Korean statement, he had extensive brain injuries. He is now in a “persistent vegetative state” with extensive loss of brain tissue, and the prognosis is not good. Most likely he will either die or remain comatose for a very long time. It’s not clear what happened, but the North Korean story is certainly bogus as there were no signs of botulism.

This is a sad tale, but of course it comports with the dreadful ways North Korea treats its own prisoners, often incarcerated for petty crimes—or no crimes at all. (Family members are taken to the camps along with the “convicted.”) How horrible—but how typical—that a self-styled Social Justice Warrior writing on HuffPo uses his sentence to gloat over how “white privilege” isn’t respected in North Korea. (To be fair, the author,  La Sha, who is black, updated the story in late March, before Warmbier’s medical condition was known.) But even ignorance of that can’t excuse her piece, which is simply gloating and reprehensible Schadenfreude:

After Sha describes her mother’s happiness when 18-year-old American Michael Fay was caned in Singapore (not hard, and not a dreadful punishment), she says she’s just as happy as was her mom. Why? Because Wamblier got what he deserved for being white and assuming his pigmentation gave him license to steal from the Koreans of Color. And of course it’s all due to American racism. Have a gander at this:

. . . and now, my mother’s callous reaction to Micahel Fay’s sentence is my reaction to another young white man who went to an Asian country and violated their laws, and learned that the shield his cis white male identity provides here in America is not teflon abroad.

As shocked as I am by the sentence handed down to Warmbier, I am even more shocked that a grown man, an American citizen, would not only voluntarily enter North Korea but also commit what’s been described a “college-style prank.” That kind of reckless gall is an unfortunate side effect of being socialized first as a white boy, and then as a white man in this country. Every economic, academic, legal and social system in this country has for more than three centuries functioned with the implicit purpose of ensuring that white men are the primary benefactors of all privilege. The kind of arrogance bred by that kind of conditioning is pathogenic, causing its host to develop a subconscious yet no less obnoxious perception that the rules do not apply to him, or at least that their application is negotiable.

. . . Yeah, I’m willing to bet my last dollar that he was aware of the political climate in that country, but privilege is a hell of a drug. The high of privilege told him that North Korea’s history of making examples out of American citizens who dare challenge their rigid legal system in any way was no match for his alabaster American privilege.

No, I think that Warmbier just wanted a cool souvenir. Can anyone not poisoned by their own toxic racism think that his “alabaster American privilege” even went through his mind when he took down a poster? After all, it was only a poster, and yes, it was illegal, but he got fifteen years of hard labor and now will probably die. Even given that Sha was ignorant of Warmbier’s illness, she has no excuse for celebrating the guy’s brutal incarceration. But it’s okay because, after all,  he is white.

Sha is even callous about his parents’ desperate attempt to get him released. One feels that she is even happy that it didn’t succeed, for, after all, Warmbier is white:

And while I don’t blame his parents for pressuring the State Department to negotiate his release, I wonder where they were when their son was planning a trip to the DPRK. Didn’t they impress upon him the hostile climate that awaited him? Didn’t they rear him to respect law and order? Did they not teach him the importance of obeying authority?

What a mind-blowing moment it must be to realize after 21 years of being pedestaled by the world simply because your DNA coding produced the favorable phenotype that such favor is not absolute. What a bummer to realize that even the State Department with all its influence and power cannot assure your pardon. What a wake-up call it is to realize that your tears are met with indifference.

How nice of her not to “blame his parents” to try to get him freed! In the end, Sha reveals her real motivation: she is black and oppressed, and in fact is just as oppressed in America as Warmbier was in a North Korean prison. (Seriously?) This article is not about Warmbier at all; it is about Sha’s perceived oppression and how people should pay attention to her plight. Me! Me! Me!  After all, Sha’s at least as bad off as Warmbier!

Here we have the Oppression Olympics stated about as baldly and callously as one can:

As I’ve said, living 15 years performing manual labor in North Korea is unimaginable, but so is going to a place I know I’m unwelcome and violating their laws. I’m a black woman though. The hopeless fear Warmbier is now experiencing is my daily reality living in a country where white men like him are willfully oblivious to my suffering even as they are complicit in maintaining the power structures which ensure their supremacy at my expense. He is now an outsider at the mercy of a government unfazed by his cries for help. I get it.

h/t: Orli