Fashionable Malice
Via the comments, Spiny Norman steers us to another ‘progressive’ initiative:
The University of Cincinnati is sponsoring a workshop on “white fragility” and “white tears” this semester… “White fragility,” as defined by a paper in the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, “is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviours such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviours, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.”
In the spirit of reciprocity, I’ll attempt an alternative, and perhaps more realistic, definition. “White fragility” is the unremarkable fact that people by and large don’t like being slandered as racists and then assigned with some pretentious collective guilt, the supposed atonement for which requires deference to actual racists and predatory hokum merchants.
As Hippogryph notes in the comments, the official definition of “white fragility” looks an awful lot like Kafkatrapping, a dishonest and pathological manoeuvre, a form of emotional bullying, in which the denial of an unproven and insulting accusation is instantly seized upon as damning confirmation of said accusation. The object being to inculcate pretentious guilt via some notional group association, making a person feel somehow responsible for the actions of others, even strangers long dead, over whom he or she has zero influence. It’s an attempt to induce a profound unrealism, and thereby compliance.
In light of which, we could parse the official definition of “white fragility” a little further:
These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear…
Or, put another way: “How dare you be annoyed by our slandering? How dare you question our motives as anything other than benign?”
…and behaviours such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.
Or, “How dare you talk back and draw attention to our question-begging? How dare you not want to remain in the presence of people who wish to do you psychological harm?”
I’m paraphrasing, of course.
Thank God they’re the clever ones.
These self-imagined intellectuals are rendered emotionally incontinent by even the prospect of a contrary view being heard, by anyone, even once. Which is to say, they’re outraged that it’s even being permitted. This, then, is the new benchmark of campus intellectual life. And the plans to disrupt the talk are, again, gratuitous and spiteful, and utterly disdain those who wish to hear Shapiro speak and ask questions. More than most speakers, Shapiro actively encourages debate with lengthy Q&A sessions immediately after his talk, in which he invites people who disagree to speak first. It’s hard to see what more a person could do to be obliging, short of not turning up.
And yet the ‘protestors’ are acting like it’s a visit via time machine by the Klan. Members of the Black Students Union casually smeared Shapiro as “racist,” based on nothing they cared to specify, insisting that he should not be allowed to speak on the topic of Black Lives Matter because he is a “white man.”
I mean, there’s irony and then there’s irony.
we must, she says, see people as “racial beings” and “teach [children] to view the world through a racial lens.”
Marathon!, Marathon!, Rah, Rah, Rah!!
—Yeah, yeah, we’re now going to get the complaints from the 30 yard dash afficionados . . . .
Incidentally, the “white tears” workshop, complete with loaded and condescending title, is the project of PhD student Ainsley Lambert-Swain, who teaches sociology at the University of Cincinnati, and whose background is in “critical race theory” and “racial microaggressions.” For those who want to know just how anti-rational and mentally blunting “critical race theory” is, see here and here. This, remember, is someone who presumes to teach the rest of us how to “manage emotion” while being insulted and called a racist, based on a self-flattering conspiracy theory.
After all, they are simply using verbal tactics. It can’t be beyond the wit of man to come up with counter tactics.
Islam does not recognize intersectionality, you vile Islamophobe!!! You will all BURN IN GEHENNA!
Racism detected!
What other explanation could there possibly be?
Racism detected!
Asking someone to turn their music down is now a racist hate crime.
Asking someone to turn their music down is now a racist hate crime.
And yet it seems to me that race is at least as likely, if not more likely, to inhibit justifiable complaints, such is the bourgeois wariness of being thought racist, even by voicing a polite request for more considerate behaviour. It’s certainly been my experience and I can think of several examples where this – dare I say it – privilege was pretty obvious.
I’m starting to think that the “Body of Knowledge” that the SJWs rely on as justification for their crusades might possibly be a teensy bit suspect. Maybe.
“After all, they are simply using verbal tactics. It can’t be beyond the wit of man to come up with counter tactics.”
I can’t find an online version of Asimov’s ‘judo arguments’and I don’t have a paper copy, but it seems to me that (from memory) they might be apropos.
Asking someone to turn their music down is now a racist hate crime.
I live in a wood frame building of four apartments, have DNA that is Scottish, Scottish, Scottish, British Isles mutt, and in the next apartment over is a pair of female Asians, one a researcher, the other possibly student related. Below them is a black woman with a cat who as a guess is also a student, or likely to be—have only chatted with her in passing. We all pay rent to a team of Chinese realtors who manage the multi building apartment complex on behalf of the Chinese or so building owners.
Recently, the realtors sent out a letter to everyone in all the buildings in the complex which very pointedly reminded that there is no smoking of any sort anywhere in the complex—interpersonal politeness as well as city health regulations and all that.
The letter also reminds that what is also mandated out of interpersonal politeness, but also rather noted elsewhere, is that the use of nightclub scale speakers in a wood frame building of one bedroom apartments is clearly solely for the intent of demonstrating that the user is a demented and childish cretin and devoid of taste, style, and a clue—and therefore such use of such speakers is also quite emphatically forbidden, silent hours listed in the letter, obvious negative audial impact upon other apartments clearly spelled out, Etc.
At no time have I ever smelled anything—or very particularly heard and had the building walls and floor buzzing from combat scale sound transmission—because of anyone in the other buildings in the complex. In my building in the complex, the only person in the entire complex who is clearly described by that letter, the quite well documented hipster that is below me in all other ways as well as geographically, is white.
These self-imagined intellectuals are rendered emotionally incontinent by even the prospect of a contrary view being heard, by anyone, even once. Which is to say, they’re outraged that it’s even being permitted.
As Muhammad would put it, roughly paraphrasing, ‘Who is it who will see to this one who has insulted Allah and His Prophet?’
They like to think they have the market cornered on “critical thinking” and thus any actual critical thinking applied to them and their Narrative is haraam.
Birds of a feather do flock together.
As Abu Afak warned, “Men who overthrew mountains and never submitted, a rider who came to them split them in two (saying) “Permitted”, “Forbidden”, of all sorts of things.“
Wear your racial shame with, er, pride!
“Political correctness is just about politeness, you privileged white supremacist racist.”
“Political correctness is just about politeness, you privileged white supremacist racist.”
Heh. Absolutely.
And what could be more polite that telling impressionable teenagers, repeatedly, arbitrarily, with no knowledge of their actual lives and behaviour, and based on nothing but the fact that they are white, that they are “personally complicit” in racism, “accomplices” to oppression? And telling them that they should want to wear badges to publicly acknowledge their complicity in racial subjugation, colonial pillage and other imagined sins. And telling those same teenagers that any objection to this accusation, any questioning of it, is proof of their “white fragility,” their “white tears,” and therefore damning confirmation of their guilt.
In a saner world, these hucksters would be pelted with soft fruit and chased out of town.
Tar and feathers works, too.
Meanwhile, in Chicago high schools.
Because that far-left indoctrination has to be seeded early, while minds are soft and yielding.
‘White people destroy everything’
https://twitter.com/FeministShit/status/832651334201470977
‘White people destroy everything’
The left’s chokehold on education is really paying off. Onwards!
Meanwhile, in Chicago high schools.
If that story is accurate and if the equation Racism = Power + Prejudice, where Power refers to legal, institutional and social authority and Prejudice refers not only to actively holding preconceived opinions about a certain group of people based on their ethnicity, but also to when the beneficiaries of a discriminatory social system are ignorant or in denial of how they have benefitted to the detriment of others, then how is this not, by that definition, an example of racism?
The high school is publicly funded and therefore holds legal, institutional and social authority over the students and their parents. And they have used that authority to deny the wishes of those parents.
The parents have then taken the matter higher up the political ladder, only to be denied by those with authority over them yet again.
Parents have been pleading with school officials since October to allow the other side to be heard. Their concerns, however, have not been taken seriously, and the school has refused to incorporate their views into the seminar’s agenda.
And this is in spite of the fact that:
… New Tier has violated its own policy by organizing a program that gives only one point of view.
If an institution is in a position to be able to visibly violate its own policies while at the same time demanding that others abide by them, and moreover to do all this in service of presenting a highly tendentious and politically motivated point of view as if it were incontrovertible fact, then it seems hard to escape the conclusion that this is an abuse of institutional authority and power.
If we add to that use of power the prejudice strongly suggested in the titles of those workshops – “Examining Our Biases,” “Microaggressions: Voices from Literature,” and “Appropriate Alliances: Working in White Spaces.” – then, I think, we must surely conclude that this is an example of racism.
I have often marvelled at the consistent track record of abject failure of political activists and why this is so. It seems to me that at least part of the answer must lie in the fact that they are the proverbial sawers of the branch they are sitting on.
And they have used that authority to deny the wishes of those parents.
It does rather suggest that these are not merely idiots or well-meaning people who’ve made a mistake. They are something else.
This seems worth digging out again:
Just in case anyone had assumed, or hoped, that the ‘initiative’ at the University of Cincinnati must be an isolated aberration.
Oh, and someone made a Google extension, changing the word “white” to “black” in Salon headlines. The results are somewhat instructive.
The results are somewhat instructive.
Fascinating . . . . .