In Which The Word ‘If’ Does A Lot Of Work
If what I’ve been saying is true, then you could say, within the white cultural racist imaginary, black bodies are different, black bodies can suffer, black bodies should suffer.
I wonder if Dr Derek Hook, the agitated educator quoted above, the one mentioned here recently, needs to lower his dosage. Or up his dosage. Or to smoke some entirely different kind of bathroom cleaning product. Either way, “whiteness,” or “the white big other of the racist domain,” appears to be pressing on his nerves. When not suggesting, in a bizarrely circuitous and somewhat manic way, that white people, as some collective entity, secretly fantasise about harm befalling random black people, via “damage” and “mutilation,” Dr Hook apparently endorses the idea that “white people should commit suicide as an ethical act,” in order to “castrate whiteness.”
So, no concerning patterns of thought there, obviously.
And in other educational news.
She’s “challenging a broken system,” you see.
Needless to say, if you poke through the archives, you’ll find countless examples of educators whose racial neuroticism and mental contortions, often with racially sadistic overtones, are quite remarkable. And again, it’s not just that the ideas on display – and very much in fashion – are obnoxious, or contorted, or morally deranged, or a blueprint for ruin; it’s that the kinds of people who find such things titillating or life-consuming, as Dr Hook and his peers evidently do, tend to be… psychologically marginal. Which is to say, the kinds of people you wouldn’t generally want anywhere near your children.
I can no longer call Duquesne’s statement “forthright enough, and supported by evidence.” On the contrary: their statement is obscurantist, and I believe deliberately so.
It’s easy to be wrong-footed when dealing with people who are accustomed to lying, and who are often quite good at it. The brazenness can be unexpected. (See, for instance, Judith Butler, mentioned in the next thread.)
And Dr Hook seems to belong to a caste of Clown Quarter inhabitants, in which being challenged on one’s mouthings by people outside of said caste – by one’s inferiors, as it were – rarely happens and isn’t generally taken seriously, unless it poses a threat of real-world consequences. At which point, the dishonesty kicks in. As anyone who’s followed this blog will most likely know, things are said by these people that would at the very least raise eyebrows among the wider population, and quite often be thought perverse or obnoxiously unhinged. And yet, among the speakers, these things are said in order to accumulate in-group kudos. A kind of mutual titillation.
The gulf between Clown Quarter cred, its competitive posturing, and actual morality is quite vast. And apparently getting wider.
It’s easy to be wrong-footed when dealing with people who are accustomed to lying…
I am certain that Delport and Hook and Duquesne University would, given sufficient power, fully support actual genocide.
I have little more to add about the Hook business; pst314 mentioned the most important aspect that I didn’t cover above: that Duquesne shows no proof–none–for their bald assertion that Professor Hook said in his presentation that the call for suicide was wrong. In the brief video we’ve seen, he grudgingly allows “parenthetically” that one “could argue” that Terblanche Delport “goes too far” — but then he immediately dismisses even this mild and parenthetical objection, and continues to endorse the call for suicide as “ethical.”
I cannot believe that he ever, at another point in the presentation, reversed ground and unequivocally condemned the call for suicide: because if he had done so the university could rout its critics once and for all just by quoting the exact words. The videoconference was recorded: playback would settle the question. But Duquesne just huffily denies the fault while keeping the evidence under wraps. It looks bad because it is bad.
All right, I’ll leave it at that, but reserve an option for another sequel.
To help chase away those suicidal vapors . . . this turned up a couple months ago alongside some youtube music I was listening to. Usually I ignore their suggestions, but I don’t know why I had a hunch this was different:
Sunny side of the street
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsEFFaboTAM
Bar Colombia, Barcelona, two years ago just about to the day