Reheated

Reheated (94)

June 19, 2024 by David 93 Comments

For newcomers, some items from the archives. Further to this recent item, readers may detect a theme of sorts.

Don’t Oppress My People With The Way You Walk.

Whitey’s hegemonic walking must be disrupted. Along with everything else.

Having been mocked for his unargued assertions and casual racism, Mr Allen is now complaining that people, presumably white ones, “don’t want to engage” with his unargued assertions and casual racism. The truth of his claims is, he says, “obvious.” An attitude that would, I suppose, explain the lack of evidence or any reciprocal standard, and the apparent disregard for any expectation of such.

However, perhaps a few atoms of sympathy are in order. It occurs to me that if your immediate environment is one in which race-based claims aren’t subject to challenge or scepticism, even when sweeping and rather dubious, it must be quite unnerving to encounter these things for the first time. 

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Public Libraries.

Librarian Sofia Leung rails against the White Devil and his books.

Ms Leung airs her distaste for “white men ideas” – as if they had been uniform across continents and throughout history – while reminiscing about attending a “white AF conference” two years earlier. I was unsure what the “AF” might refer to and searched for some literary or scholarly explanation. It then occurred to me that a “white AF conference” is, to borrow the woke vernacular, a white as fuck conference. Which is how not-at-all-racist academic librarians convey their thoughts, apparently.

Readers may also wish to ponder the implications of a librarian and self-styled educator, schooled at the University of Washington and Barnard College, New York, and who is offended – something close to enraged – by the existence of “white ideas” and the “so-called ‘knowledge’” of “white dudes.” 

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Acceptance And Compliments.

The Guardian’s Natalie Morris juggles humblebragging with contrived downtroddenness.

We are informed, firmly, that, “It’s impossible to see the rise of mixed beauty ideals as a positive thing, because at its heart sits an unsettling insistence on white superiority.” It’s impossible, you see. Though how Ms Morris arrived at this assertion is less than clear. This being the Guardian, however, it does have an air of inevitability, of predestination.

Ms Morris tells us that in her youth not being white and not looking like the women seen most often in media and advertising made her feel “insecure.” And yet now, when women who resemble her, racially, are all but ubiquitous in media and advertising – way out of proportion to actual demographics, and even added anachronistically to historical dramas – this is also a cause of unhappiness and resentment, and an excuse for convoluted theories of racial victimhood.

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Big Hooped Earrings.

Not just earrings, mind. Lip-liner, too.

If you want to see evidence of maturity and self-possession, the Pitzer College Media Studies department, where Ms Alegria Martinez spends her time and some poor sucker’s money, probably isn’t the first place to look. And I think that, for many, that’s the tacit appeal of identitarian wokeness – it’s a chance to defer adult norms, and an excuse to act out pretentious, inchoate tantrums.

But it is a strange thing, this combination of assumed superiority and infantile emoting. Remember, Ms Martinez and Ms Aguilera emailed the entire campus, repeatedly and quite vehemently, with their views on hooped earrings and who should be allowed to wear them. It does, I think, take a particular chutzpah to publicly claim to be oppressed – by other people’s earrings – while spending more than the median household income at a glorified holiday resort. 

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Norms Of Punctuality.

Being expected to arrive for work on time is “systemic white supremacy.”

Says student Shahamat Uddin, “The reason ‘coloured people time’ exists is because non-Western cultures tend to have more polychronic work environments, and there is a different prioritisation of family and relationships over capitalist productivity and work demands.” Which is obviously what every employer wants to hear. And pay for. Every month.

A “polychronic” culture, since you ask, is one in which chatting and distractions are both commonplace and encouraged, and in which “issues such as promptness” – and reliability and productivity – are not prioritised. As favoured in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, that engine of civilisational blossoming and human betterment. 

Oh, and we mustn’t forget this one:

Don’t Oppress My People With Your White Devil Science.

On the hurling of lightning. And the smearing of human faeces.

In the video below, filmed at the University of Cape Town, members of the science faculty meet with student protestors who wish to “decolonise” the university – and not pay their bills. During the meeting, one of the staff, one of the “science people,” points out that, contrary to claims being made by a student protestor, witchcraft doesn’t in fact allow Africans to throw lightning at their enemies. He is promptly scolded for “disrespecting the sacredness of the space,” which is a “progressive space,” and is told either to apologise or leave. 

Other allegedly oppressive phenomena, including departmental acronyms and branded headphones, can be found in the archives.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.




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