Reheated (131)

Given these fevered thoughts, all this tool-induced upset, readers may wish to peek at the photographs accompanying the article, and which may bring to mind the words grown adult, albeit ironically. Readers may also wish to ponder the prospects of a father-son relationship premised on a dogmatic, near-hysterical disdain for maleness, for “anything deemed masculine.”

It is, I think, worth picturing what it would be like to be a boy raised by an ostentatiously progressive father, a social worker and therapist, who sneers at men “boxed in by masculinity” – for instance, men who own wrenches.

Unlike our ideologically emasculated neurotic, who imagines himself on a much higher plane, and who “spirals into panic” at the mere thought of a toolbox or anything approaching manual labour.

Our excavation of uncanny knowledge continues with input from Treva Van Cleave, a mother and, er, witch, who can, we’re assured, call upon her ancestors by fondling her late grandmother’s necklace. Strange “emanations” are mentioned. Which is exactly what you need when getting children ready for school or loading the washing machine.

For Dr Inoue, a minority student wishing to be articulate, precise, and understood by a wider audience, by being fluent in the language of his academic peers and potential employers, is “selfish” and “immature.” Opting for comprehensibility and success is, we’re told, to surrender to “white supremacy” and “capitalist-inflicted bullshit.”

“You can… mouth the words that are white, but… they’re coming from a [black] body,” says Dr Inoue, as if expecting applause.

In Dr Inoue’s classroom, a student’s ambition to develop linguistic skills, to be clearly understood, and to succeed in life, must be subordinate to the paranoid, tribal politics conceived by Dr Inoue. So, no selfishness there, clearly. As a display of the pernicious and perverse, it’s quite a thing.

Achieving proficiency and wishing to be taken seriously as someone capable of thought are framed by Dr Inoue as some kind of internalised oppression. And being able to express yourself precisely, and getting a job you want, is somehow a failure, a betrayal of authentic blackness. And by implication, getting on in life – being able to provide for yourself and your family – is, according to Dr Inoue, “a really shitty choice.”

This, then, is the man to whom hopes should be entrusted.

If, for instance, I were considering whether to amuse myself by flinging tomato juice over people and over their computers, while grinning with satisfaction, I’d expect a not insignificant likelihood of consequently being punched in the face. This expectation is important.

The risk of being punched, vigorously, is important. It inhibits quite a lot of recreational malice.

Professor Yancy goes on to denounce, on behalf of all men, “our sexually objectifying gazes… our pornographic imaginations.” Our “dominant phallic economy.” Indeed, he continues, “we are collectively complicit with a sexist mind-set and a poisonous masculinity.” You see, being aroused by women, while not quite rape in itself, is nonetheless, as it were, rape-adjacent, and constitutes “a violent, pathetic and problematic masculinity.”

One wonders how a species of suitably corrected human beings, purged of such heterosexual inclinations, might propagate and flourish. Such that we can indulge the theatrical sorrows of lecturers in “critical whiteness studies.”