Reheated (138)

Appearing as a headline guest at Australia’s recent Stella Prize longlist party, “a celebration of women’s writing,” Ms Whittaker felt a need to air her “itching discontent” and to “confront” the “majority white audience” for the sin of pretentious enthusiasm – namely, their enthusiasm for works by people such as herself.

We’re told that being a “coloured” or “Indigenous” writer is fraught with “structural oppression,” on account of being “marginalised” – as when being invited to literary award parties and then swooned over by pretentious pale-skinned lefties.

“Whiteness” and “white men” are particular burdens to Ms Whittaker and her peers, whose suffering – their “collective plight” – is seemingly endless and endlessly fascinating, at least among those for whom such woes are currency.

As Ms Whittaker’s world is one of practised self-involvement, her point is at times unobvious. However, our unhappy poet appears to be annoyed both by “underwhelming responses” to her own writing and by insufficiently convincing displays of approval. All that “endless patronising praise.”

At which point, the words high maintenance spring to mind.

Such is the world of identity politics and playing Browner Than Thou. And if you base your written output and literary persona, and your claim of artistic importance, on being Brown And Therefore Fascinating™ – or as Ms Whittaker puts it, “Blak literature” by “Indigenous creatives” – this will happen.

To complain about pretension – “white fawning” – while in the very same paragraph demanding race-fixated, self-agonised appraisals – “criticism that is responsible for the race of its giver” – is incoherent and faintly ludicrous.

To bemoan woke piety as insincere and unsatisfying, which it is by definition, while simultaneously milking it for all it’s worth and encouraging those same pretensions, is unlikely to evoke much in the way of sympathy.

At least not sympathy that’s sincere. 

Those presented as victims of injustice, of “racial inequity,” include Mr Rodney Perry, whose photograph accompanies the piece, and who, in a single year, has received eight tickets for speeding and three for running red lights. The article appears not to have had room to include the views of those injured or bereaved by Chicago’s law-breaking motorists, despite an eye-widening spike in accidents, fatalities, and hit-and-run crashes.

Nor, it seems, was there room to consider the possible effect of endless, widespread excuse-making for antisocial behaviour, and its role in making such behaviour more likely, not less.

It seems we’re supposed to believe – emphatically and indignantly – that Mr Perry and Mr Olatunji Oboi Reed, our candidates for victimhood, are being induced to break the law and to drive in ways that are dangerous to others, including repeatedly running red lights, because of “fewer pedestrians and more vacant lots.”

Cyclists and dog walkers are also invoked as possible factors, along with the claim that a black person may have to drive to the nearest grocery store, a feat rarely undertaken by people of pallor, obviously.

And all of this is presented as if the gentlemen’s behaviour, their choices, could only have external causes. Other variables apparently being unworthy of consideration.

And so, Mr Reed, an “activist for racial equity,” expects city officials to “eliminate any racial… disparities in camera ticketing,” while avoiding any mention whatsoever of behaviour and personal responsibility. “The root cause of traffic violence in our society that is disproportionately impacting Black and brown people is structural racism,” says he.

As a result, the default narrative, the woke conceit, is just a little odd. Namely, if black people are being injured or killed as a result of reckless driving, very often by other black people, this is “traffic violence” and “structural racism.” But attempts to enforce the law and reduce the number of such incidents are also “structural racism” and must therefore be done away with.

The author of the above, Ms Virginia Heffernan, not only has a “pandemic getaway,” which must be nice, but also neighbours sufficiently thoughtful to clear her drive of heavy snow. Inevitably, this induces not gratitude or warm feelings, but fretting and resentment, such that the aforementioned act of kindness is framed, disdainfully, as “aggressive niceness.”

Exactly how Ms Heffernan’s neighbours were being aggressive is unclear, but it seems that we, the reader, are expected to dislike them, quite intensely, on account of their being insufficiently leftist.

As readers may be a little confused by the air of displeasure, I should point out that no history of neighbourly rancour is offered as an excuse – no disputes over hedges or noisy pets. Nothing of that sort is mentioned at all. Ms Heffernan’s neighbours are, it seems, to be frowned upon, indeed despised, in print, in a newspaper they may well read, simply for failing to vote for Mr Biden.

It’s not unlike someone who’s five foot five insisting that they be perceived by everyone around them as being six foot four. And then getting all tearful and pissy when this doesn’t happen. It’s scarcely less absurd.

You don’t get to control how others perceive you. Emotional blackmail based on demands that others must use fabulist pronouns, even out of earshot, will not change that fact. It may, however, make you look obnoxious and deranged.

‘Every time you refer to me, whether I’m present or not, you first have to clap your hands three times.’

Same vibe.

Even if it were the case that Ms Meghan feels “misgendered” – which would be assuming quite a lot – she has not in fact been “misgendered” by use of the words she and her, or by any recognition of the fact that she’s obviously a woman. She has been referred to accurately, in accord with physical reality. Her mental health problems – any feelings of being “misgendered” – are not the arbiter of what is.

We can see what is.