A tale of modern love.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

“It hurts people when they see a white man bouncing a brown baby on their lap!”

Following this recent item on Robin DiAngelo and her lamentable bestseller White Fragility, some of you may have been wondering, “What kind of person is drawn to and internalises this neurotically demented horseshit?”

Well. Via Karl in the comments, here’s a possible answer, captured for posterity during a live-streamed meeting of the New York City Community Education Council on June 29 2020. In a mercifully abridged video, edited by Benjamin Boyce, and embedded below, we see “public education advocate” and gratuitous declaimer of pronouns Ms Robin Broshi using the meeting to chase away the demons nesting in her head. Demons that are also, it seems, tormenting a number of her colleagues.

It’s thirteen minutes long and quite intense. You may wish to bite down on something.

Kitchen scenes. (h/t, Damian) || Teeny tiny drama. || Daring daylight heist. || Those adorable fluffballs. || Floral jelly cake. You heard me. || Not fiddlesome at all, these origami masks. || Their prangs and mishaps were way worse than yours. || Question asked. || Consequences. || Nommy-nommy-nom. || Medical advice of note. || Somewhat embarrassing. || Bending light. || The thrill of yeast. || She had one of these and way before you. || At last, an alternative to bug spray. || Dining of note. || Good deed detected. || Their antique rapatronic camera is better than yours. || Pineapple is racist and oppressive. || At last, a UV phone sanitiser. || Fox chortling. (h/t, Darleen) || And finally, via sk60, heroic doings.

And so, an open thread, in which to share links and bicker. 

I’ll set the ball rolling with the gushing brains of Harvard’s best, and, via Captain Nemo, a textbook display of socialism, darling.

Our betters, you see.

Update: 

In the comments, John notes the agitation of Ms Janover, our Harvard intellectual, and adds, rather drily, “Something is obviously upsetting her.” Well, yes. As a Higher Being, she’s offended by “entitled caucasity,” by which she means expectations of reciprocity.

Needless to say, the upset continues. Despite being quoted verbatim – and despite her own video, which she saw fit to share, presumably expecting applause – Ms Janover is now claiming that she has been cruelly misrepresented by “Trump supporters,” whose “hate” she denounces. After threatening to stab people who disagree with her. We’re told, furthermore, that she will “never be silenced into shame.” Which is rather the problem, one might think.

The not-at-all-entitled Ms Janover is also, it seems, astonished that sharing stabby meltdown videos is not a good way to impress employers.

Matt Taibbi on Robin DiAngelo and her pernicious bestseller White Fragility:

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category. If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

As we’ve seen many times. For instance, here. And here. And here. And if that doesn’t sound quite Maoist enough, there’s more.

And Jonathan Church on the same:

[According to DiAngelo,] the two “master discourses” of Whiteness are “individualism” and “universalism.” White people have been “socialized” from the moment they were born to see themselves as individuals rather than as members of racial groups, and to believe in a universal humanity or human nature. All of this obscures the nature of “systemic racism,” making white people incapable of seeing how they constantly reinstate and reinforce white supremacy with virtually every word they say, or do not say. That’s right. Even if you remain silent in inter-racial dialogue, maybe because you want to shut up and listen or because you are shy and prefer one-on-one interactions rather than the hurly-burly of groups, you are making a “move” of Whiteness which keeps you complicit in the preservation of white supremacy.

Readers who doubt the stupefying effects of Dr DiAngelo’s racial woo should note the number of replies to Mr Church in which his article is dismissed out of hand, triumphantly, by devotees of Dr DiAngelo, as the work of a white person displaying “white fragility,” and therefore invalid by default. As noted here recently, it seems we will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.