Or, Grifters Gonna Grift.

At Montreal’s Concordia University, even light is being “decolonised.” Because “colonialism in contemporary physics” is a thing, you see. No, really, it is. A thing that must be “countered” in the name of piety. By people with salaries and lots of taxpayer subsidy:

The project occupies the time of “equity, diversity and inclusion advisor” Tanja Tajmel and Associate Professor of First Peoples Studies Louellyn White, and draws on the magical almost-brownness of Donna Kahérakwas Goodleaf, a member of the Turtle Clan from Kahnawà:ke, and who was hired by Concordia to “facilitate anti-colonial training.” Combined, their efforts will be,

I suspect this is where the words bad whitey will be inserted. After all, there ain’t no grift in a context that isn’t heaving with pretentious guilt.

Apparently, “all physicists and other scientists” should divert time and effort from their actual work, the important stuff, the thing that pays the bills, in order to become familiar with indigenous “bodies of knowledge.” Presumably, on grounds that one simply can’t do physics or astronomy without a detailed knowledge of magical talking beavers and rival chiefs stealing the Moon. 

At Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, a panel of journalists and media professionals declare their priorities. 

The full two-and-a-half-hour video, which begins with a land acknowledgement and rumblings about “settlers” and their “racial guilt,” and “white supremacist colonial mindsets which we have internalised both collectively and individually,” can be endured here. 

Following this lengthy declaration of innate racial wrongness, the panellists begin to ruminate on “how best to confront the corrosive force of online hate targeted at journalists.” Being a journalist on Twitter, where the public can talk back, sometimes bluntly, is equated with surviving in an active warzone and other “hostile physical environments,” with women, the majority of the panel, apparently hardest hit. Journalists, we’re told, are “exposed to danger in the digital world” and consequently suffer high rates of “anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic distress.” As a result of being mocked or disagreed with on Twitter. “We don’t want our journalists to be killed,” says Catherine Tait, the president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Janice Fiamengo pokes through the outpourings of Sophie Lewis: 

Ms Lewis and her fever dreams have of course been mentioned here before: 

I’m just going to leave this here, I think: 

Other questions generated by means of Queer Theorising include, “Do I think I’m having sex with my dogs when they kiss my face?” Apparently, for Dr Rudy, a Professor of Women’s Studies, being licked by a dog is difficult to distinguish from kissing grandma on the cheek or being lost in a full-on erotic fever. And thus, we’re told, “The line between ‘animal lover’ and zoophile is not only thin, it is non-existent.” 

Previously in the land of Queer Theory. 

And of course this rather eye-widening example.

Also, open thread.

Lifted from the comments, where much of the fun happens:

Says Min,

Well, we live in unhinging times, so it can be hard to tell. It did occur to me that maybe the parent, the one seeking pre-approval for adjectives, could have been indulging in some elaborate wind-up, one that passed undetected by its target. Or maybe the anecdote is a fiction, a self-flattering fantasy. Again, it’s hard to be sure. As the archives here illustrate, a thing being farcical doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

But either way, it must be quite strange to go through every day with your own “identity” foregrounded, forever in mind and endlessly referred to, and always craving an affirmation that is at best a polite lie. And with unending deference and flattery as an aspiration, an ideal, an ‘A-plus.’

And oh yes, the adjectives expected.