Via Mr Muldoon in the comments, our betters at work:

Laughable, yes. But not harmless:

Further to recent rumblings in the comments, Captain Nemo steers us to the Twitter feed of Library Journal, a “global community of more than 200,000 librarians and educators,” and which proudly directs its readers to the mental exertions of Ms Sofia Leung:

Our library collections, because they are written mostly by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks. Pause here and think about this.

Ms Leung, an academic librarian, is unhappy that public libraries in the US, a white-majority culture with a white-majority history, tend to have, among other things, lots of books by authors with pale skin. This, we’re told, is an “interesting mini-eureka moment” that our Queen of Intersectional Rumination feels compelled to share. When Ms Leung discovers that public libraries in China and South Korea have quite a few books by Chinese and Korean authors, I’m sure she’ll be equally aghast. Every bit as offended.

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.

If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from POC and then claimed as white property… When most of our collections filled with this so-called “knowledge,” it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of colour.

At which point, things get a little breathless and intermittently grammatical. However, readers may wish to ponder how synthesising insights from around the world, and from cultures long gone, and preserving those insights, in libraries, is somehow a bad thing. 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.”

As if sensing that her thoughts aren’t sufficiently lurid and unhinged, Ms Leung then shifts into higher gear:

“You should be more conscious,” says she.

The young intellectual quoted above – Denisse Moreno Melchor, the one apparently having some kind of episode – can also be seen here. On Twitter, Ms Melchor describes herself as a “Brown Magic Womxn.” Her pronouns, should you care, are “they/elle/she/ella.”

What’s interesting isn’t the content of the rote psychodrama so much as the dynamic, which is one we’ve seen before. Faced with a seemingly demented woman, one from a Designated Victim Group, other students attempt to appease and accommodate, only to be met with more psychodrama and overtly racial animosity. The targets of this abuse then back away, understandably, as interactions with demented people rarely go well. And so, again, ground is ceded, both symbolically and literally. Until the invited speakers, there to give careers advice, are followed to their cars and shooed from campus.

And, emboldened, the bedlamite claims victory.

Struggling with unfamiliar pronunciation is a “racist practice,” apparently.

Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.

Listening to the broadcast, the dogmatic vanities are hard to miss, and the ladies appear oblivious to how they might seem. At least beyond the circle of the severely educated.

It’s also interesting how the grievances of the recreationally indignant – these self-regarding young women who wear victimhood like jewellery and complain about the emotional travails of ordering coffee – so often read as an assertion of class status. As if a modestly-paid coffee-shop worker, with whom they interact for a few seconds, and whose own name they don’t share, or presumably recall, should somehow automatically divine the unobvious pronunciation of an unfamiliar name, and then remember it, forever, despite interacting with hundreds of people every day, and having a life and priorities of their own.

We’ve been here before, of course.

Update, via the comments: 

While invoking Alex Haley’s slavery novel Roots as a guide to their own suffering, the ladies insist that, if you aren’t instantly sure how to pronounce Ms Ali’s Somalian first name, or Ms Roy’s Indian first name, then you’re a “vehicle of racism” and are “damaging” their “self-worth and sense of confidence,” and should, one assumes, prostrate yourself at the nearest Temple of Woke Sorrows. Given this kabuki of the implausibly downtrodden, it occurs to me that the charming lady who runs the local Chinese takeaway, and for whom English is at best a second language, has struggled to pronounce my surname for close to two decades. Presumably, I should storm in there one evening and publicly berate her for oppressing me and invalidating my personhood. Delicate flower that I am.

In the comments, Daniel Ream notes,

Teenagers gonna teenage, but for some reason we’ve decided to grant ignorant adolescents whose brains haven’t fully formed yet bizarrely elevated status and moral authority.

Readers may wish to ponder why it is that modern leftism dovetails so neatly with the psychological shortcomings of adolescents.

Being a “queer feminist poet” schooled in “critical race theory,” Ms Alison Whittaker is, of course, unhappy:

We’re in the midst of a renaissance in First Nations literature. I should be elated… So why do I feel this restlessness? 

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 “confront” the “majority white audience” for the sin of pretentious enthusiasm – namely, their enthusiasm for works by people such as herself:

I talked about the “endless, patronising praise” I got from white audiences, and how I salve it with the frank reading of Indigenous women who “do you the dignity of taking you seriously.”

Fun night. We must do this again.

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.