In the video below, filmed at the University of Cape Town, members of the science faculty meet with student protestors who wish to “decolonise” the university and not pay their bills. During the meeting, one of the staff, one of the “science people,” points out that, contrary to claims being made by a student protestor, witchcraft doesn’t in fact allow Africans to throw lightning at their enemies.

He is promptly scolded for “disrespecting the sacredness of the space,” which is a “progressive space,” and is told either to apologise or leave. Repeated cowed apologies ensue. The offended speaker, the one claiming that Africans can in fact throw lightning at each other – and who disdains “Western knowledge” as “very pathetic” – then uses the apparently scandalous reference to reality as the sole explanation for why she is “not in the science faculty.”

There being no other, perhaps more obvious, reason.

When you enter a space – any space – as a man, you carry with yourself the threat of harm.

Melissa Fabello, the queen bee of Everyday Feminism, teams up with Aaminah Khan to once again remind any male readers that there’s something fundamentally wrong with them, and all men currently striding about the planet:

The socialisation of men is such that even a good man – a supportive man, a respectful man, a trusted man – has within him the potential for violence and harm because these behaviours are normalised through patriarchy. 

For those who find the above less than compelling, Ms Fabello and Ms Khan obligingly link to an earlier Everyday Feminism article, in which a male contributor, Jamie Utt, a “diversity and inclusion consultant,” recounts slamming a table in exasperation and consequently being chastised by his female partner, before rending his garments and rushing to the conclusion that,

My actions exist in the context of patriarchy. And patriarchy is violent. Full stop.

This is followed by a series of equally adamant reiterations – “Cis-masculinity is fundamentally oppressive and violent” says he. Apparently, a single incident of exasperated table-slamming is damning evidence of patriarchal brainwashing, proof that the author has been “socialised to be abusive,” along with all other men. However, the gender-damning meaning of female table-slamming, or door-slamming, or general fits of irritation, or any number of aggressive and passive-aggressive displays indulged in by women, remains oddly unexplored. Instead, Mr Utt equates this apparently all-pervasive patriarchy with “related systems of oppression like white supremacy.” Adding, “It’s important that I situate myself within my positionality.”

This being Everyday Feminism, Ms Fabello and Ms Khan are no less bold in their statements:

We know that even the men that we love, never mind random men who we don’t know, have the potential to be dangerous.

Though Ms Fabello and Ms Khan don’t acknowledge it, it seems that ladies have made great strides on that front too, with some taking advantage of the customary reluctance among men to repay female aggression in kind.

But in a world divided into the oppressed and the oppressors, the former learn to fear the latter as a defence mechanism.

Ah, the subtleties of “social justice.”

Some people are just really hard to please: 

When they showed up carrying racial protest signs to the university’s annual DePauw Dialogue on Wednesday, the audience started applauding. “Stop fucking clapping!” some protesters yelled, a student who was near the commotion told The College Fix. They later complained about the applause on social media. The protesters’ irritation with the spotlight didn’t end there. At the end of their campus march, they “asked a photographer to stop taking pictures and confronted him when he refused,” The DePauw student newspaper reported.

So, to recap. Forty or so “social justice” protestors disrupt a keynote address at DePauw University, holding signs that scold the audience for being insufficiently deferential to the protestors’ racial fixations and delusions of being oppressed. Being schooled in “privilege and identity,” and therefore suitably cowed and pretentious, the audience starts applauding the disruption, and applauding the scolding being aimed at them. And then those applauding are promptly scolded for doing so.

After the event, protestor Justin Collado announced via Facebook:

It was very shocking and upsetting when the student body and faculty… decided to clap at our struggle, our voices. It felt as if we were not taken seriously. We are here, as a community, to make a change and see difference on this campus. We will not be looked as a joke [sic].

Approval is oppressive. Also grammar. But for God’s sake, don’t laugh.

Another protestor, resident assistant Amata Giramata, denounced the applause as a display of “white sympathy,” which is apparently the wrong kind of sympathy, and is therefore offensive:

Dear DePauw, why is your first reaction to my protests, clapping? My activism is not a show.

Oh madam, I beg to differ.

Update, via the comments:

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Well, Soil Is Sort Of Brown. 

Your furniture choices are informed by the “crisis in white identity,” says sociology lecturer. And Gardeners’ Question Time is all about race.

Given the Guardian’s intense gravitational pull on certain kinds of stupid, it was perhaps inevitable that Dr Pitcher would find a welcome there. Now it turns out that squirrels are yet another proxy for “our” unspoken racial sentiment. Our esteemed intellectual, who divines hidden racism by means of his third eye, is hurt by the avalanche of mockery aimed at his earlier pronouncements, claiming his words have been misconstrued, while also claiming that same derision proves him right, and while repeating the very claims that resulted in laughter. He does, however, concede that “the uprooting of… Japanese knotweed is… not necessarily motivated by racist intent.”  

Ladies First. 

You men must learn your place in the progressive pecking order.

“On television interviews, on platforms and political meetings, at any presentations — if there’s no woman speaker, then the event does not take place,” says Professor Haiven. By which she means, such gatherings should not be permitted. She’s quite emphatic on this point. Professor Haiven is also keen on punishing people who say things of which she doesn’t approve, and which she casually conflates with acts of violence. And this great thinker can denounce the evils of an alleged male “monopoly” in an environment where women outnumber men by quite some margin, and while sitting on a panel with no male participants, and with no-one willing to argue a substantively different view. 

Answers On A Postcard, Please.

Squat enthusiast invites readers to “imagine what you and your friends could do with a crowbar, a guitar,” and someone else’s property. 

Says Ms Cosslett, “Communes represented a different way of being – sharing the cooking, the cleaning and the childcare was not only practical but also beneficial to the wellbeing of the members.” Readers who as students shared a house and cleaning duties, in theory at least, will no doubt testify to the practicality of this approach and the lofty hygiene standards that invariably resulted. Now imagine those high standards applied to parenting and childcare.

There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits. And tickling the tip jar is what keeps this place afloat.

Noted racist and waitress abuser Mr Ntokozo Quabe™ is in the news again:

It is NOT true that I ‘assaulted’ and ‘whipped with a stick’ a white student during our shutdown of the arrogant [University of Cape Town] Law Faculty yesterday. Although I wish I’d actually… whipped the white apartheid settler colonial entitlement out of the bastard – who continued to video record us without our consent.

Well, in fairness, and as caught on video, Mr Quabe and his associates were fairly unequivocal in their demand for attention. And note the use of the word ‘arrogant’.

While word has it that the instruction to video record us came from the Dean of Law (a whole womxn of colour!), we are klear [sic] that we will not be subjected to such white violence. The violent anthropologising of articulations of black pain without black people’s consent is as old as settler colonial domination itself. We refuse to continue operating under the white gaze!

Yes, physical harassment and jabbing at strangers with a two-metre stick are actions unworthy of complaint. But the use of a smartphone to record said jabbing and harassment constitutes “white violence” and is therefore inexcusable. Potential employers, please take note.

Meanwhile, at the University of Houston, and in no way related to anything above: 

Philosophy department advisor Bobbie Sue Schindler agreed without hesitation to the idea of “emotional first-aid kits,” even offering her assistance to help assemble them. “The stress of school gets to them,” Schindler observed… regarding the emotional distress that students face, “like a bad grade, a missed class, being late, a microaggression, uh whatever…” To help students deal with such burdens, the emotional first-aid kits contain a baby blanket, chocolates, a plush kitten, a bag containing the smell of lavender, ear plugs, a genderless pastel teddy bear, hand written notes, and a pacifier. Only the pacifier gave Schindler any pause, though only out of concern that students might take them the wrong way. Instead, she suggested that the kit just contain a note encouraging students to suck their thumbs.

Says Ms Schindler, “I sucked my thumb for twenty years.”