Social Justice Watch

Identity Politics Fights Back

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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Sensing a growing backlash against their toxic ideology, identity politics cultists are preparing to mount a fightback

Check out this epic rant in the New York Magazine, in which TV producer and playwright Elizabeth Meriwether fumes that even contemplating whether the rise of identity politics may have contributed to political division and a Trump presidency is so dangerous that she needs to seal herself off in a sleeping pod to protect herself from further betrayal by the traitorous “white liberal males” asking the question.

Bear with me…

I’ve decided that the best thing for Democrats to do for the next four years is to stop caring about “identity politics” and focus on the needs of white men all around the country. From now on, as a woman who makes her living and pays taxes in the blue bubble of California, I will shut up and enter a medically-induced coma and only come out when liberal white men ask me to come out. I will develop a special, secret knock that these liberal men can use to wake me up inside my sleeping pod when they deem it safe for me to emerge and start ruining elections again.I hope that other women and minorities will do what I have done. Democrats can either care about income inequality or we can care about “women and minorities,” but we can’t do both. It’s impossible. Just try. Close your eyes right now and try to care about creating jobs, offering debt-free college, redistributing wealth, and protecting the rights of minorities and women. Do you see what I mean? It’s impossible. You either care about class or you care about civil rights. I am being fitted for my sleeping pod as we speak. And, because I am an elite, it’s entirely made from reclaimed wood and the tube that will pump food into my stomach will do so in the form of small tapas-style plates that are meant to be shared. Bon Iver will be playing nonstop, and I will be covered in organic cotton and sprinkled with chia seeds. My rescue dog will be hermetically sealed into my sleeping pod with me, and the whole thing will be plugged into an outlet like an electric self-driving car that also cuts off dicks. I will be allowed out of my sleeping pod if and only if I choose to have sex with a white liberal male. But the terms of this agreement include listening to him monologue about what went wrong in the election and allowing him to prove me wrong with various facts and figures and statistics. I will not be allowed to look any of those statistics up on my phone under any circumstance, although I will be allowed to disagree with him if I quickly concede the point and if I am squeezing my tits together into a pleasing butt-shape.

Way to miss the point. The point of criticising identity politics is not to suggest that we stop trying to fight for genuine egalitarianism and equality of opportunity. The point is that continually dividing Americans and playing off various “victim groups” against one another – and always against “white males”, no matter how desperately poor or marginalised they may themselves be – is actively feeding the toxic political atmosphere which has led to two Americas which can now barely tolerate each other’s presence.

Meriwether then continues her long digression about sex, for no reason other than the fact that people like her seem to have to shoehorn the subject into every political conversation – part of the identity politics cultist’s desperate need to make all politics personal, I suppose.

The diatribe continues:

Finally, talking about protecting the rights of minorities makes white guys feel like we are not talking enough about them — see above when I explained that we can’t care about more than one thing at a time — so it’s better if we all stop seeing ourselves as part of separate groups and start seeing ourselves however white guys want us to see ourselves. That would honestly just make it easier for everyone, and as I said before, is really the only way that Democrats will ever win another election again. The only way to come together as a party and defeat Trump is if we blame women and minorities for everything. This is the end of “identity politics,” by which we mean that this is the end of women and minorities being allowed to talk about issues that white men don’t care about.

Yes. Opposing identity politics means secretly wanting to construct a giant woodchipper, rounding up all the Evil Minorities and dropping them into the machine, one by one. The only possible reason that anyone might oppose the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics is a desperate desire by white males to get their boots back on the face of women and minorities. No other possible reason.

Of course we can care about more than one thing at a time. I don’t know of one serious commentator or criticism of identity politics which has argued otherwise – that identity politics or economic growth, identity politics or national defence, identity politics and healthcare reform are zero-sum games, with only one able to prevail. The problem is not that identity politics crowds out other issues. The problem is that for true believers like Meriwether, identity politics becomes the prism through which every single issue must be considered.

The problem with identity politics is that it empowers a select clerisy (the SJWs and politicians who court them) by encouraging everybody who is not a “white male” to consider themselves peculiarly fragile and vulnerable to physical and mental harm, either from normal everyday encounters or from offensive and unpleasant behaviour which would otherwise be written off in a dignity culture, confronted in an honour culture but which are taken as grounds for public complaint and petitions to higher authorities in our increasingly victimhood culture-oriented society.

The problem with identity politics is that it infantilises fully grown adults and teaches them that they are without agency or responsibility for their own lives and decisions – that anything bad which happens to them is the result of oppression (by the afore-mentioned bogeymen, “white males”) which can only be lifted by enacting a suite of leftist policies and laws which restrict what people can say and how they behave, often in ways which run completely counter to the spirit of the US Constitution. And the feedback loop of self interest ensures that

As regular reader of this blog, AndrewZ, put it in a recent comment on another blog post:

If people from a designated victim group are able to overcome difficulties and succeed by their own efforts then they can’t be as “oppressed” and “marginalised” as the theory demands. Therefore they must be indoctrinated into a mentality of helpless victimhood in order to protect the theory from inconvenient realities.

But if the whole world is divided into victims and oppressors then it becomes immoral for a member of a victim group to be strong and successful, because the theory says that they can only succeed by becoming part of the system of oppression. Equally, a person who does not belong to an official victim group can only make themselves socially respectable by embracing a victim identity.

The problem with identity politics is that it has become so much more than a simple struggle for egalitarianism – a cause which nearly everybody (save the real racists in society) should be able to happily get behind.

Hence we find people like Liz Meriwether – successful screenwriter and TV producer, and oh yes, a wealthy white woman – and taking to the pages of New York Magazine to wail that life is so tough for her that she needs to take to an escape pod for the next four years – not to escape from Donald Trump, but from normally like-minded “white liberal males” who committed the heretical thought of asking whether we really need to consider a person’s race, gender, sexuality, and horoscope before assigning weight to their words and arguments.

This is the corrosive power of identity politics. This is why we need to fight back against it with every ounce of strength we have. Because the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics takes strong, successful, independent adults (and adolescents perfectly capable of becoming strong, successful and independent themselves) and convinces them instead that they are weak, pitiable victims in need of constant rescuing by external authority figures. And the authority figure is inevitably the government, and the government inevitably seeks to protect each one of the victim groups petitioning for redress by further restricting the freedoms of the general public.

Identity politics is cancer. What else to call it, when somebody as outwardly successful as Liz Meriwether can write a nonsensical, stream-of-consciousness rant about she suffers systemic oppression when her white male liberal contemporaries fail to linger long enough while engaging in oral sex with her, and have that piece published with all seriousness in New York Magazine?

Identity politics is cancer. And it needs to be surgically removed from our political discourse, and any remnants blasted with whatever rhetorical equivalents of chemotherapy and radiotherapy we can lay our hands on, lest it return.

 

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 49 – Chicago Universities Are Raising A Generation Of Infantilised Young Adults

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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Students who are offered Play Doh and “therapy horses” to help them make it through university will be cannon fodder in an unforgiving, competitive global labour market

At this point we are used to seeing outrageous stories of overbearing, coddling universities going to extraordinary lengths to teach the young adults studying on their campuses like delicate, helpless infants.

But the Chicago Tribune has done quite a job in summarising all of the instances of infantilisation-posing-as-stress-management taking place at institutions in and around the city. And the extent of the trend is quite shocking to behold.

Some excerpts:

Sephanie Delgado can feel the stress of her to-do list as she works to finish the semester at Roosevelt University: three essays, a presentation and exams.

To escape the pressure, the 20-year-old college junior, who also works as a restaurant cashier to help pay for school, sculpted a chunk of blue Play-Doh into Popplio, a Pokemon character. She was at a table next to other students who colored and decorated cookies before two miniature therapy horses wearing sneakers trotted into the room Wednesday for the university’s De-Stress Fest.

“I know I still have to do all that work, but coming here I’m able to take some time off to hang out with friends, have fun and empty my mind for a little bit,” said Delgado, who lives on the Southwest Side. “It’s like a refresh. My mind is nice and clear so when I go to start my homework, I’m well focused.”

As the semester nears its end — and students pull all-nighters to cram for exams, type papers and finish projects that weigh heavily on final grades — colleges in the Chicago area are taking steps to help students manage stress. It’s part of a broader approach to focus on students’ mental health and expand proactive outreach efforts instead of waiting for students to seek help. Local schools this week are offering activities ranging from animal visits at Roosevelt to a bubble-wrapped room at the University of Illinois at Chicago to the long-standing tradition of a stress-busting primal scream at Northwestern University.

More:

At Northwestern, “because of the hectic academic pace that exists here, it is stressful and very pressure-packed,” university spokesman Alan Cubbage said.

Students can blow off steam with a visit from miniature horses Friday and release their frustration through a campuswide scream, in which students let out a collective yell at 9 p.m. Sunday before finals week. Next week, a number of activities such as Lego building, board games, midnight coffee breaks and late-night breakfast are planned for exam relief.

More:

The series of events UIC hosts during finals week helps junior Liz Huss manage stress in a healthful way.

Students got a visit from comfort dogs Wednesday and are invited next week to pop bubble wrap at the student center, get chair massages, do candlelight yoga and leave notes of encouragement for fellow students.

“I like to take 10, 15, 20 minutes to rejuvenate, reflect and relax, and these events really help with that,” said Huss, an accounting major.

I’m sure that the large professional services firm that she may one day seek to join will be more than happy to bend over backwards to accommodate Liz Huss’s artificially-instilled need to reach for the soothing presence of a “comfort dog” whenever the going gets tough.

More:

For Andersonville resident Rob Chesler, a junior at Roosevelt, stress can motivate him to get his work done. But he also welcomed the distraction of the De-Stress Fest, during which he took a selfie with Lunar, the oldest miniature horse from the Barrington-based nonprofit Mane in Heaven.

“If you’re living in this world of hard work every second of every hour of your life, then you’re not going to be happy and you’re just going to be all about work,” he said. “If you have little horses every now and then, you have moments where you can just breathe and enjoy life.”

Little horses for everyone!

Fortunately there are also voices of sanity:

Clay Routledge, psychology professor at North Dakota State University, believes universities should be promoting psychological strength and resilience, not coddling students.

“I’m not ignorant to the fact there are vulnerable students that need services,” he said. “I’m not against that at all. My criticism is: Are we promoting more broadly a culture of sensitivity and victimhood than we need to do?”

Many colleges and universities are becoming more than educational institutions and overreaching by not letting students figure things out on their own, he said.

“We need to promote toughness and strength, and we know from decades of research that humans are extremely resilient,” Routledge said. “You have to have real stressors in life. You have to fail. You have to be embarrassed and you have to face situations where you’re wrong and you’re challenged — and you’ll be strong as a result.”

A rare voice arguing for building resilience the way that university has done for decades, if not centuries – focusing on the academia, not seeking to micromanage every moment of each student’s pastoral experience on campus, and letting them grow through trial, error and experience. Expect Professor Clay Routledge to be blacklisted by the social justice / identity politics cultists at his university and drummed out of his job any day now.

I have always found American universities to be slightly odd places. Having spent a reasonable amount of time on various campuses in the Mid-West, I have always been struck by the way that universities do not treat their students like autonomous adults to the extent that one might expect in Britain.

Despite eye-wateringly high tuition and accommodation costs, undergraduates are usually expected to share a small room with a roommate, at least in their first year, an almost unheard-of indignity for British students (who would probably feel the same way about this as Americans would feel about staying in one of the NHS’s communal hospital wards rather than having a private room of their own). American universities often see fit to correspond with the parents of students as though they are still school children rather than adults over the age of eighteen, old enough to wear the uniform and fight for their country (though not old enough to drink). These, and many other odd customs, long predate the social justice and identity politics craze which has infected Western academia.

But while customs and practices such as these treat students as though they are not quite yet fully-grown adults, the new trend for safe spaces and infantilising activities masquerading as “stress relief” are of a different order because they effectively serve to stunt any further emotional growth, making it harder for students to ever become autonomous, successful adults.

Making an eighteen-year-old incurring $60,000 of annual student debt sleep three yards away from a roommate is one thing. Treating students as though they are fragile and unresilient children who need bubble wrap, puppy videos and therapy horses to make it through the academic year effectively becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, ensuring that they enter the world utterly unprepared to function in a society and labour market which does not put their feelings and emotional health on a pedestal.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt joked about this when he compared two fictional universities – Strengthen University and Coddle University – in a lecture / college recruitment pitch given to high school seniors. But more and more, Haidt’s send-up of Coddle University is coming to pass and being made real on campuses across America, and in Britain too:

We are based on a very simple psychology which is that people are fragile. People are so easily hurt. Anything that upsets you could trigger trauma, repressed trauma, unrepressed trauma, trauma that you somehow put up there in the closet and forgot to take – there’s trauma all over your mind and your memory. And we don’t want to trigger your trauma. That could damage you.

And this is especially true for members of the six protected classes [women, African Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ, differently abled, and Native Americans]. If you are a member of one of the six marginalised and oppressed groups you are especially vulnerable. You’ve been traumatised and oppressed your whole lives. Microaggression theory teaches us that when people repeatedly cut these little nicks, these little insults, these little exclusions, they don’t develop calluses, they bleed to death. And so we will not let you be cut while you are at Coddle. We will protect you. Now don’t try to do it yourself, that’s very dangerous. WE will protect YOU from aggression.

At Coddle University we offer access to therapists 24/7. Just dial 811 from any phone, or we have this new feature – just raise three fingers, go like this [he gestures] and we have sensors all around campus, go like this and a therapist will be airlifted right into you.

University is supposed to be stressful. Balancing the academic workload and social events and newfound freedom away from the family home is supposed to develop key skills required to navigate the world as an independent adult later in life. Shipping in a bunch of therapy horses onto campus is not “offer[ing] students opportunities to learn self-care”, as one University of Missouri jobsworth claims, because it simulates an environment which will not exist outside of the university campus.

There are no therapy horses laid on for employees in the average workplace. Teaching students to survive daily stress by reaching for Play Doh and therapy animals is like training an astronaut to undertake spacewalks while failing to simulate the essential conditions of weightlessness and limited oxygen supply, and every bit as likely to lead to disaster.

But still the universities teach this nonsense and lay on these extravagant, infantilising services, unaware or unconcerned that they are setting their students up for failure the moment they set foot off campus.

 

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Safe Space Notice - 2

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Will The Social Justice Revolution Ever Stop Eating Its Own?

Samuel Hooper6 Comments

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Slowly, tentatively, a few identity politics activists are starting to question their current scorched earth tactics and the unforgiving way that they tackle “heresy” within their own ranks. But will it make a difference?

Everyday Feminism may be the go-to site for all things Social Justice, but at least one writer there has started to display some unusual self-awareness, questioning whether the constant backbiting, jockeying for position and competitive victimhood within the activist world might actually be doing more harm than good.

Kai Cheng Thom, a self-described Chinese trans woman writer, poet, and performance artist, writes:

When I found activist culture, with its powerful ideas about privilege and oppression and its simmering, explosive rage, I was intoxicated. I thought that I could purge my self-hatred with that fiery rhetoric and create the family I wanted so much with the bond that comes from shared trauma.

Social justice was a set of rules that could finally put the world into an order that made sense to me. If I could only use all the right language, do enough direct action, be critical enough of the systems around me, then I could finally be a good person.

All around me, it felt like my activist community was doing the same thing – throwing ourselves into “the revolution,” exhausting ourselves and burning out, watching each other for oppressive thoughts and behavior and calling each other on it vociferously.

Occasionally – rarely – folks were driven out of community for being “fucked up.” More often, though, attempts to hold people accountable through call-outs and exclusion just exploded into huge online flame wars and IRL drama that left deep rifts in community for years. Only the most vulnerable – folks without large friend groups and social stability – were excluded permanently.

Like my blood family, my activist family was re-enacting the trauma that we had experienced at the hands of an oppressive society.

Credit where it is due – this is a mature and thoughtful observation, especially from somebody in the thick of the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics. It cannot be easy to admit such a glaring flaw in one’s own social movement, so kudos to Kai for doing so.

This is actually one of the aspects of the whole social justice phenomenon which fascinates me the most – the dual scrambles to both climb the victimhood pyramid and claim the most “oppressions” while also seeking to be the most fastidious observer of the new rules laid down to govern how people speak and interact with one another.

For me, it crystallised with the story in Britain of NUS LGBT officer Fran Cowling, who sanctimoniously and publicly refused to share a stage with lifelong gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, on the grounds that he was insufficiently enthusiastic about banning the speech of people who disagree with the current orthodoxy about transgender issues.

As I wrote at the time:

It is obvious that NUS LGBT officer Fran Cowling is attempting to gain a vast amount of social currency and standing from her peers by trying to take down Peter Tatchell, an A-lister in activist circles. By refusing to share a stage with him, Cowling is effectively declaring to the world that she is morally superior to Tatchell, he having failed the latest racism and transphobia tests. Thus, she can bank all of Tatchell’s personal accomplishments for herself, add the fact that unlike him she is not a “transphobe”, and Win the Game.

And that’s the rotten core of today’s student identity politics movement. A constant, bitchy, backbiting game of snakes and ladders, with one insufferable petty tyrant rising to the top of the Moral Virtue Pyramid only to be brought down by their jealous rivals, either for no reason at all, or for having unknowingly violated one of the many red lines that they themselves helped to draw across our political discourse.

Too often the internal machinations and politicking of these activist movements seem to vastly overshadow any possible good that they may seek to accomplish. Too often it seems that social justice warriors are more interested in enforcing arbitrary rules and squashing dissent than actually making tangible efforts to help the people on whose behalf they claim to speak.

Kai Cheng Thom goes on to quote an anonymous writer:

There are no activist communities, only the desire for communities, or the convenient fiction of communities. A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence…

If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community.

At present, social justice activists are very proficient at excluding and excommunicating those who stray from the One True Path. Never mind agnostics or opponents; many SJW communities will excommunicate fellow members for little more than not being fully up to speed on the latest terminology – a constantly changing glossary of “correct” and “incorrect” words.

In other words, as Kai puts it, many activists currently operate according to the philosophy that “if I could only use all the right language, do enough direct action, be critical enough of the systems around me, then I could finally be a good person”. It is almost a points-based system. Attend enough protests, share enough memes on social media, parrot enough orthodoxy and avoid committing too many mistakes and in time you will “level up”. Fail to keep up with the herd, however, and you will be left in the wilderness.

Kai Cheng Thom’s article at least suggests that there are growing glimmers of awareness that this approach is a) not working, and b) hardly an appropriate way to live the values that they preach.

For in truth, the social justice movement is a symptom of the only real kind of privilege left out there – rich, Western country privilege. That’s not to say that racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia have been fully vanquished – clearly not. But the fact that so many people in the English-speaking Western world are now able to devote such significant amounts of time to activism tackling the remaining vestiges of oppression in their own back yards is itself a sign that we live in unprecedentedly prosperous and egalitarian times.

In large part, social justice activism is nothing more than a luxury pursuit, indulged in primarily by those people who have the fortune to be attending college or university in one or other of the richest and most prosperous democratic countries on this Earth. Anyone marching in a campus protest to restrict the rights and freedoms of other people to say things which they may find offensive would, if they actually took the words “social justice” remotely seriously, immediately redirect their anger toward those benighted parts of the world where racial minorities, women, gay, transgender and disabled people face overt and often physical hostility. Yet for some reason the social justice community often has little negative to say about many of these places, while remaining ever-ready to criticise the good-faith efforts of those closer to home.

And the online obergruppenführers of this petty, thin-skinned self-actualisation cult, this morally lost movement, have grown accustomed to consolidating their power by doing the one thing they claim to be most against – oppressing and marginalising other people, in this case those who step out of line and deliberately or accidentally say, think or do the “wrong” thing.

It is wonderful that some of these cultists may be starting to realise the error of their ways. For as Kai says, “only the most vulnerable – folks without large friend groups and social stability – [are] excluded permanently”. And why is that the case?

Because at its rotten heart, the social justice movement can be most likened to that quintessential bastion of “white privilege”, the suburban country club. The club has many strict rules. Arcane rules which are often incomprehensible to outsiders. Rules which must be acknowledged and obeyed, and only ever flouted if one has sufficient social currency within the group to get away with it.

That is what the social justice movement has become. A virtual, worldwide country club for privileged young millennials and some aged hangers-on in academia, easy to join (so long as one passes ideological inspection) but swift to exclude those caught breaking the finicky, ever-changing rules. A club in which anyone and everyone is ultimately disposable in the neverending competition for power and status.

Can the social justice revolution ever stop eating its own? I don’t see how. Most of those at the country club’s core seem motivated primarily by the desire to feast on the shortcomings and innocent mistakes of others. Take that inducement away and they may as well just join their nearest fraternity or sorority, fully embracing the “social” aspect and ceasing to feign an interest in “justice” altogether.

 

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 48 – Insufferable Middle Class SJWs Decide To ‘Liberate’ Working Class Students

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

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Working class people at Oxbridge do not need to be “liberated” and turned into a designated victim group by meddling, power-hungry campus SJWs

Apparently St. Hilda’s College at Oxford University plans to appoint a “class liberation officer” to watch over the welfare of lower-income students and formally enshrine their status as an official victim group to be fussed over and grievously pitied by the over-active university SJWs.

Huffington Post reports:

An Oxford University college is to appoint a “class liberation officer” to protect working-class students from being called “chavs” or being insulted over Primark clothes.

Students at St Hilda’s College voted to create the post after it was suggested that working-class students are under-represented at the prestigious university and suffer from “microaggressions” and classism.

According to the motion, the post will act “in a similar way” to appointments including the “RE Officer, LGBTQ+ Officer, Women’s Officer and Disabilities Officer to represent students who self-identify as being part of this group.”

One student at the college told the Sunday Times: “Insults such as ‘chav’, chav-themed social nights and questions such as ‘why are you wearing Primark?’ can make poor students feel upset and worthless.”

This is absolutely pitiful, yet entirely emblematic of the way that the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics works on a university campus level. Identity politics cultists only maintain their power and influence by claiming to speak on behalf of various “oppressed” groups, and by exaggerating that oppression to comical proportions in order to justify the various perks and restrictions on free expression which are inevitably demanded. And this inevitably leads to a ratchet effect, with more and more subgroups of people being identified as “vulnerable” or “oppressed”, and ever-smaller problems being cast as intolerable harms done to them.

It was therefore only a matter of time until the overwhelmingly middle class SJW brigades decided that the next involuntary beneficiaries of their enlightened do-goodery would be working class students, none of whom require a dedicated student union officer to fight their corner. In fact, there is nothing more patronising and offensive to students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds than the idea that they somehow cannot make it on their own at Oxford without the help of dedicated student union officials protecting them from harm.

Jacob Furedi says it best:

I heartily concur. I grew up in a poor, single-parent household in Essex and attended Cambridge University, and in my time there I was never made to feel unwelcome or at risk of emotional “harm” because of insults about my background. In fact, I would have chafed at the very idea that some busybody union official saw it as their duty to watch over me, as though I were any less capable of navigating university life than a privately-educated fifth generation Oxbridge student.

This move by St. Hilda’s college to create a so-called Class Liberation Officer is offensive beyond measure, and any good that might come from preventing or punishing random insults is vastly outweighed by the further segregation of the student body in to separate rival special interest groups, perpetually jockeying for position and seeking to cast themselves as the most oppressed in order to gain maximum perks and benefits.

From my personal experience fifteen years ago, Oxbridge students are smart and sensitive, and more than capable of forming friendships across racial, religious or socio-economic divides without the help of some godawful student union facilitator or the constant invigilation of a “liberation officer”. But you know the one surefire way to immediately make everybody painfully conscious of class and economic status? Yep, you guessed it – seek to actively divide the student body along these lines and you create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Working class students, just like working class people outside of the increasingly rotten university system, are of absolutely equal intrinsic worth to those from wealthier backgrounds. What’s more, they are more than capable of organising and standing up for their own interests when occasionally necessary throughout history (see Selina Todd’s excellent book “The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class” for a great narrative), and pulling together as part of the broader society the rest of the time.

Working class people do not need rescuing or “liberating” from “oppression”, least of all by busybody SJWs on the lookout for more victim groups to represent. To be liberated, one must first be enslaved. And if pinch-faced, upper middle class SJW do-gooders at Oxford view poorer students or the other minority groups under their watch as slaves then they should urgently check their privilege, for they are the only real oppressors in town.

 

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Top Image: Andrew Shiva / Wikimedia Commons

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 47 – An ‘Everyday Feminism’ Thanksgiving

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

The Everyday Feminism “Post-Election Thanksgiving Fact Sheet to Help You Prove Oppression Exists” is so deliciously beyond parody that it almost defies analysis too.

Kim Tran, who is “finishing her Ph.D in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley” (naturally), writes:

“Thanksgiving” is a weird time when we get stuck with conservative family members who might trigger us so much that it feels almost impossible to formulate a sentence.

Especially this year – when the entire election cycle seemed dominated by not just sexism, but sexual assault and not just “colorblind” racism, but racial terror – we may find ourselves at a loss for how to make an appeal to our conservative uncles, cousins, and parents.

Trust me when I say I know how hard that can be.

Yes, there will be thousands of people twitching uncontrollably on the floor around the Thanksgiving dinner table this year, having been exposed to unwanted contradictory opinions and triggered beyond all endurance.

I’m not quite sure what Thanksgiving has done to deserve the special quotation marks in Tran’s introduction, though. Perhaps this is an allusion to the fact that the SJWs who read Everyday Feminism have little to give thanks for at the present time. And truly, one should feel sympathy for them. Previous generations of Americans who lived through the Civil War, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, two world wars and Jim Crow and still managed to celebrate Thanksgiving have no idea just how hard today’s pampered young millenials have it, or how very little they have to give thanks for now that Donald Trump is about to take possession of the White House.

Oh, and let’s note Tran’s acknowledgement of “conservative uncles”, but not of conservative aunts. What’s this? Erasing the identity and lived experience of conservative women? Tut tut, very oppressive.

I’m definitely not saying to cross boundaries of physical or emotional safety. I am, however, hoping white allies can show up really hard right now because, well, we need you. We need you to be uncomfortable so that queer folks, undocumented people, Muslims, survivors, and countless others can feel safe.

Lord, have mercy. If I was a white person in Kim Tran’s acquaintance I would sooner spend Thanksgiving shut away on my own with a cheerless $1 microwave meal for dinner than spend one of the most beautiful holidays in the American calendar being lectured by some screechy SJW about how I’m not doing enough to make people who broke federal immigration laws feel sufficiently warm, fuzzy and safe.

But it gets better:

So particularly, if you are one of the few of the cohort of white progressives/radicals/do gooders, we need you to go ahead and call-in Randy, Travis, and Becky. I’ll even give you the cold hard facts to help you feel more comfortable doing it.

Woah. So let me get this straight. Kim Tran lives and studies at the prestigious UC Berkeley in California, the golden state, finishing a PhD in “Ethnic Studies” which would be utterly useless in the real world, but will equip her perfectly for a lifetime of tenured service on a university faculty perpetrating the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics. Basically, she has it made. And from this lofty position she sees fit to mock people called Randy or Travis, all of whom must (to her mind) be backward, ill-educated, prejudiced, tobacco-chewing hillbillies whose presence has is graciously tolerated, once a year, by the socially and morally enlightened readers of Everyday Feminism.

In other words, Kim Tran is stuck so far up her own backside that she openly mocks and belittles other people with more Southern-sounding names and zip codes, yet still considers herself the oppressed minority in America. It doesn’t occur to her that living in the Golden State and embarking on a career where she will be paid – paid! – to churn out meaningless identity politics drivel might, just might mean that she is more privileged than the stereotypical white male trailer park inhabitant in Appalachia whom she so evidently despises. Marvellous, absolutely marvellous.

The rest of the Thanksgiving Fact Sheet is the usual blend of lies and distorted propaganda pumped out by the SJW brigade – like the idea that one in five women will be raped in their lifetime, and one in four sexually assaulted at college, both of which statistics have been debunked more times than one can count.

Then we get airy assertions about illegal immigration, like:

Lots of immigrants do different jobs from natives because they have limited English language or technical skills, or because they have insufficient exposure to the US workplace. For instance the most popular occupation for undocumented workers is “maids and housekeepers,” while the most popular occupation for native workers is “cashier.”

My emphasis in bold.

Note the insidious switching between talking about “undocumented ” workers and immigrants in general, all part of the SJW masterplan to normalise illegal immigration.

Then we get damaging claims that oppression is somehow so endemic that “people of colour” (what a stupid term – and being one myself, I can say so) shouldn’t even bother trying to succeed on their own merits:

Pulling Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps Is Almost Impossible (If You’re A Person Of Color).

The idea behind the American Dream goes a little something like this: if you work hard, you can achieve economic success and comfort. Unfortunately, that’s not true for the vast majority of people of color.

One of the first steps to this kind of “success” is school and the school to prison pipeline predetermines students of color “as violent and in need of reform.”

Note how Kim Tran strips “people of colour” (ugh) of any agency or responsibility for their own lives, decisions and circumstances. This is the true tyranny of low expectations, and will succeed only in bolstering some people’s sense that they belong to a permanent victim class, focused largely on historic injustice rather than present opportunity.

And then for dessert:

Climate Change Is Real And It Affects Communities Of Color The Most

It’s important to mention that communities of color are most impacted by climate change and human-created environmental racism.

Three quarters of hazardous waste landfill sites are in Black and Latinx neighborhoods.  Moreover, during natural disasters like the recent hurricane in Haiti, women are often the last to escape, because they tend to prioritize the safety of their family and children.

Well, Black Lives Matter UK would agree strongly, at least.

I hope you are in a good mood to celebrate Thanksgiving now, having been lectured by Kim Tran and Everyday Feminism about how everything you are, everything you do and everything you love is basically evil and oppressive. And I know that “factsheets” like this one will make you really want to reexamine your own beliefs and reach out to the other side in a spirit of mutual trust and understanding. I know I sure do. Or maybe not.

This year, #JeSuisTravis.

 

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