SJWs

Three Little SJWs From School

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

The Mikado poster

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Nobody’s safe, for they care for none

I must admit that I have been waiting for this one. I knew that it was only a matter of time before the social justice censors came for The Mikado, that beloved Gilbert & Sullivan operetta set in a highly fictionalized version of Japan, and here we are.

(My other long-standing test for the final capitulation of our society to the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics is the inevitable future banning of George Gershwin’s sublime Piano Concerto in F, a work of jazz and blues rendered in classical form for orchestra, due to its “cultural appropriation” of musical forms pioneered by African Americans. I guarantee you that this will happen, and that picket lines will appear outside the Lincoln Center and Walt Disney Concert Hall much sooner than you think.)

Back to the present day, though, and Fort Hays State University has become the latest epicenter of SJW protests after the FHSU Music and Theatre student organization dared to put on a production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “The Mikado”.

Campus Reform reports:

Some students at Fort Hays State University (FHSU) in Kansas say a school-sponsored operetta production is not only “racist,” but also rife with “cultural appropriation.”

Naturally, the idea of an operetta based on late-nineteenth century stereotypes of Japanese culture and customs provided the perfect opportunity for various SJW saviour types to go charging to the defence of any innocent contemporary Japanese (or Japanese-American) people who may be offended. Never mind that the real target of W. S. Gilbert’s humour in The Mikado, as in so many of his works, is British bureaucracy and imperial custom. No; instead we must see only artistic cruelty and the helpless victimhood of a designated minority group.

One of the most damaging facets of the current craze for scouring old artistic treasures for reasons to hate and ostentatiously denounce them is the fact that everything interesting about the work in question must take a backseat to the confected outrage of the professionally offended. And sometimes the outrage obscures truly interesting detail, such as that noted by Caroline Crampton in the New Statesman:

Gilbert and Sullivan were first and foremost creating a satire, not a musical comedy. They were working at a time of wide-ranging, if implicit, censorship of the theatre, where easily affronted middle-class audiences would simply not turn up if a work had a whiff of scandal or immorality about it. Gilbert himself likened the challenge of being a late-19th-century dramatist to “doing a hornpipe in fetters”.

Like Shakespeare hundreds of years earlier, using a fictional version of Italy to host his comedies about the Elizabethan court, Gilbert and Sullivan used their “Japan” as a proxy to enable them to satirise the very middle-class audiences they courted. The Mikado’s central plot device that I find so frustrating – that flirting is a crime punishable by death – is a dig at the theat­rical censorship that would not allow any extramarital romance to be portrayed on the London stage.

Utterly ignorant of this nuance and context, a Fort Hays State student going by the name of Fatima took it upon herself to deface several of the posters advertising the event, attaching a semi-literate rebuttal in which she takes W.S. Gilbert to task for being insufficiently woke:

 

The student’s list of accusations against the production is long and rambling:

The Mikado is racist for many reasons so when I saw the Dr. Joseph Perniciaro picked this for the opera I was appalled. The Mikado is cultural appropriation, it is RACIST, it is “yellow face”, and it sure as hell shouldn’t be a production that still exists.

To begin, the opera is about Japanese People … *BUT* … it is being performed here at Fort Hays State University with an all NON-ASIAN CAST.

Quelle horreur – the student musical theater group failed to observe the unwritten rule that characters of a certain race can only be portrayed by actors of the same race. Presumably, Fatima the Outraged Student is also up in arms that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton dares to use an all-minority cast to tell the story of the white male Alexander Hamilton’s rise and rivalry with fellow white male Aaron Burr. Except of course that we all know that Fatima would cheer this casting.

The charge sheet continues:

All this production is, is an exaggeration of Japanese stereotypes. The actors put on kimonos, black wigs, color their brows black, wear sandals, use fans and small umbrellas, *OH* – and also put white powder on their face. ‘Blackface’ is universally unacceptable, so why is it okay to do a ‘yellowface’ production? Well, NEWSFLASH, it’s not. If this production was about African American people, it WOULD NOT be cast with all white people.

Absolutely. My mother took me to a production of The Mikado at the English National Opera when I was a teenager and now when I think of modern Japan, I immediately picture severe-eyebrowed, black haired warrior men and porcelain-skinned, umbrella-twirling Geishas. The world’s third largest economy and historical imperial power has never had any opportunity whatsoever to export its true culture and neither have I, a citizen of the United Kingdom with two eyes, a (Japanese brand) television set and an internet connection ever had the opportunity to see real Japanese culture and creations for myself.

More:

The show was created by Gilbert and Sullivan (who are known for such racist productions) in the late 1800’s, and it reduced the Japanese culture to an item of curiosity, fetishizing them for a profit.

I think that the widespread Western fetishization of certain things Japanese began somewhat later than 1885 and with very little assistance from late Victorian operetta, but how thoughtful, how brave of this FHSU student to get outraged at the cultural misrepresentation of Japanese people who lived and died a century before she was born, and who undoubtedly practised meticulous open-minded tolerance at every opportunity in their own lives.

This production was not okay when it was created and it definitely isn’t ok today – like COME ON, it’s 2018. Not to mention that they had to cut the N-WORD out to make it more acceptable *(like that changed how racist it was)*.

Yes, this student actually wrote the phrase “like COME ON”.

On a semantic point, how can something be both a stereotype and cultural appropriation? At one point FHSU’s student censor claims that The Mikado is based on an inaccurate pastiche of Japanese culture and custom, and on the other she accuses Gilbert & Sullivan of cultural appropriation. But how can one culturally appropriate a stereotype? And if a stereotype is culturally appropriated, who is actually harmed? Surely not the Japanese people (either contemporary or those of 1885), since what appears on stage was not a true representation of their lives when it first appeared, and certainly bears no resemblance to life in the technologically advanced, urbanised Japan of today. If one were particularly sensitive and pedantic one could say that The Mikado is glib and insulting, but cultural appropriation is an inaccurate charge.

But on a broader level, I am intrigued about the other contradictions inherent in this charge against The Mikado. Japan is a rich, powerful and historically imperial nation, and has certainly not always been a childishly innocent or benevolent actor on the world stage. Modern-day Japanese cultural and commercial reach is strong, though curiously Japan itself does not have a reputation as a cultural melting-pot particularly welcoming to immigrants. Japanese people are among the most privileged in the world, and scarcely in need of defence by do-gooder social justice warriors, fighting on their behalf from American university campuses.

Would the FHSU students protesting The Mikado also be up in arms at a production lampooning the British, either historical or contemporary? Obviously not, because Britain has been placed squarely into the White Imperialist Aggressor box, and therefore made ineligible for sympathy or outrage when her citizens or culture are mocked, parodied or criticised. Yet Japanese imperial “crimes” in recent history are real. People alive today still bear witness to them. So what precisely is it which pardons and rehabilitates Japan in the eyes of SJWs but continues to damn countries such as Britain and America?

The answer can only be a resoundingly arrogant, America-centric view of the world – a quasi-imperial view, if you will, expounded by the identity politics Left. This worldview assumes firstly that the supposed experience of a Japanese individual is the same as a Japanese-American individual, that both are in need of defending against the risk of offence or emotional harm. and that it is the place of American university students who can barely string together a coherent paragraph to act as self-appointed guardians of their wellbeing. But the Japanese are certainly not a persecuted minority in their own country, and thus far the only publicised objections to The Mikado have come from outside Japan. It takes a peculiar kind of arrogance to think that the Japanese culture and people are so weak as to need the help of American campus SJWs.

The English National Opera regularly stages productions of The Mikado. One of the ENO’s corporate partners is the Japanese piano manufacturer Yamaha. If there were any organic upset or consternation at the continued staging of this operetta whatsoever then Yamaha, a Japanese corporation, conscious of its domestic reputation and eager to avoid being associated with a supposedly white supremacist event, might well consider ending its association with the opera company. They do not do so because there are probably only a handful of individuals on Earth who are genuinely upset at the existence of The Mikado, and of those souls an infintessimally small number would actually be Japanese, the rest comprising of deluded young Western campus activists with too much time on their hands and not enough legitimate causes to support.

In fact, a similar protest did apparently take place in 2014 when another musical theater group dared to put on a production of The Mikado in Providence, Rhode Island. The Taiwanese individual who launched that particular protest was at least willing to countenance possible acceptable productions of the work:

I am aware of a production that had Asian actors in the lead roles while wearing British costumes. There is also a film “The Mikado Project” by chil kong, that shows an Asian-American theatre company producing the opera. These are both great moves. I can support a production of this material that shows some consciousness of the present day, but not a straightforward, uncritical celebration of these 1800s racial stereotypes.

The decidedly non-Japanese student(s) who launched this latest protest at Fort Hays State University, on the other hand, think that only total censorship and banishment of the work down the memory hole will do, proving that each concession to the authoritarian, regressive Left only fuels and encourages even more draconian future demands.

There is no victory great enough to sate their appetites because ultimately this is not about protecting a beleaguered minority (I have yet to read of instances of Japanese people traumatised by Gilbert & Sullivan) but rather about the exercise of power by identity politics-soaked leftist activists.

We tolerate this illiberal, censorious nonsense at our peril. Allow the SJW brigade to take down The Mikado and it will be swiftly on to the next target.

 

The Mikado - racist - cultural appropriation - FHSU

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Laurie Penny, Gaslighter

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Laurie Penny

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According to Laurie Penny, conservatives are the true enemies of free speech and the illiberal student activists who beat them up, ‘no platform’ their speakers and disrupt their events are merely questioning the establishment

As they stagger on under the “leadership” of Theresa May, this Conservative government continues to cast about aimlessly for some kind of raison d’être, a justification for showing up for work in the morning which sounds marginally more noble than “because daytime TV sucks”.

And so it came to pass that the unremarkable minister for universities, Jo Johnson, decided to jump on the increasingly popular right-wing bandwagon of bashing identity politics, demanding that universities uphold a commitment to free speech and promise not to use no-platforming or safe spaces to suppress the exchange of ideas on pain of being fined or even deregistered as an institution by the Office for Students.

This is all incredibly boring. Jo Johnson was head of the Downing Street Policy Unit from 2013-2015 under David Cameron, right at the time when illiberal identity politics zealots were cementing their power. If Johnson had a burning desire to protect free speech, he could have persuaded Cameron to take up the cause. He did not do so. It is also curious that he now wants to become a crusader for free speech when working for an authoritarian prime minister whose every instinct points the opposite way, toward more regulation and censorship. In short, this whole thing is a PR stunt by a rudderless Tory Party chasing headlines rather than following an ideological compass.

But all this is only to be expected. More noteworthy is the response to Johnson’s posturing by identity politics priestess Laurie Penny, who took to the New Statesman to claim not just that conservatives are exaggerating the threat to free speech but that it is entirely a figment of their imagination.

Penny’s article begins dishonestly, and then gets worse:

The nonsensical consensus amongst the centre-right that today’s students are a bunch of censorious cry-babies plays well with the base, so Johnson Minor has jumped on the rickety bandwagon barreling down the road to the palace of convenient fictions, where a delicate banquet of delusion will be served to those whose cash and status protect them from ever having to hear their opinions questioned by a bunch of rowdy kids.

Conservatives seeking protection from having their opinions questioned? This is an interesting inversion. Rather than trying to minimise the issue and argue that the threat to free speech on campus has perhaps been blown out of proportion and is perhaps not as bad as portrayed, Laurie Penny insists – rather shamelessly – that the problem does not exist at all, that it is all a figment of our imagination.

Penny must be a secret neo-conservative fan girl because this is a consummate Karl Rove strategy, whereby she shamelessly accuses her opponents of the identity politics Left’s own glaring flaws. Where is the lengthy list of prominent left-wing speakers who have been banned from college campuses by conservatives? Where are the left-wing professors who fear for their job security if they question conservative ideas? Where are the left-wing students expelled or suspended from college because they made conservatives feel “unsafe” and contributed to a hostile, non-inclusive atmosphere? They don’t exist.

The problem is not that crusty old establishment figures are upset that brave, radical students are questioning their judgment. The problem is that these illiberal students do not merely question ideas, they actively suppress them on the grounds that they amount to dangerous “hate speech” with the power to wound or even kill. Yet through immense self-deception, Penny is able to cast actions which deliberately prevent speech from taking place as mere protest:

This is a non-controversy, and it’s unbelievable that otherwise intelligent commentators are taking it seriously. “No-platforming” is just another word for student protest – the practice of opposing invited speakers with bigoted views is a time-honoured one. The cooked-up row over “student censorship” is led by the sort of trembly-whiskered outrage-merchants for whom “censorship” means “making me feel bad about holding certain views”.

But protesting an idea and infringing on the rights of another person to express that idea are two very different things. One could excuse any act of violent oppression using Penny’s logic. “But lynching is just another word for protest”, said the Klansman to the sheriff as he was caught red-handed tying a noose. “I believe that black men are a menacing sexual threat to white women. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, I sincerely believe that it is and on that basis you have no right to stop me stringing up DeShawn over here for making my wife stare at him lustfully”.

And so it is with the SJWs. They sincerely believe that words are violence (or at least some of them do – I can’t help but think the smarter ones know full well that words are not deadly, but pretend that they are as justification for censoring unwanted ideas) and on that basis they claim the right to “protest” by shutting down the offensive speech, preventing it from taking place or exacting severe physical, financial or bureaucratic consequences for the speaker who dares to persist.

Laurie Penny continues:

There is, I ought to say, a rhetorical difference here that causes some confusion. Today’s students are simply more likely to use the language of empathy and trauma in their politics. They’re more likely, initially, to say “this book about how women aren’t really human might make some of us feel unsafe” than they are to say “this book is bullshit”. They’re more likely to say “you’re doing harm” than they are to say “fuck you”.

This is partly because a lot of today’s young radicals come from demographics for whom it’s far more dangerous to say “fuck you”. They are young women, young queer people, young people of colour. Their way of questioning authority is simply less actively aggressive. Today’s angry young people are more likely to show you their scars than their fists. That might be passive-aggressive, but it’s not politically unsound.

This is nonsense. Today’s SJWs and Antifa (the movement’s Faith Militant) are equally happy inflicting scars as they are flaunting their own to garner sympathy. It doesn’t take long to dig up both high-profile and more obscure cases where the pseudo-victimhood of supposedly marginalised and oppressed groups morphed suddenly into violent aggression on campus.

Witness student Bonita Tindle pushing and shoving a white male student who had the temerity to wear his hair in dreadlocks. Witness the recent incident at University of California – Santa Cruz, in which protesters shut down a meeting of the College Republicans and one protester claimed that she literally felt unsafe meeting in a library which was previously used by college Republicans. Witness the aggression of Jerelyn Luther getting hysterical about Halloween costumes. Witness Black Lives Matter shutting down an ACLU free speech event at William and Mary College, holding up banners declaring that speech kills. Note, too, the rising trend of outraged leftists demanding that speakers and publishers of wrongthink retract their “harmful” ideas and articles rather than going to the effort of disproving them. The Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics is causing many on the Left to forget how to argue at all.

Laurie Penny dismisses the current ideological focus on “harm” as a mere difference in rhetoric compared to previous generations, which is blatantly false. If you think a prominent idea is “bullshit” and evidently false then you generally relish the opportunity to publicly tear it down and discredit its proponents. But the SJWs do not do this. All too often, they don’t even attempt to engage with the substance because they claim that even hearing contrary thoughts expressed will do them physical and emotional harm.

There is hardly a shortage of literature and academic research on the rise of victimhood culture and learned fragility/unresilience. One thinks particularly of the paper “Microagression and Moral Cultures” by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, which discussed the difference between dignity, honour and victimhood cultures, or Jonathan Haidt’s development of these ideas.

Laurie Penny is doing a fantastic job of telling often well-meaning leftists exactly what they want to hear. She seeks to assuage any doubts that some wavering souls may feel about their movement’s snarling illiberalism by waving away any concerns as the desperate squeaking of a racist, misogynist old guard who are simply upset at the loss of their hegemony. After all, it is much easier to dismiss concern as the self-interest of oppressive powers rather than reflect on the ideological oppression they themselves are inflicting in the name of social justice.

But in telling conservatives that persistent, concrete efforts by the Left to paint their ideas as intolerably extremist and forbid their expression on campus are merely imagined, Penny is actively gaslighting. She is engaging in that coercive, manipulative behaviour more common to spousal abusers by portraying her opponents as crazy and flat-out denying observable reality in order to delegitimise conservative concerns about free speech suppression.

That Laurie Penny feels able to lie and deceive so freely in the pages of the New Statesman shows just how strong the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics has become. Adherents to this illiberal, censorious cult no longer fear being discredited or held to account for their lies. So complete is their control over academia and so cowed and enslaved are the media and many politicians that people like Laurie Penny can now create their own reality and demand that others accept it as real.

If a conservative were to insist that capitalism was completely flawless or deny that poverty exists, they would be laughed out of town and rightly lose all credibility. Yet Laurie Penny can use her exalted perch in the New Statesman to deny that things we can all see taking place on Western university campuses are even happening at all, yet still be taken seriously the next time she spouts off on TV.

That’s the protective power of the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics at work.

That’s how close conservatives and defenders of free speech are to losing this war.

 

Gaslighting definition - Dr Robin Stern

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 52 – Gustavus Adolphus College, Illegal Immigration And A Failure Of Intellectual Curiosity

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Illegal Immigration - White Supremacy - Gustavus Adolphus College - Poster

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The Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics takes a fierce, perverse pride in refusing to understand the arguments of anyone who holds alternative ideas

What genuine attempt at political dialogue begins with a deliberate effort to misunderstand and mischaracterise the opposing side, misrepresent their motives and impugn their morals?

The answer, of course, is none. No respectful or productive discussion is possible when one side deliberately poisons the well in such a manner. Yet this is exactly what the Diversity Leadership Council at Gustavus Adolphus College did when they posted a series of fake, deliberately racist anti-illegal immigration posters around campus to spur a discussion and supposedly “educate” people about racism.

Campus Reform reports:

The “Diversity Leadership Council” at Gustavus Adolphus College has admitted to posting racially offensive posters around campus after the school’s Bias Response Team received multiple reports on the matter.

The signs, which are now being labeled a social experiment, notified “all white Americans” to report “any and all illegal aliens to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement” because “they are criminals.”

Provocatively declaring that “America is a white nation,” the flyers assert that it is the “civic duty” of white Americans to turn illegal immigrants in to law enforcement.

Because the only people who could possibly concerned about illegal immigration are white people, right? Nobody of any other skin tone or ethnicity could have a problem with turning a blind eye toward those who either illegally cross the border, overstay their legitimate visa or otherwise flout federal immigration law and then seek to use the length of their lawbreaking as an emotional cudgel to lobby for the normalisation of their status. Only racist white people.

Of course, as the predictable outrage crested and the Bias Response Team’s switchboard melted down under the sheer volume of calls from triggered students, it turned out that the whole thing was a fake. The Diversity Leadership Council coming forward with this smarmy statement:

At approximately 10 a.m. this morning, the Diversity Leadership Council (DLC), a student-run organization that represents 21 student groups on campus, posted signs in Beck and Olin Hall which attacked “Illegal Aliens” by suggesting that “they are criminals.” These posts were quickly torn down and shared with members of the campus community via the Facebook Group, Overheard at Gustavus.

It is the mission of the Diversity Leadership Council to formulate a collective voice when our organization recognizes the need to promote, preserve, and protect on-campus diversity. Thus, a subcommittee of the DLC, in collaboration with social justice theatre troupe I Am We Are, posted these signs and accompanying A-frames with bystander intervention tips in academic buildings on campus in an effort to help educate our peers and campus community about issues of bias, and the importance of being an active bystander.

We want to help put an end to bias-related incidents that happen on our campus, social media, and in our communities by forcing individuals to have dialogues about forms of hate and bias.

Social justice theatre troupe? Kill me now.

And so with a straight face, the Diversity Leadership Council of Gustavus Adolphus College told the student body and the wider public that their little stunt – portraying concern over illegal immigration as the exclusive preserve of white nationalists – was intended to foster “dialogue”.

The National Review’s redoubtable social justice beat reporter, Katherine Timpf, thunders:

Hey, kids? If you want to “help put an end to bias-related incidents that happen on our campus,” how about you address those incidents instead of distracting from them by making up a fake one? Seriously — just what is bringing awareness to a fake issue going to solve? It’s not going to help solve that issue, because — and sorry if I’m blowing your mind here — a problem has to actually exist in order for you to be able to solve it.

Now, I am not sure exactly what kinds of “bias-related incidents” are happening on that campus, but I do know that there being people on campus who felt so strongly that only white people should live in America that they were running around posting “AMERICA IS A WHITE NATION” flyers to help achieve that would be a serious one indeed. Presumably, this fake incident is on a completely different level from anything that is actually happening on that campus, which means that any “dialogues” related to it are on a completely different level, too. No doubt, these flyers must have left a lot of people feeling freaked out and threatened based on a false issue, all for the sake of having a discussion about something that didn’t even exist — and that’s about as disgusting as it gets.

Timpf’s objection is all well and good, but the real problem is not the fact that demented SJWs have now taken to crying “wolf” when starved of more legitimate opportunities for outrage (depressing though that is), but rather the fact that these campus leaders and activists are studying at university yet seemingly totally incapable of understanding the alternative arguments and perspectives which they so vociferously oppose.

One does not need to be a white nationalist to oppose illegal immigration. In fact, the vast majority of those who choose not to celebrate illegal immigration are perfectly welcoming and tolerant of immigrants, provided that they a) settle in America through the proper legal process, and b) assimilate into general society once they arrive. Are there racists and white nationalists as well? Of course there are. But while all white nationalists may object to illegal immigration, not all people who object to illegal immigration are white nationalists. Not even a plurality of them.

And yet rather than encouraging students to deeply understand an issue or argument from all sides, universities today seem to openly encourage an outcome-based approach to thinking about certain issues – for students to start at their desired endpoint (open borders and the normalisation of all current illegal immigrants) and then choose the facts (or Trumpian alternative facts) to back up that position.

I was always taught that in order to properly debate with somebody, let alone stand a chance of winning an argument against them, one must first seek to fully understand and be able to properly articulate the opposing argument, from the opponent’s perspective. Only armed with this knowledge can one properly analyse, refute and undermine the premises of their argument in order to comprehensively attack their conclusion.

By contrast, today’s campus activists – raised on the dogma of the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics – lack the capacity not only to understand opposing viewpoints in order to argue properly, they also seem unable even to assume the good faith of those who hold alternative views. They are so high on their own sense of self-righteousness that they lack the basic intellectual curiosity to seek to understand why somebody might disagree with their position. Hence objection to illegal immigration is described in the posters at Gustavus Adolphus College as being of concern only to white Americans who believe that “America is a white nation”.

But the truly depressing thing is that while the Social Justice Star Chamber of Gustavus Adolphus College may have gone slightly further than most in terms of fabricating fake racist posters to get outraged about “promote a discussion” about their pet topics, the simplicity of their thinking is mirrored across a vast portion of society and the media.

How harshly can one really criticise the social justice zealots at Gustavus Adolphus College when the American mainstream media is also in the business of deliberately conflating legal and illegal immigration so as to portray opposition to the latter as racist-inspired hostility to the former?

How strongly can one denounce the student activists when the leadership of the Democratic Party sees fit to welcome a succession of illegal immigrants onto the stage at their quadrennial party convention to soak up the admiring applause of party delegates?

What the Diversity Leadership Council did was bad, but in many ways it was no worse than similar insidious efforts made by politicians and the media to normalise illegal immigration and portray anybody with legitimate concerns as either heartless or a dangerous extremist. And at least it is clear – by virtue of their limited intelligence and rank amateurism – what the Gustavus Adolphus activists are up to with their tawdry little campaign. The bias of political officials and supposedly objective journalists is often far more subtle, and therefore harder to detect.

The same cannot be said of the mindless open borders stance of the Gustavo Adolphus activists, and the naked stupidity and bad faith currently on display at that Minnesota college.

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 51 – The Social Justice Movement’s Toxic, Self-Defeating ‘Call-Out Culture’

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Call-out culture sucks sometimes - social justice - SJWs - identity politics

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Self-awareness is a rare, endangered commodity within the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics

This blog has previously written about the ways in which the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics is a revolution determined to eat its own – see here, here, here, here, here, and (most recently) here.

Back in December I reported that there have been potential fleeting flashes of self-awareness from within the social justice community, as certain members – typically those who at one time found themselves persecuted and ostracised by their former comrades for having committed some minor act of thought crime – came to realise that the “call-out culture” within the social justice movement is doing far more harm than good.

Today there is another such spark of self-reflection in the pages of Everyday Feminism, as writer Lola Phoenix offers her tribe a few tentative suggestions as to how they might present a slightly less insufferable face to the outside world.

Of course, Phoenix’s testimonial begins with the now-familiar recitation of personal oppressions and “marginalised identities” to serve as mitigation for the harsh truths she is about to deliver:

Six months ago, I really got called out.

And by “called out,” I mean that the person had more interest in collecting me like I was garbage in a very public way and less interest in helping me understand where I was going wrong.

Hmm, sounds familiar.

Despite my willingness to apologize, to try and learn, their attitude pulled me back into that whirlwind of cognitive ability confusion. As a person on the autistic spectrum, I can’t count the amount of times I’ve been unsure of what I’ve done wrong and have tried to figure out what I did.

Blah blah, you get the idea. But pre-emptive excuses aside, Phoenix goes on to engage in some fairly accurate self-reflection:

We’re not robots, and when we learn we’ve been oppressive in some way, we’re going to have feelings about that. And sometimes that needs to be expressed, but – as of now – there’s no really appropriate place to do that.

As a white person, I’ve seen myself do this to other white people who haven’t learned better. When they exhibit the attitudes I once held, I become embarrassed, enraged at their ignorance, and treat them accordingly.

But we have to keep in mind that so many of us committed to social justice are living in a culture where we aren’t taught how to handle or process anger effectively, so it comes out in abusive ways even when we don’t mean it to.

More:

There is a “callout culture” where ally theatre happens and people enjoy “calling out,” naming, and shaming, witch hunting, and publicly humiliating people.

I’ve been on the receiving end of that.

I do think there’s a difference between confronting someone about their behavior versus humiliating them.

Wow. This is an astonishingly frank admission. It is perhaps unfortunate that it took being on the receiving end of an SJW witch hunt for Phoenix to realise that enforcing ideological conformity through public shaming and strict social ostracising is a bad thing, but we should take what we are given.

Meanwhile, Sara Lynn Michener – coining the term CSJW, or “Counterproductive Social Justice Warrior – makes some equally valid observations for Empire South Magazine, including advice such as:

Disproportionate Punishment
Someone has made a legitimate mistake, and there are calls by CSJWs to essentially have them drawn and quartered, thereby eclipsing the original offense and opening it up further for ridicule. Example: it is true that the British astrophysicist who wore a shirt covered in B-Grade Vargas Girls to an event of international significance (that would have had impressionable science-loving little girls in its audience) made a poor wardrobe selection that day that also spoke volumes of the negative experiences of women in science and tech. But verbal abuse or calls to have him fired, rather than specifically explaining the harm caused, were counter productive and fuel for the opposition. This rule also applies when the person who erred apologizes, but the apology is deemed insufficient (often not because it was deemed insincere, but because more than a sincere apology is what is being demanded) and calls for the proverbial pound of flesh continue until the vultures move onto another body.

And:

Confusing Preaching to The Choir vs Outreach
Sometimes expressing outrage and drawing support from such a community is wonderful and gives you strength for the fight. I do it all the time, but I do it knowingly. It is not the same thing as outreach and one rarely lives in the same place as the other. When a group (or individual) truly seeks to explain something to a listening audience who are not yet the in-group but are sympathetic, curious, and ripe for conversion; there is no excuse for using the same hostile and demeaning snark that you use in the in-group. So, if you’re about to post about an issue, ask yourself: am I sharing this for the people who already know? Or for the people who don’t? And proceed accordingly, especially in the comments section. Here’s a hint: preaching to the in-group is easy. Outreach is very, very hard work that keeps you honest about why the issue matters.

And:

Not being able to adequately explain the why behind your thesis
This one is practiced so often by college educated CSJWs it makes me wonder how tough their professors were on them. If your argument relies on a label rather than proving it is a correct usage of said term, your argument will only ever make sense among those who already agree with you. Rhetoric is a slogan. A real argument is both more and less work depending on how you look at it, but if you’re accusing someone of something like Ableism and you can’t explain why or back up your argument, you’ve already lost.

And:

Rejecting Imperfect Members of the Resistance
Amy Schumer, Taylor Swift, and Lena Dunham are imperfect members of the resistance. I am an imperfect member of the resistance. So are you. Human beings tend to have faults. Famous people’s faults, whether they are even real or not, get nevertheless amplified all over the world. It’s fine to call out a celeb if they have genuinely said or done something problematic. But if you then never forgive them, bring it up every time they are invited to speak at a rally, and routinely say they have no place in the resistance because of things they have long since apologized for, then you will have a very small and ineffective resistance. I personally only accept flawed people in my resistance, including CSJWs who sound like they’re sitting at a high school cafeteria announcing YOU CAN’T SIT WITH US, when they do this.

The above point is a great observation. But note how the language could almost describe a Christian’s understanding of himself as a sinner, and the Church as a community of sinners. This is the extent to which Social Justice has become a new, secular religion for those involved – that we now see “love the sinner, hate the sin” discussions taking place in SJW Land.

And so from these and a growing number of other articles expressing unease at the way the Social Justice community polices itself and engages with the world, ther is at least a recognition that their own behaviours are making activist communities “toxic” for many people. Will it ultimately change anything? Probably not.

Mea culpas and moment of self-reflection such as this can be likened a man trying to find his way out of a pitch black cave with only a broken cigarette lighter for illumination. Press the button and it may spark briefly, revealing tantalising glimpses of a safe path through the interior, but no sooner does the spark appear than it is extinguished again, and the darkness returns. “Call-out culture” and public shaming is such an inherent part of the Social Justice movement that nobody in the ascendancy within the cult has any incentive to stop using the techniques of free speech suppression and ideological enforcement which they themselves practice and benefit from.

Some time ago, I described the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics as “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.”

I still think that this is a fair and measured description of the movement as a whole. But if the social justice warriors could get their impulses for virtue signalling and heresy persecution in check – at least within their own tribe, if not to change their sanctimonious attitude toward non believers – then they might at least stop appearing so ridiculous and out of touch to so many outsiders.

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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SJWs Say The Most Racist Things

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Gentrification is Racism

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If racist sentiments like this count as “progress”, count me out

If anyone were still in doubt that much of the social justice movement is often little more than a thin veneer of moral respectability plastered over a movement built on the hatred and resentment of “cisgender, straight white males”, they need only read this article by writer/performer Taylor Steele in online publication The Body Is Not An Apology.

In the piece, Steele reacts to the creeping gentrification of her Brooklyn neighbourhood with a racist tirade that would see her roundly condemned and excommunicated from polite society were she white and the target of her ranting black:

Gentrification happened to me in steps.

At first I was confused.

Were the non-POC in this predominantly Black/Brown neighborhood lost? Did they miss their stop on this Queens-bound train? Are they simply taking a tour of the best Caribbean spots in Brooklyn? When I let it sink in that they were here to stay, noticeable implants to a previously self-contained body, there was anger and frustration. I could feel my rent rising every time a white family, Air BnB-ing in my neighborhood, asked which way to the nearest organic market. And yes, that really happened on a Bed Stuy corner outside of the Crown Fried Chicken and family-run bodega.

(For the uninitiated, “POC” means “people of colour”, and “Black/Brown” are capitalised while “white” is not for reasons that will soon become all too evident.)

Okay, so we have what appears to be a fairly standard diatribe against urban gentrification. So far, so typical. But Steele then continues:

It is traumatic finding strangers in your house, not understanding completely how they got there, not being able to ask them to leave, them rearranging the furniture, and you not being able to move any of it back — nothing will ever be the same; change is trauma.

I can logically/intellectually understand that the white people who move into predominantly Black and brown spaces do not do so with mal-intent; perhaps, these are the places they can afford to live. Perhaps, they can’t see that their presence in these spaces can serve as a kind of terrorism. I also understand they are not responsible for my mental health. However, this is how white supremacy works. It makes it impossible to point the finger at any one thing because the problem is a systemic, political, institutional one. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy proclaims that I am supposed to feel an inherent inadequacy and replaceability.

Author’s emphasis in bold.

A kind of terrorism. Go back and read that passage again, lingering over each sentence. Just read it, and then tell me with a straight face that the world is somehow better off for the presence of this toxic, self-obsessive, cancerous movement in our society.

Imagine that the situation were reversed, and a white author was complaining about black or other ethnic minority residents moving into the neighbourhood, explicitly complaining about the way that they are “rearranging the furniture” through their presence and fretting that the unwelcome newcomers cannot simply be asked to leave. Imagine that the white author described the mere arrival and presence of these newcomers as a form of terrorism being perpetrated on the white inhabitants. Just imagine the reaction. Imagine the outrage and social ostracisation which would rightly follow the expression such heinous, prejudiced sentiments. Now answer this: how does this new form of racism toward the often white beneficiaries of urban gentrification in any way expunge or heal historic racism aimed at black people?

While stubborn racist holdouts and the vestiges of real privilege and discrimination clearly do still exist in places, they are a shadow of what they once were, and thankfully in terminal decline. While full equality under the law should always be the only acceptable goal, those who fought for civil rights in the 1960s and preceding decades would often be astonished by the landscape faced by their successors in 2017. In fact, the only ones now openly using racist language and seeking to resurrect the “separate but equal” days of Jim Crow and segregation are the Social Justice Warriors, in their perverse fight against perceived “oppression”.

And this leads us to the perverse spectacle of a black writer, seemingly oblivious to the historical parallels she is invoking, talking resentfully about white people moving into “her home”, “terrorising” her with their somehow-illegitimate, organic food-purchasing presence (as though no wealthy black people shop at Whole Foods).

Here is someone who would no doubt be the first to join an anti-Trump protest as it marched through Brooklyn, and yet describes her resentment and fear of change in exactly the same language – social loss, fear of change, the undermining of local institutions – that she would castigate a white person or Trump apologist for using to articulate their own feelings about uncontrolled immigration and social change. There is simply no self-awareness at all – just rage, entitlement and self-inflicted fragility.

Have we really come this far as a society only to revert back to fearful, paranoid tribalism of this kind?

For some of us, yes, apparently so.

 

Gentrify This

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Bottom Image: Amanda Farrer

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