My anti-racist bona fides

I was home sick from work yesterday so I ended up wasting more time than usual arguing with people on Facebook. This time it was with Michael Kimmel over his approval of a video that tells white women to shut the fuck up. Literally:

You want to deprive white women of a voice?
Start with yourself, Emma Gray.

Kimmel has a Facebook page for the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities of which I was a member up until yesterday. I got into an argument with someone using the name of the group, so I can't be sure it was Kimmel himself, but probably, especially since someone has been checking into this blog several times in the past 36 hours, most recently from SUNY at Stony Brook.

Kimmel is clearly in league with the identitarians - I used to call them Social Justice Warriors but the term has been co-opted by the Right. An identitarian is someone who is obsessed with ethnicity - everything is about ethnicity for them, and if you dare to suggest otherwise, they will brand you a racist. That is their main weapon. That and censorship. Identitarians love to tell people to STFU mainly because they are not smart people and so the only way they can win any argument is by silencing their opponents - that's why they are so quick to tell any objectors to shut up, and to make them shut up if possible. Which is why Kimmel threw me out of his Facebook page.

I've written at length about my unpleasant experiences with identitarians, including the queen of the white woman-hating identitarians, Mikki Kendall.

Now I try to assume that people like Kimmel mean well, but in their ill-considered approach to injustice they are only perpetrating more injustice. The professional identitarian Robin DiAngelo is a case in point, as I blogged about not long ago. She decided that somebody needed to pay for the 1955 murder of Emmet Till, and so she used her authority during a company meeting to humiliate a woman by telling her she had to leave the room when she cried because white people were not allowed to cry. She did it because some woman prior to the meeting had griped about "white women's tears." 

The white woman in this case probably thought of herself as an individual human being, not as a dehumanized signifier of white women in the Southern patriarchy tradition. But Robin DiAngelo decided that she should be dehumanized - as payback for the way black people have been dehumanized.

Dehumanizing random white people as payback is not how you fix racism.

You want to talk about slave reparations? Let's talk about slave reparations - I thought Ta-Nehisi Coates made a good case for them. You want to talk about how black people have a higher arrest rate for drugs than white people even though white people deal drugs more? There's a Washington Post article with data showing this happens and it needs to be addressed. 

There are plenty of white people who are pissed off about ethnic-based injustice. It's completely idiotic to tell others they can't talk based on their ethnicity - you may be silencing an ally. It's not only unjust, it's ineffective politics.

And I am certainly an ally. As I pointed out to Kimmel, I have stood up against racism, as I discussed on this blog.

I also helped to keep professional racist Razib Khan from getting a gig at the New York Times.

I've always spoken out against racism, because racism is both evil and stupid.

But none of that matters to identitarians. Because they decided that "white feminist" means an ignoramus who has to be told everything. And according to identitarian ideology, white people do not get to speak for themselves. No matter what is said about them. You don't have a right to defend yourself, ever.

Identitarians cannot tolerate dissent. Because what identitarians are really about is not justice for all, but revenge against white people. And since women are less likely to get violent, and more likely to be apologetic than men they decided to target white women specifically. And since they are essentially an anti-liberal, reactionary bunch, white feminists especially.

And Michael Kimmel, who pretends to be interested in equality, approves this effort to silence women on the basis of their ethnicity. That should tell you something about him and his organization.

And once again I'm left wondering if people like Michael Kimmel and Emma Gray, the Executive Women's Editor of the Huffington Post are secretly working for some Koch brothers-funded organization - because identitarianism benefits conservatives more than anybody else by promoting the notion that we should all be judged on the color of our skin rather than the content of our character.

No Jamelle Bouie, Robin DiAngelo is not helping

I was very disappointed to see that Jamelle Bouie cited Robin "intentions are irrelevant" DiAngelo in his latest piece about Donald Trump.

The first time I ever heard of Bouie was when he used my blog posts as a resource - because I had been documenting Razib Khan's racism for years -  to make a case against Khan when Khan was up for a steady writing gig with the NYTimes. I mention this fact in my anti-racist bona fides (bottom of this post and on the right-hand side of this blog.)

Thanks to social media, there are times when people are falsely smeared as racists - I have had that very thing happen to me. The thinking seems to be that because black people have been treated horribly on the basis of their ethnicity, it's now appropriate to turn the tables and treat white people badly on the basis of their ethnicity. You can casually smear a white person as racist, for any reason, if you feel like it because black people have suffered. And you will be considered a hero by many on the left, as Mikki Kendall was.

This is not justice. This is revenge.

It's one thing when social media zanies like Mikki Kendall promote revenge, but Robin DiAngelo has taken that revenge-based approach and codified it into a series of lectures and workshops given to established, respectable organizations. One of DiAngelo's techniques is to bow to the personal prejudices of some people in order to discriminate against others, on the basis of ethnicity. Now it certainly wasn't the intention of the woman who cried to distress a POC - she was expressing sadness for what happened to a POC - but since Robin DiAngelo's belief is that intentions are irrelevant that means that bigotry against a white person is perfectly acceptable, even if what they are doing is expressing sympathy for a POC.

This is why Robin DiAngelo is so incredibly pernicious, because she packages garden-variety bigotry as social justice.

I completely agree with Bouie's article about Donald Trump and racism. And Bouie does not lump all white people together. As he notes in his piece:

For its American Values Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute asks respondents whether “discrimination against whites is a significant problem.” In last year’s survey, 43 percent of Americans—including 60 percent of working-class whites—said discrimination against whites had become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

But as far as an identitarian like DiAngelo is concerned, "43 percent of Americans" saying discrimination against whites had become a bigger problem is meaningless - because as far as DiAngelo is concerned, 100% of white Americans are racist. She says exactly that - that your beliefs and actions, as an individual, ethical-decision-making human being are irrelevant.

if we are well-intended and do not consciously dislike people of color, we cannot be racist. This is why it is so common for white people to cite their friends and family members as evidence of their lack of racism. However, when you understand racism as a system of structured relations into which we are all socialized, you understand that intentions are irrelevant.

So because we are all socialized in the system, we are all the same. DiAngelo does not allow for individual human beings becoming aware of, and consciously rejecting the existing race-based system of structured relations - at least without paying Robin DiAngelo to run a workshop.

All white people are equally racist to DiAngelo because all white people are equally white.

This absolutely does not help the race problem in the United States. I resent very much being lumped in with a member of the Ku Klux Klan because Robin DiAngelo has decreed that my individual beliefs and actions mean nothing - only my ethnicity matters.

Just like people of color, white people resent being lumped together with others in a negative way on the basis of some physical trait. So naturally Robin DiAngelo is only going to fuel white resentment in her wrong-headed approach to social justice.

Robin DiAnglo is not helping.

More of my thoughts on Robin DiAngelo.

My Anti-Racist Bona Fides
Because the reflex response of all Social Justice Warriors/Identitarians like Robin DiAngelo is to smear their critics as racist, here is my statement on racism:

Although I was smeared on Tumblr by infamous bully Mikki Kendall and identitarian extremist K. Tempest Bradford (and thanks to the cozy relationship between Tumblr and Google, the smears show up in Google search results on my name), in fact I have a long history of opposing racism, and the evidence for the past 10 years is on this blog. Unhinged extremists like Kendall and Bradford don't care to know anything about the strangers they randomly smear. That's why they and the people who promote them like Verso books are horrible and don't help solve the problem of racism in the United States.

• I helped prevent racist Razib Khan from getting a gig writing for the NYTime - thanks to documenting his racism for 10 years. 
• I stood up to a woman at work who had a pattern of saying racist things.
• I'd like to see Juneteenth become a national holiday.
• I demonstrated that David Mamet's play RACE is most likely based on Mamet's racial hatred of Michelle Obama.
• I believe African Americans built the US.

How stupid is Robin DiAngelo? How sleazy is her "white fragility" marketing campaign?

On the one hand you could argue that DiAngelo is smart - she's made a career for herself that is lucrative and not very hard - she travels around the country explaining to identitarian organizations that all white people are equally racist and the only way they can have some of their racism alleviated is to pay DiAngelo to lecture about "white fragility."

On the other hand some of the things she says are amazingly stupid. Her most recent free advertisement from the Good Men Project includes this statement:

But what if someone does literally point their finger and boldly state, “You are racist!” (a deep fear of progressive whites)? A white person who claims to be antiracist and who positions themselves as above or beyond other whites is being a self-righteous jerk, but that is on them. What is on me is to identify my racist patterns and work to change them. If the point being made is insightful to that goal, then regardless ofhow carefully or indirectly it is being made, that is what I need to focus on. The method of delivery cannot be used to delegitimize what is being illuminated or the excuse for not doing my work.

First off, this demonstrates a basic tenet of DiAngelo, that all white people are equally racist:

"A white person who claims to be antiracist and who positions themselves as above or beyond other whites is being a self-righteous jerk, but that is on them."

Apparently someone "claiming" to be anti-racist, and therefore claiming to be better than white people who are racist - is deemed to be a self-righteous jerk.

But also, and most stupidly, is her incomprehension as to why people don't like to be called racist if they believe they are not racist. White progressives do not wish to be called racist because they feel racism is a sign of stupidity or evil or usually both. And so if you declare them a racist, you have said they are stupid and/or evil.

And Robin DiAngelo finds this some kind of moral indictment, to object to someone attacking you as stupid and/or evil on the basis of your ethnicity.

Listen to DiAngelo describe people taking offense at being judged unfairly. It's at minute 5:18. Her words are bad enough, but it's the tone, especially, dripping with utter contempt, that tells you how she feels about anybody who questions her pernicious message.

"Because we hear a moral slight. We sincerely believe it wouldn't be possible for us to be racist because we're good people... and so we get very upset and defensive and we cry and we get our feelings hurt and we suggest that you don't know us and that you're generalizing."
"I actually think progressive white folks like me are the hardest."

She clearly thinks that those claiming she is generalizing are idiots, but in fact that's exactly what she is doing. Generalizing.

Meanwhile she aids those who are actual racists by giving them a legitimate reason to claim that anti-white racism exists in the United States. Robin DiAngelo is not helping the issue of race in America. Robin DiAngelo is making it worse by being the anti Martin Luther King Jr. She is promoting the idea that people should be judged on the color of their skin and not, as King dreamed, the content of their character.

The thing about DiAngelo's career is that she answers to nobody.

She is hired to promote her specious arguments about race and she will never have to face any critics. So she can keep turning her critics into defenseless straw men she can easily defeat with her contempt and her overweening smug self-satisfaction.

DiAngelo has completely accepted the mind-set of racism: that all humans are easily grouped into one of a few distinct "races" and should be judged accordingly. And she is attempting to spread that dehumanized view of individual human beings.

She makes a good living preaching the gospel of "race" and revenge and she will keep doing it as long as someone will pay for it.


More about Robin DiAngelo.


My Anti-Racist Bona Fides

Because the reflex response of all Social Justice Warriors/Identitarians like Robin DiAngelo is to smear their critics as racist, here is my statement on racism:

Although I was smeared on Tumblr by infamous bully Mikki Kendall and identitarian extremist K. Tempest Bradford (and thanks to the cozy relationship between Tumblr and Google, the smears show up in Google search results on my name), in fact I have a long history of opposing racism, and the evidence for the past 10 years is on this blog. Unhinged extremists like Kendall and Bradford don't care to know anything about the strangers they randomly smear. That's why they and the people who promote them like Verso books are horrible and don't help solve the problem of racism in the United States.

• I helped prevent racist Razib Khan from getting a gig writing for the NYTime - thanks to documenting his racism for 10 years.
• I stood up to a woman at work who had a pattern of saying racist things.
• I'd like to see Juneteenth become a national holiday.
• I demonstrated that David Mamet's play RACE is most likely based on Mamet's racial hatred of Michelle Obama.
• I believe African Americans built the US.

Identitarians in the theater

It looks like identitarianism has infested the theater. It's true that white people have dominated theater in this country (white men of course). This is the result of white male hegemony in this part of the world generally. But white people dominating theater is also partly through demographics and economics. There are just lots more white people here thanks to centuries of European immigration, and white people achieved economic dominance through various circumstantial advantages, and theater is a luxury that few who are not well-off economically can afford to indulge in.

There is certainly injustice to be found. But the problem with identitarians is that they let their dismay over injustice and their zeal to fix it carry them into witch hunts which only increases injustice in the world. I've previously discussed the methods of professional identitarian Robin DiAngelo. A non-white woman complained to DiAngelo about "white women's tears" and as a result, DiAngelo told a group of employees at a workplace session on police violence against African Americans that she was running that any white person who cried had to leave the room. And she made a white woman leave when she cried, to the woman's dismay. DiAngelo then proudly wrote an article for the Good Men Project about this incident, and she proceeded to justify her (probably illegal) action by blaming white women as a group for the 1955 murder of Emmet Till:

Men of color may also may come to the aid of white women in these exchanges, and are likely also driven by their conditioning under sexism and patriarchy. But men of color have the additional weight of racism to navigate. This weight has historically been deadly. For black men in particular, the specter of Emmett Till and countless others who have been beaten and killed over a white woman’s claims of cross-racial distress is ever present. Ameliorating the woman’s distress as quickly as possible may be felt as a literal matter of survival. Yet coming to the rescue of a white woman also drives a wedge between men and women of color. Rather than receive social capital that reinforces his status, a man of color put in this position must now live with the agony of having to support racism in order to survive. 

Robin DiAngelo decided that a good way to address the extreme racism towards black men and paternalism towards white women that caused the murder of Till was to use the small authority given to her in the workplace to single out an individual white woman for humiliation. And as you can see in the comments under the article, there are plenty of people who think this is commendable.

Scapegoatism is a favorite technique of identitarians. We can see this again in the recent controversy over casting decisions in a small Pennsylvania college. As it says in the NYTimes:

The cancellation of a college production of Lloyd Suh’s play “Jesus in India” over the casting of white actors as Indian characters has prompted a war of words over diversity in theater, with Mr. Suh arguing that the production could send a “dehumanizing” message to minority students and the school countering that the student actors on its rural, predominantly white campus were being “punished for their race.” 

The controversy broke out last week when The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Mr. Suh had withdrawn permissions for the production at Clarion University, a state institution in western Pennsylvania with a student body of about 5,400. It landed amid heightened national conversation about racial exclusion on college campuses, as well as ongoing debate in the theater world about how to promote greater diversity onstage.

Now after reading several pieces on this and arguing with people on Facebook it appears to me that there was miscommunication on both sides. But Mr. Suh made a statement about the issue and it doesn't add up. If Clarion was attempting to abrogate Mr. Suh's rights and produce his play without permission, why is casting even an issue?

And if the only reason why the play was not allowed to proceed was the casting, then why is the permissions status an issue?

It appears to me that what Suh is saying is that he would have allowed the play to proceed if he was satisfied with the casting. So apparently what Clarion did wasn't so objectionable that he would not still have worked with them, if he liked the casting. And the New York Times story reflects that.

At the heart of the matter though, is Suh's identitarianism, which leads him to use a disagreement with Clarion University as an exercise in scapegoatism.

Clarion is clearly a small school in a very white section of the country, and it's perfectly reasonable to assume that Indians were not cast because they were not available in the theater department. But to get around this clear logistical justification for the decision to cast whites in roles for Indians, Suh proclaims that it is not acceptable to him that college theater departments don't behave the way professional theaters do:

This includes university theater programs, which are a crucial part of the way professional theater is born. We are witnessing a moment on multiple college campuses where racial tensions are undeniable and extremely dangerous. I cannot grant university programs an allowance on these matters that I would never grant a professional theater.

If he "cannot grant university programs an allowance" then he shouldn't have allowed them to do his play, knowing that thanks to demographics it was possible there would not be enough Indians to take the roles.

There is a difference between university theater programs and professional theaters for a variety of practical and financial reasons, and Suh's proclamations on the subject won't change that, no matter how much he pushes the notion that lack of Indian students in the theater program is evidence of bigotry or somehow contributing to racial tensions.

But this is the way identitarians argue. When it is pointed out to Suh that theater departments don't work the same as professional theaters, his response is the equivalent of stamping his feet and shouting well they should be the same! And if they aren't changed on my command immediately, then they are obviously racists!

It strikes me as a bit of concern trolling that Suh mentions "racial tensions" when, if anybody has ginned up racial tensions, it would be himself. It's a safe bet the NYTimes would not have picked up the story of a humdrum cancellation over writers' rights. Only when Suh implied Clarion University is a pack of racists did this become noticed by anybody outside of Clarion.

Another item of interest - I pointed out in the discussion thread under Suh's Facebook statement that although Suh objected to casting of "Caucasians" in fact Indians have long been classified as Caucasians. Now of course race is not a biological concept but a cultural construct and "Caucasian" is just a label assigned over a hundred years ago based on the firm belief that humans are justifiably cast as "races". This is an important point - it demonstrates how much identitarians themselves adopt the mindset, assumptions and terminology of the racists. But even my pointing this out was deemed offensive by many people on the thread, including the infamous bullshitter Mike Daisey.

Mike Daisey achieved fame initially when the National Public Radio program This American Life invited him to share his monologue about the dire situation for workers in Apple factories in China, which was running at the Public Theater at the time. TAL took Daisey's work as reportage, and it appears that Daisey never corrected their mistake. And it's likely he didn't because TAL would not have been interested in his story of going to China and meeting 14 year old factory workers, and factory workers who had never seen an iPhone, if it was clear it was mostly bullshit. Or fiction, if you will.

The result was that TAL had to retract the story and Daisey apologized.

But you can see that Daisey's tendency towards feckless fabrication would make identitarianism appeal to him. He would much prefer a simple good vs. bad narrative, with Clarion University cast as evil racists out to destroy a person of color who was standing up for the rights of all people to be represented in the theater, rather than a messy tale of miscommunication and logistics and peevishness. 

So for me to mention a minor but interesting point of fact that detracts from the simplistic identitarian narrative of "white power and dominance" is highly offensive to Mike Daisey.

Unfortunately what identitarians demonstrate is that the Left is no less susceptible to hysteria than the Right, even if they get hysterical over different boogeymen.

Power couple

Two really good editorials in the past week's NYTimes, one about the lack of an official age of consent in France by Valentine Faure, and the other a response to the identitarian leanings of Ta-Nehisi Coates by Thomas Chatterton Williams.  

Turns out they're married to each other. Now there's a power couple. I couldn't find a picture of them together online but Williams writes about meeting Faure here.

Razib Khan & Robin DiAngelo: where race essentialists of the Left and Right meet

In June 2017 on his web site "Brown Pundits" Razib Khan proclaims himself the enemy of "barbarians," meaning the Left.

Much of the media lies about me, and the Left constantly attacks me. I’m OK with that because I do believe that the day will come with all the ledgers will be balanced. The Far Left is an enemy of civilization of all stripes. I welcome being labeled an enemy of barbarians. My small readership, which is of diverse ideologies and professions, is aware of who I am and what I am, and that is sufficient. Either truth or power will be the ultimate arbiter of justice.

This is amusing because he has so much in common with the Far Left - at least the anti-appropriationist branch - when it comes to holding an essentialist belief in race.

The anti-appropriationists are in perfect agreement with Razib Khan that race is a clear-cut, obvious attribute of every single person and which controls aspects of an individual's intellect and/or morality. A recent NYTimes piece by Thomas Chatterton Williams says it very well:

I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish. 

This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural. For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a “talisman,” an “amulet” of “eldritch energies” that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a “meta-biological force,” a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring.

Now I don't think Ta-Nehisi Coates is as bad as Williams says he is, especially in the superb piece he is talking about The First White President.

I think that Coates' talisman metaphor for whiteness referred in that case to the cultural perception of white difference and superiority in the United States as exploited by Donald Trump. Although I will agree that like identitarians generally, Coates is quick to advocate censorship when it suits him.

The argument between the Far Left and the Far Right on the issue of race is not the existence nor the essential nature of race, it's a disagreement over which "race" is superior. The Far Right believes in the innate intellectual inferiority of non-whites, most especially African Americans, while the Far Left believes in the innate moral inferiority of whites, especially those of northern European ethnicity.

Razib Khan mentions a victim of identitarian extremism on his GNXP blog:

 (basically I think anyone who has sympathies that they have the courage to make vocal with classical liberalism will end up on the Right eventually; I’m looking at you, Bret Weinstein).

Khan is referring to the incident when Weinstein, a leftist, was the target of race essentialists:

Bret Weinstein is a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who supported Bernie Sanders, admiringly retweets Glenn Greenwald and was an outspoken supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. 

You could be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Weinstein, who identifies himself as “deeply progressive,” is just the kind of teacher that students at one of the most left-wing colleges in the country would admire. Instead, he has become a victim of an increasingly widespread campaign by leftist students against anyone who dares challenge ideological orthodoxy on campus. 

This professor’s crime? He had the gall to challenge a day of racial segregation.
A bit of background: The “Day of Absence” is an Evergreen tradition that stretches back to the 1970s. As Mr. Weinstein explained on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, “in previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus — a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning.” This year, the script was flipped: “White students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave campus for the day’s activities,” reported the student newspaper on the change. The decision was made after students of color “voiced concern over feeling as if they are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.”

What the Left identitarians are doing, as I have pointed out many times, is revenge. People who have been identified as Black have been legally kept out of various establishments in the United States up until the 1960s. What the Left extremists seek to do is identify people who are White and keep them out of an institution - in this case Evergreen College for a day - as symbolic tit-for-tat micro-revenge.

I've mentioned the problem with the Far Left's quest for revenge against randomly-selected white scapegoats in my criticisms of the career of Robin DiAngelo on this blog.

Razib Khan's argument is that people of African ethnicity are intellectually inferior to the rest of humanity, and therefore any claims of systemic bigotry against the ancestors of the enslaved people in the United States are false and there's nothing that society can do. Razib Khan believes in "human biodiversity."

Robin DiAngelo's argument is that all people of European ancestry living right now in the United States are collectively guilty of injustice against people of African ethnicity in the US, regardless of the expressed beliefs, political affiliations, or personal actions of individual whites. And any whites who protest when accused of racism are lying and/or deluded. Robin DiAngelo believes in "white fragility."

They both agree that the most important aspect of any human being is that person's "race." Thus demonstrating the horseshoe theory. Both the Far Left and the Far Right reject liberal notions of striving for colorblind fairness and reject Martin Luther King's dream that we all be judged on the content of our character and not the color of our skin. For identitarians of Left and Right, race is absolute and all-encompassing.

For Khan the government should not create social programs without taking into consideration the essential biological inferiority of the racial underclass. An attitude he shares with Charles Murray:

right now, we assume that ALL GROUPS HAVE EQUAL APTITUDES. the result is that liberals devise new social programs to “uplift” groups to express their potentional.

For DiAngelo it's not enough that we continue to struggle to address the systemic racism of the United States which disadvantages people of color, we must also assume all whites are ignorant and immoral. She demonstrates this when she freely lies about white people's collective view of Jackie Robinson's career.

While Robinson was certainly an amazing ball player, this story line depicts Robinson as racially special; a black man who broke that color line himself. The subtext is that Robinson finally had what it took to play with whites, as if no black athlete before him was strong enough to compete at that level.

I expect that like Khan, DiAngelo feels misunderstood, even lied about, especially when quoted directly.

That's not to say that Khan is self-aware enough to recognize his own hypocrisy when he complains that his multi-ethnic childrens' school issues an advisory against certain Halloween costumes. He's so much more willing to accept the idea that people are not one race so long as we aren't talking about the descendants of African slaves in the United States.

The sweet sweet irony of Robin DiAngelo's targeting people of European descent is that Razib Khan is far more racist than many "whites" but DiAngelo only focuses on the racism of whites. So even though Khan built his career by sucking up to racialists like Charles Murray and Ron Unz, he gets a free pass from anti-white identitarians like DiAngelo.

Now please note, Khan claims he is not a racist.

However, I think what Khan said in 2006 applies to Khan himself:

Recently I’ve been saying that it is important to distinguish between what people believe, what they say they believe and what they do. The three do not always integrate well together

Khan's remark about Bret Weinstein was made in the same blog post where Khan complained he was blocked on Twitter by right-wing extremist Sebastian Gorka.

Meanwhile, I was blocked on Twitter by Razib Khan.

The pernicious impact of Dr. Robin DiAngelo

UPDATE: My latest post about Robin DiAngelo: No Jamelle Bouie, Robin DiAngelo is not helping

Robin DiAngelo, as I have demonstrated on this blog has no qualms about smearing random white people - or all white people - as racist. Here she is bragging about scapegoating an individual woman in the workplace.

DiAngelo gets away with doing this kind of thing because of course racism is a horrible thing. And since she is against racism, surely she must be a good and wise and fair person. Right?

No, she is not good or wise or fair. She is a snake-oil saleswoman selling tactics that do not make the problem of race in America better. She is telling us that we should judge people on the basis of the color of their skin, and not on the content of their character. She is the anti-Martin Luther King, Jr.

What DiAngelo is selling is revenge. And of course seeking revenge is a very human thing, that's why it's so popular, and that's how DiAngelo can make a living doing it. But it's not ethical. It's immoral to make a living promoting revenge.

Scapegoating, dehumanizing and denying individual human beings their own will, their own conscious ethics, their intentionality is evil. And those are the things Robin DiAngelo does. That's how she earns her living.

More on the pernicious impact of Dr. Robin DiAngelo.

And because the reflex response of all Social Justice Warriors/Identitarians like Robin DiAngelo is to smear their critics as racist, here is a statement:

My Anti-Racist Bona Fides

Although I was smeared on Tumblr by infamous bully Mikki Kendall and identitarian extremist K. Tempest Bradford (and thanks to the cozy relationship between Tumblr and Google, the smears show up in my search results), in fact I have a long history of opposing racism, and the evidence for the past 10 years is on this blog. Unhinged extremists like Kendall and Bradford don't care to know anything about the strangers they randomly smear. That's why they and the people who promote them like Verso books are horrible and don't help solve the problem of racism in the United States.

• I helped prevent racist Razib Khan from getting a gig writing for the NYTime - thanks to documenting his racism for 10 years.
• I stood up to a woman at work who had a pattern of saying racist things.
• I'd like to see Juneteenth become a national holiday.
• I demonstrated that David Mamet's play RACE is most likely based on Mamet's racial hatred of Michelle Obama.
• I believe African Americans built the US.

Die, Tumblr, Die

Although it was very unpleasant to read Aaron M. Renn scapegoating Paul Krugman as a government-bailed out corporation there was something in his piece on City Journal (a media outlet of the Koch brothers-funded Manhattan Institute) that was very cheering indeed:

Most Americans know about corporate executives like Marissa Mayer. She completely failed to turn around the struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo, though that’s what she was hired to do. Her “accomplishments” include buying the now-worthless blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Despite her failure, if she’s not retained in the wake of the reported sale of Yahoo’s businesses to Verizon, Mayer is set to collect a pre-negotiated $55 million golden parachute. Most Americans know that they wouldn’t be treated so kindly if they lost their jobs.

Oh man do I want Tumblr to die. It's thanks to Tumblr accounts that a bunch of identitarian extremists have been able to smear me via Google results on my name - Tumblr allows people to drive up the Google search rankings of their Tumblr postings if they have enough followers, and identitarians tend to have a whole bunch of college-student aged followers with nothing better to do than encourage nut-bars like Mikki Kendall and K. Tempest Bradford to smear random strangers on the Internet.

When I contracted Tumblr to complain about the smear-job their response was basically "tough shit." So I am so happy if they are teetering on the edge of extinction.

I guess vicious Tumblr bullies like Mikki Kendall
will have to save their meanness for Twitter now.

Once Tumblr fails, conscience-deficient mobbers and smear-mongers like Kendall and Bradford will no longer have the power to casually smear people so easily. Hallelujah!

Open letter to Sady Doyle

Really? You're going to block me on Twitter because I said Mohammed Ali wasn't perfect, and deliberately adopted an arrogant persona as a statement against the bigotry of the time? And because I took exception to the standard identitarian practice of scapegoating white women - most often white women who are feminists?

BTW - I said very complimentary things about Mohammed Ali a year ago.

http://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2015/01/meet-mohammed-ali.html

But of course identitarians aren't interested in getting to know anything about the people they smear.

I was smeared five years ago as a "racist" by that bully Mikki Kendall (see Michelle Goldberg's piece in The Nation on what an ass she is) because I argued with friends of hers on Facebook who claimed John Lennon and Yoko Ono were racists. In spite of the fact that anybody who reads my blog can see I'm on record as being an ANTI-racist for the past 10 years - and Jamelle Bouie even cited my blog as evidence against Razib Khan during the NYTimes controversy.

http://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-triumph-of-racist-razib-khan.html

As far as I can tell, Kendall thinks I deserve to be falsely smeared as a racist because I was impolite when I was arguing with her and her friends. That was my first taste of the absolute conscience-free approach to public discourse of identitarians.

It's only a matter of time until identitarians turn on you because attacking people on the basis of their gender/ethnicity is what they do. Because identitarians are fundamentally bigots, who don't give a shit about the content of a person's character, ONLY the color of their skin.

And Jesus after all the nice things I said about you and defended you against that asshole Doug Henwood?

http://mcclernan.blogspot.com/search?q=sady

Don't you think the groupthink and absurd smearing that the brocialists engage in is exactly what identitarians do? How could you fail to see the similarities in the mob rule mindset?

Fun fact: my first awareness of Doug Henwood was on Facebook arguing with him calling a feminist organization "bourgeois" - his response was to attempt to smear me with the Mikki Kendall lie - proving that brocialists and identitarians are EXACTLY alike when it comes to smearing people, without the slightest ethical qualm.

You're a brilliant writer. As a judge of character, not so much.

Emily Nussbaum: scourge of abrasive women everywhere

I was really pleased to see Michelle Goldberg's piece in Slate, arguing against anti-appropriation insanity. I've been a fan of Goldberg's since she wrote a piece for The Nation in which she exposed identitarian extremist Mikki Kendall as a bully. As identitarians, Kendall and her gang are of course  anti-appropriation, and they hate Michelle Goldberg for the Nation piece.

A mention of the article popped up in my newsfeed so I hastened to like it. Then I saw Siva Vaidhyanathan, cultural historian and media scholar, who is my Facebook friend, responding to the article by saying:

That a few Indians wanted fame and/or money from "exporting" Yoga does not absolve the American yogis of being deeply insulting and misguided.

This really annoyed me and I expressed my annoyance with sarcasm, asking if Indians had contributed to the Internet and Facebook, and suggested that if they hadn't maybe he'd need to stop "appropriating" it. I didn't literally mean that of course - I was making a point that the concept of anti-appropriation is idiotic no matter which ethnic group is telling which other ethnic group to stop using their stuff. 

Interestingly, I found Vaidhyanathan advocating in favor of loosening copyright laws because:

"Copyright is a fluid, open, democratic set of protocols."

Maybe if yoga had been copyrighted he'd feel less threatened by American yogis getting their misguided hands all over it.

Vaidhyanathan and I went back and forth a couple of times and that might have been the end of it, but then Emily Nussbaum, television critic for the New Yorker, had to jump in and trash me - even though she said she basically agrees with my position.

Emily Nussbaum I'm ordinarily sympathetic to Michelle's side of this, but Nancy is being so snide and creepy in this thread, I'm considering switching sides and agreeing with Siva.
Like · Reply · 1 · November 23 at 9:07pm

Naturally I defended myself, and then tried to turn the discussion back onto the anti-appropriation issue. I wanted to focus on the fact Vaidhyanathan  felt he could disparage American yogis as insulting and misguided without bothering to present evidence. But Nussbaum was having none of that. She had to double down on attacking me using what must be deliberate obtuseness.

Emily Nussbaum Nancy, as I said, I agree with Michelle's piece, which is nuanced, well-argued and beautifully researched. But whether or not I agree with Siva, I'd rather talk with him than anyone who spends a Facebook thread making rude personal comments like, "Oh yeah?? Well Indians didn't create the Internet, so you can't use it." It would be a waste of time, and not because of writing quality. I posted here to offer Siva some support, because it's pretty unpleasant to have someone come at you with this abrasive an approach. And that's it for me. Have a good Thanksgiving and namaste.
Like · Reply · 2 · November 25 at 7:28pm

Since she makes her living as a writer, I can't believe that she didn't understand that when I said the thing about Indians and Facebook I was being sarcastic.

And clearly Emily Nussbaum doesn't care about the issue of cultural appropriation, what she really cares about is scolding women who argue too abrasively for her liking. It's a curious approach to discourse from someone who fancies herself a feminist, considering the history of women being excoriated for being too abrasive:

The abrasiveness trap: High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews.

I've mentioned Nussbaum in this blog before, usually favorably. I won't be doing that again. And Michelle Goldberg is kind of an asshole too. The fallen heroes are piling up.

The quotable... me?

I decided to try out Facebook's search feature and see where my name is popping up - hoping, I will admit, that I didn't find some identitarian talking trash about me.

Instead I got this much more pleasant surprise - I was quoted back in 2013, like I'm some kind of famous person. How about that?

That Cory Hardin, it must be said, is a man of taste and discernment LOL. And quite handsome too.

I originally said the quotation here. When I said "as I believe I've demonstrated" I wasn't talking about my plays, I was talking about three 10-minute plays that I analyzed for an essay "How do you write a good 10-minute play?"

Kwame Anthony Appiah on the benefits of appropriation

Bo Derek, running dog of appropriation

I'm amazed that I blogged about Kwame Anthony Appiah's "The Case for Contamination almost ten years now. I guess that's what happens when you've had a blog as long as I have - my 10 year bloggerversary is coming up on November 2.

I still remember posting it though, so it doesn't seem so long ago. I was very impressed by his main point - that cultural appropriation is a good thing. Although he only uses the word "appropriating" once and not in reference to the current popular meaning. His focus in the Case for Contamination is more on other cultures being made less pure by whites (Europe and the United States):

The preservationists often make their case by invoking the evil of "cultural imperialism." Their underlying picture, in broad strokes, is this: There is a world system of capitalism. It has a center and a periphery. At the center - in Europe and the United States - is a set of multinational corporations. Some of these are in the media business. The products they sell around the world promote the creation of desires that can be fulfilled only by the purchase and use of their products. They do this explicitly through advertising, but more insidiously, they also do so through the messages implicit in movies and in television drama. Herbert Schiller, a leading critic of "media-cultural imperialism," claimed that "it is the imagery and cultural perspectives of the ruling sector in the center that shape and structure consciousness throughout the system at large."

One of the pillars of identitarianism is opposition to the cosmopolitanism Appiah is talking about. But their cultural appropriation is not people of color using white people stuff, but white people using people of color stuff - young white women wearing their hair in cornrows is a particular irritant for them, in spite of the fact that Bo Derek wearing cornrows was a thing back in 1979. But anti-appropriationist Parul Sehgal felt the need to mention them anyway in her NYTimes screed:

In fashion, there was the odd attempt to rebrand cornrows as a Caucasian style — a ‘‘favorite resort hair look,’’ according to Elle.

Shehgal doesn't seem to have any problem with black women straightening their hair though, so apparently in her mind people of color can appropriate anything they want, only white people are forbidden from adopting something that was originally associated with another ethnicity, even if, like cornrows, it was adopted thirty-six years ago by white people.

But it doesn't matter which side of white/nonwhite you are against adaptation, what we're talking about is culture purity, which is almost always associate with fundamentalism and reaction. And cultural appropriation has been happening forever. Appiah again:

The ideals of purity and preservation have licensed a great deal of mischief in the past century, but they have never had much to do with lived culture. Ours may be an era of mass migration, but the global spread and hybridization of culture - through travel, trade or conquest - is hardly a recent development. Alexander's empire molded both the states and the sculpture of Egypt and North India; the Mongols and then the Mughals shaped great swaths of Asia; the Bantu migrations populated half the African continent. Islamic states stretch from Morocco to Indonesia; Christianity reached Africa, Europe and Asia within a few centuries of the death of Jesus of Nazareth; Buddhism long ago migrated from India into much of East and Southeast Asia. Jews and people whose ancestors came from many parts of China have long lived in vast diasporas. The traders of the Silk Road changed the style of elite dress in Italy; someone buried Chinese pottery in 15th-century Swahili graves. I have heard it said that the bagpipes started out in Egypt and came to Scotland with the Roman infantry. None of this is modern.

I wasn't able to find anything by Appiah addressing anti-appropriationism, but I hope he writes something soon. The ethnicity of a writer should not matter more than what they say, but to identitarians no white person has the right to speak on the issue of ethnicity (unless the white person is an identitarian), so what I say won't mean anything to them except as an example of a white woman refusing to STFU. Appiah is not white and so might actually be able to get through to identitarians. Not because he makes superb, reasonable arguments, but because of the authority of his ethnicity.

In the meantime I thought this piece by a couple of bloggers, Reflections on Cultural Appropriation is pretty good, although I can't confirm they are people of color and so quite possibly dismissible by identitarians. All they have is rational argument, a thing that identitarians are notably resistant to.

I hadn't been keeping up on the career of Appiah, and I see he's the now the New York Time's Ethicist. I will have to start reading that regularly.

Countdown to the Robin DiAngelo lawsuit

UPDATE: My latest post about Robin DiAngelo: No Jamelle Bouie, Robin DiAngelo is not helping

Robin DiAngelo has written another bigoted offensive article and naturally it ends up in my Facebook newsfeed thanks to a friend of a friend. I've written before about DiAngelo. I would prefer not to have to think about Robin DiAngelo at all but idiots keep pointing to her as if she's some kind of voice of reason on the subject of race.

When I say "the Robin DiAngelo lawsuit" I don't necessarily mean she will personally be the defendant although she might.  But more likely her employer will be the defendant, because Robin DiAngelo conducts workplace events that discriminate on the basis of ethnicity. And it will be an open and shut case because DiAngelo makes no secret of the discrimination - she is so proud of it she wrote an article for "The Good Men Project" admitting to it:

When another police shooting of an unarmed black man occurred, my workplace called for an informal lunch gathering of people who wanted to connect and find support. Just before the gathering, a woman of color pulled me aside and told me that she wanted to attend but she was “in no mood for white women’s tears today.” I assured her that I would handle it. As the meeting started, I told my fellow white participants that if they felt moved to tears, to please leave the room. I would go with them for support, but asked that they not cry in the mixed group. After the discussion, I spent the next hour explaining to a very outraged white woman why she was asked not to cry in the presence of the people of color. 

So just to recap:

• An employer called for a gathering to be run by DiAngelo.
• One individual in the workplace told DiAngelo she had a problem with a specific group of people on the basis of their gender and ethnicity.
• DiAngelo then informed the members of that ethnicity only that if they cried during the discussion, they had to leave the room.
• At least one individual was very upset by being singled out that way.

DiAngelo then spends the rest of the article justifying the discrimination, which, when you boil it down, is something like: "all white women share the guilt of the death of Emmet Till because white men killed him because he whistled at a white woman."

I sure hope she tries to use that as a defense in this clear-cut case of ethnicity-based discrimination. She'll be laughed out of court.

If Robin DiAngelo continues to commit blatant discrimination in the workplace it is only a matter of time before somebody sues.

And because the reflex response of all Social Justice Warriors/Identitarians like Robin DiAngelo is to smear their critics as racist, here is a statement:

My Anti-Racist Bona Fides

Although I was smeared on Tumblr by infamous bully Mikki Kendall and identitarian extremist K. Tempest Bradford (and thanks to the cozy relationship between Tumblr and Google, the smears show up in my search results), in fact I have a long history of opposing racism, and the evidence for the past 10 years is on this blog. Unhinged extremists like Kendall and Bradford don't care to know anything about the strangers they randomly smear. That's why they and the people who promote them like Verso books are horrible and don't help solve the problem of racism in the United States.

• I helped prevent racist Razib Khan from getting a gig writing for the NYTime - thanks to documenting his racism for 10 years.
• I stood up to a woman at work who had a pattern of saying racist things.
• I'd like to see Juneteenth become a national holiday.
• I demonstrated that David Mamet's play RACE is most likely based on Mamet's racial hatred of Michelle Obama.
• I believe African Americans built the US.

Happy Blogger-versary!

Wow, here it is, 10 years since my first blog post on November 2, 2005. 

Since that date:

My former partner and I won against Edward Einhorn and his copyright scheme ~ I wrote an article for the Dramatists Guild here. I got to know playwright David Ives a little since he was editing the Guild magazine at time. And I got an anecdote about David Ives and the bullwhip out of that one.

I did lots of self-productions which can be seen at my Mergatroyd site. One of them, Jane Eyre, nearly drove me into bankruptcy. And I became an award-winning playwright.

I turned NYCPlaywrights into a money-making venture instead of a money-losing venture. Of course it is not a lot of money. But it's still better than losing money.

I wrote sonnets because I was in unrequited love with a complete mediocrity. You're never too old to be a fool for love. But I did enjoy writing the sonnets. And some of them are not bad.

I got my first booty call, and from the son of a movie star yet. I did not take him up on it.

Obama became president Oh, yeah, that. Kind of a big deal. I was very excited when it happened, although I had been rooting for Hillary during the primaries. But I liked Obama too, and I think he's proven to be an unusually effective president, in spite of the hideousness of the Republican party.

I often expressed my love for Jon Stewart. And Paul Krugman. And my contempt for Ayn Rand, New Atheists and Social Justice Warriors.

I lived through unemployment and cancer, as well as being personally lied about and smeared by identitarian bully Mikki Kendall and famously bad movie director/producer Andrew Bellware.

I have received responses to this blog from the dread Daphne Merkin and from the cool yet somewhat out-there Cindy Gallop, as well as Santa Claus.

My proudest moment for this blog was when I contributed to preventing the greater mainstreaming of professional bio-racist Razib Khan.


Some blog statistics from blogger - unfortunately they only go back to 2010 so they're not entirely accurate over the last 10 years.

My 10 most popular posts of all time. #4, about Schopenhauer, is pretty surprising.

Damn my accursed principles!!!! Jun 3, 2008	3395
Stupid shit that Social Justice Warriors say, Flav... Mar 4, 2014, 2 comments	2080
Intact Gallery Aug 28, 2010	1994
Six Questions for Arthur Schopenhauer Nov 13, 2011	1773
Razib Khan and his continuing successful quest for... Jan 9, 2013, 6 comments	1476
Social Justice Warrior smear campaign: Sarah Kendz... Jun 12, 2014, 8 comments	1376
Don't Let Me Down Oct 18, 2011	1175
On being smeared by the Mad Gastronomer and Karny... Jun 30, 2012, 4 comments	957
miffed at the New Yorker, Steven Pinker calls for ... Nov 30, 2011, 15 comments	858
more confirmation that Richard Dawkins is a gigant... Jul 6, 2011, 2 comments	818

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Surprising that a French-speaking country is ahead of the UK.

Number of blog posts per year according to my archives. Clearly 2011 was my big blogging year so far. And since 2008 I have been averaging over one blog post per day.

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