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njoseph's avatar

Steve, I agree with almost everything you have written on these issues. Regarding your conversation with Anita, let's point out that bringing in the Israel-Palestine conflict as proof that racism is involved in Gay's firing is itself evidence of bringing only one, simplistic conceptual tool- racism!!!!- to complex situations that require nuance and yes, that dreaded word, context.

Because whatever else the Israel-Palestine conflict is about, it sure as heck is not reducible to Kendi-style racial categorizations. There are black Israelis, and light-skinned Arabs, and Asian migrant workers who were targeted and killed in the Oct 7th attacks. The most right-wing Israelis are often the descendants of refugees from the Arab expulsions in '47 and '48, who are indistinguishable from "people of color."

None of what I'm writing implies support for Bibi and his coalition; I'm simply pointing out at if you look at Israel and Palestine and can only apply weird American ideas about race, you don't understand much if anything about the conflict, even if you're Amnesty International. Why would you think such a person is capable of nuance around something like "black person with important job happens to suck at it and gets fired?" Because the one thing university presidents can never do is piss off the donors, no matter what. If you do that, by definition, you suck at your (real) job.

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Grow Some Labia's avatar

When you buy into the notion that you're fucked because you were born with darker-than-approved skin you're screwed at birth. This is the damage 'antiracism' is doing to POC, as woke feminism is doing to girls/women, convincing them they're fucked because of the 'wrong' genitals (and it's what's driving a lot of F2M transgenderism too). Being on Medium drove me insane sometimes with just how fucked in the head by third wave feminism these young women were. They talked about how 'exhausting' it was to deal with 'patriarchy and misogyny everywhere' sounding rather a lot like Medium's antiracists who apparently couldn't walk across the street without being crushed by epic white supremacy. I was like, "Where is all the misogyny? Where is all the patriarchy? Am I just not paying attention? How is it worse now than when I grew up in the '80s?" :)

Antiracism is pretty clearly now all about anti-white racism, and I'm waiting for Kendi to demand 400 years of slavery from us if we don't cough up reparations soon ;)

Upon which he's getting an invoice from me for 12,000 years of patriarchy :)

And no, black penises aren't exempt! All penises, including girl penises, have to pay up! YOU TOO, be-penised transmen! You wanted to join Da Patriarchy, now ya gotta pay the price!!! ;)

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