Sometimes I wonder how many people's 'bad experiences', whether it's living in a relentlessly 'racist' or 'patriarchal' culture (women) or a 'transphobic' culture (trans folk, and mostly transwomen) are perhaps inviting the hostility, consciously or not, with their own, subtle or not. There was a black writer on Medium before I left whos…
Sometimes I wonder how many people's 'bad experiences', whether it's living in a relentlessly 'racist' or 'patriarchal' culture (women) or a 'transphobic' culture (trans folk, and mostly transwomen) are perhaps inviting the hostility, consciously or not, with their own, subtle or not. There was a black writer on Medium before I left whose stories on racism she experienced living in another country (she's never, to my knowledge, lived in the US) who began reading the negative, victim-centred literature (Kendi, DiAngelo, Coates, etc.) and began sounding far more whiny and self-victimizing and a little bit racist herself. I began to feel sorry for her white husband, and I wonder whether the racist 'microaggressions', which sound a bit exaggerated now, are because her country is all that racist or whether maybe she's got a chip on her shoulder the size of a dump truck.
The funny part about human beings is that while no one likes to *be victimized*, many of us sure do like *feeling* victimized. Acknowledging progress interferes with the victim narrative that gives you a reason to blame everyone except yourself for your problems.
"There was a black writer on Medium before I left whose stories on racism she experienced living in another country (she's never, to my knowledge, lived in the US) who began reading the negative, victim-centred literature (Kendi, DiAngelo, Coates, etc.) and began sounding far more whiny and self-victimizing and a little bit racist herself"
This wouldn't be Rebecca Stevens would it?😅 At some point she blocked me, even though we've never even had a conversation, but the overwhelming positive was that I no longer had to see her articles in my feed.
John McWhorter has been talking about this problem recently. Victimhood is a perfectly human weakness. White, black, gay, straight, male, female, we're all susceptible to the temptation to say "poor me". This is why we often note that there's so much overlap between a certain type of antiracist and feminist and LGBT activist.
But when we're not only given permission to play the victim, but are rewarded for doing so, including financially in the case of writers on Medium, the temptation takes on a whole new level.
I'm not sure if you *are* talking about Rebecca, but what drove me mad about her "work" is the fact that there was never anything productive. Not a single relationship or work story or trip to a supermarket that wasn't tarnished by racism or her lack of "privilege". There was never even the slightest attempt to understand or portray nuance. I simply don't believe that her life is really like this. She simply edits out anything that portrays being black as anything other than a living hell.
But her thoroughly mediocre writing got the most attention when she wrote moronic, divisive nonsense. So that very quickly became all she ever wrote. It's this really toxic negative spiral.
Medium has gone completely overboard in coddling the victim claims. I was kicked off for telling one of those "nonbinary" people that I would not refer to him/her as "they." NOTHING about the authenticity of the claim to intermediate gender, which privately I believe to be complete BS, just that my respect for grammar would not allow "they."
Medium called this "bullying" and banned me. Again. And with the changes to their partner program I won't be writing there anymore.
ROTLFMAO! Thank you for sharing this story. Welcome to the club, O My Brother :) I got banned after I defended Dave Chappelle and criticized trans activists for being misogynist and snowflake. They'd already suspended two of my previous articles, and I predicted they'd suspend *me* next. Which they did. Having already psychologically disengaged from Medium after the second article takedown, it wasn't too hard to stick to my intention to refuse to beg for my account back. Wrote a whole article about it on my blog. https://www.nicolechardenet.com/post/bye-bye-medium-com
I take it you got reinstated at least once? I'm done with Medium.
They don't reinstate. Appeals are always rejected. And my last one was at the complaint of one of the sickest and angriest people I have run across online, and I have been online since the dialup networks like Compuserve.
I mostly write about the software industry but it is hopeless.
Then I'm glad I didn't give them the satisfaction of sucking (transwoman, LOL) d**k to try to get my account back. They're taking a very strict line in regards to *ANY* challenge to the trans community. Thou. Shalt. Not. Question.
Yeah, it was Rebecca. I actually liked reading her stories when I first joined Medium, they seemed quite real, a view of racism I don't see myself, obviously. But later, it seemed like she was stretching to find the racism and shortly before I left it seemed to me that she was looking to US (slave) history to feel victimized and outraged and *that's not even her history*. She's from Africa originally and I have a little less patience with Africans pissing and moaning about a practice the US eliminated *over 150 years ago* when in many parts of Africa today they STILL practice the slave trade - in fact, an article in the last few years described Africa as once 'again' the epicentre of the global slave trade. Africans who dislike American slavery really need to go home and do something about slavery TODAY.
Although I've noticed that most people complain about Marley K the most. Marley is to antiracism what Jessica Valenti is to feminism - the biggest whiners and complainers out there, but maybe once a year they produce something rational and worth reading. Because of that, I muted rather than blocked both of them to keep their horse shit out of my feed (but in case it ever came to my attention that they'd written something worth reading, I wanted to remain a bit open.) I've never had an interaction with either myself.
Like you, I don't think Rebecca's life is as bad as she makes it out to be. She's an unhappy woman for reasons neither of us know why, but I'm pretty sure it ain't because she's subjected to a constant stream of racism (in Switzerland?) I guess Judson Vereen really called her out on that recently - someone sent me the article - and I was glad to see him take on the fact that she's middle class, has a good job, lives in a country with a decent standard of living. I'm beginning to feel real sorrow for her white husband, because I'll bet she's getting to be a real pain in the ass to live with.
One thing I've noticed about Medium three months away: I don't miss it that much. It took up a *lot* of my time, and while I felt a little 'cut off' at first I now realize how much I'd fallen into the Medium 'groove' of writing a certain way to feed the audience that wants what it wants. I have to write a little differently for Vocal, where your story has to be approved first. Their standards are similar to Medium's but not the same and in fact there's less leeway to be as extreme. Medium really does allow a lot of hateful content, my experience being a helluva lot of blanket man-hating and also plenty of whitey-hating. Extremism does sell and Medium is okay with paying for it, but only if you hate on the 'right' people.
Going to test Vocal with a rewrite of one of the articles Medium took down earlier last year. Taking out the snarkiness, the criticisms of the trans community, and focusing more on why I think 'transracialism' might be a good idea, based on some positive things I see coming out of its close cousin, the better parts of the trans movement. Let's see if Vocal can handle that...at least I won't get a strike mark against me if they don't approve it, I either rewrite it to their liking or I delete it :)
"I actually liked reading her stories when I first joined Medium, they seemed quite real, a view of racism I don't see myself, obviously."
Yeah, that's just it. I think with Rebecca it's a question of exposure. The first couple of stories of hers I read struck me as a little sensationalist, but I though, "sure, she's a different person, maybe her experiences have simply differed from mine." I believed she was at least being genuine and was willing to excuse some of the hyperbole as fear or a difference in personality.
But then there's the next one. And the next one. And each time it gets a little harder to take her seriously. Especially when she starts talking about the way black people in general are treated, and it's obvious that what she's saying simply isn't true. Eventually any sympathy I might have had is completely eroded because it's obvious she's just a liar.
This is a microcosm of racial discourse at the moment. Especially on social media. And it's doing exactly the same thing to people who I see becoming increasingly racist in their thinking. They didn't start out like that in most cases. Some I personally know started out perfectly reasonable and engaged. But the constant drip, drip of bullshit, coupled with being told how evil and racist they are all the time, has led some of them to reflexively deny racism even in situations where it's obvious, or to generalise about black people in response to the generalisations about white people.
Increasingly often I find myself having arguments with people because they've just assumed I hold a bunch of views that I don't, because they're the views "black writers" hold. People like Rebecca and Marley are doing real, measurable damage.
Good luck with Vocal, I haven't given them a go yet but I'll be interested to hear your experiences with them.
"The funny part about human beings is that while no one likes to *be victimized*, many of us sure do like *feeling* victimized. Acknowledging progress interferes with the victim narrative that gives you a reason to blame everyone except yourself for your problems."
There is some degree of "liking to feel victimized" but I believe that much of what we call victimhood cultures is about gaining power over others through exaggerated exposition of one's victimhood, rather than about actually wallowing in one's pain. If it didn't pay off in power, without that incentive, I believe a lot of it would die down. But if some professor having published something you don't like, and you can claim it makes you feel 'unsafe' to enter a campus where they work, the goal is less to feel sorry about yourself so much as to get that professor shut down - power.
And yes, I've come to believe that the Prime Directive for neo-progressives is "Reinforce the Narrative at all costs". Promoting the Narrative is their source of power, so any dissent which might undercut it at all must be suppressed. Research that shows a lessening of bias needs to be deep sixed, but anything which can be interpreted as supporting a narrative of oppression is to be highlighted.
One example was when at a certain stage of facial recognition the software was better at recognizing white faces than Black, this was portrayed as embodied white supremacy. The systemic racism in which white programmers were steeped was presumed to have leaked through their fingertips into a racially biased algorithm. The truth was that there are many more white faces available for training, and they on average have better contrast than the available Black faces, so the early iterations were better at one. Over time, by artificially biasing the training data not to proportionately represent the population, and general improvements, it will even out more. But suppose that it had for similar technical reasons been better at recognizing Black faces at that stage. I have no doubt that would be considered systematic racism as well - designed to detect Black criminal more than white. Being more easily identified by surveillance is not necessarily a privilege, after all. The reliable thing in common with either scenario is - Reinforce the Narrative at all costs. Find a way to accentuate the narrative of oppression, suppress anything which weakens that narrative. In the narrative lies power. Protect the narrative.
(I have more sympathy for what I consider the roots of that approach than it might sound. While I believe it has become dogmatic and corrosive today, I think that in part it's a bastardization of the call for moral integrity from sources like Dr King. However, it has mutated into something more malign today - a divisive tribalism rather than a unifying message among other things.)
There is a young Black content creator on YouTube whom I appreciate - Kimi Kitati. She grew up in several countries of Africa, then moved to the US. In college she got way into the woke ideology. But she describes how miserable it was to be constantly looking for and reacting to microaggressions and racial bias everywhere all day long.
It was so draining that at some point she decided to forgive (one of her heroes is Desmond Tutu), and a weight was lifted off her shoulders. She started seeing nuance and the good in people. She also has an intellectual analysis, but the deeper change was in her heart.
Putting this in my own terms (which she might or might not agree with), she found that the psychological payoffs of neo-progressivism were the booby prize; the real prize was in authentic connection and engagement. Still trying to make the world better, but not with those poisoned tools.
Never doubt that neo-progressivism has its psychological payoffs; once hooked on them deeply, it's very hard to escape. Her story inspires me with hope.
You might like to check it out for a contrast to Rebecca in terms of how she has evolved with exposure to the first world. Her take just feels so much more psychologically *healthy* as well as politically constructive.
Thanks for the rec! Yes, I will definitely check out Kim Katati. Sounds quite interesting. I often wonder how much people make *themselves* miserable with their increasingly twisted views of the world. I'd bet my bottom dollar people like Rebecca are at this point either consciously or unconsciously acting in such a way to invite hostility from others. I see this same dynamic from victim feminists who treat men the way Rebecca treats white people. The narrative is *always* about oppression, and you can always spin it to be proof of oppression, as you noted elsewhere about the 'racism' of facial recognition systems. Thanks again, now I have something new to listen to while I make dinner!
Sometimes I wonder how many people's 'bad experiences', whether it's living in a relentlessly 'racist' or 'patriarchal' culture (women) or a 'transphobic' culture (trans folk, and mostly transwomen) are perhaps inviting the hostility, consciously or not, with their own, subtle or not. There was a black writer on Medium before I left whose stories on racism she experienced living in another country (she's never, to my knowledge, lived in the US) who began reading the negative, victim-centred literature (Kendi, DiAngelo, Coates, etc.) and began sounding far more whiny and self-victimizing and a little bit racist herself. I began to feel sorry for her white husband, and I wonder whether the racist 'microaggressions', which sound a bit exaggerated now, are because her country is all that racist or whether maybe she's got a chip on her shoulder the size of a dump truck.
The funny part about human beings is that while no one likes to *be victimized*, many of us sure do like *feeling* victimized. Acknowledging progress interferes with the victim narrative that gives you a reason to blame everyone except yourself for your problems.
"There was a black writer on Medium before I left whose stories on racism she experienced living in another country (she's never, to my knowledge, lived in the US) who began reading the negative, victim-centred literature (Kendi, DiAngelo, Coates, etc.) and began sounding far more whiny and self-victimizing and a little bit racist herself"
This wouldn't be Rebecca Stevens would it?😅 At some point she blocked me, even though we've never even had a conversation, but the overwhelming positive was that I no longer had to see her articles in my feed.
John McWhorter has been talking about this problem recently. Victimhood is a perfectly human weakness. White, black, gay, straight, male, female, we're all susceptible to the temptation to say "poor me". This is why we often note that there's so much overlap between a certain type of antiracist and feminist and LGBT activist.
But when we're not only given permission to play the victim, but are rewarded for doing so, including financially in the case of writers on Medium, the temptation takes on a whole new level.
I'm not sure if you *are* talking about Rebecca, but what drove me mad about her "work" is the fact that there was never anything productive. Not a single relationship or work story or trip to a supermarket that wasn't tarnished by racism or her lack of "privilege". There was never even the slightest attempt to understand or portray nuance. I simply don't believe that her life is really like this. She simply edits out anything that portrays being black as anything other than a living hell.
But her thoroughly mediocre writing got the most attention when she wrote moronic, divisive nonsense. So that very quickly became all she ever wrote. It's this really toxic negative spiral.
Medium has gone completely overboard in coddling the victim claims. I was kicked off for telling one of those "nonbinary" people that I would not refer to him/her as "they." NOTHING about the authenticity of the claim to intermediate gender, which privately I believe to be complete BS, just that my respect for grammar would not allow "they."
Medium called this "bullying" and banned me. Again. And with the changes to their partner program I won't be writing there anymore.
ROTLFMAO! Thank you for sharing this story. Welcome to the club, O My Brother :) I got banned after I defended Dave Chappelle and criticized trans activists for being misogynist and snowflake. They'd already suspended two of my previous articles, and I predicted they'd suspend *me* next. Which they did. Having already psychologically disengaged from Medium after the second article takedown, it wasn't too hard to stick to my intention to refuse to beg for my account back. Wrote a whole article about it on my blog. https://www.nicolechardenet.com/post/bye-bye-medium-com
I take it you got reinstated at least once? I'm done with Medium.
They don't reinstate. Appeals are always rejected. And my last one was at the complaint of one of the sickest and angriest people I have run across online, and I have been online since the dialup networks like Compuserve.
I mostly write about the software industry but it is hopeless.
Then I'm glad I didn't give them the satisfaction of sucking (transwoman, LOL) d**k to try to get my account back. They're taking a very strict line in regards to *ANY* challenge to the trans community. Thou. Shalt. Not. Question.
Yeah, it was Rebecca. I actually liked reading her stories when I first joined Medium, they seemed quite real, a view of racism I don't see myself, obviously. But later, it seemed like she was stretching to find the racism and shortly before I left it seemed to me that she was looking to US (slave) history to feel victimized and outraged and *that's not even her history*. She's from Africa originally and I have a little less patience with Africans pissing and moaning about a practice the US eliminated *over 150 years ago* when in many parts of Africa today they STILL practice the slave trade - in fact, an article in the last few years described Africa as once 'again' the epicentre of the global slave trade. Africans who dislike American slavery really need to go home and do something about slavery TODAY.
Although I've noticed that most people complain about Marley K the most. Marley is to antiracism what Jessica Valenti is to feminism - the biggest whiners and complainers out there, but maybe once a year they produce something rational and worth reading. Because of that, I muted rather than blocked both of them to keep their horse shit out of my feed (but in case it ever came to my attention that they'd written something worth reading, I wanted to remain a bit open.) I've never had an interaction with either myself.
Like you, I don't think Rebecca's life is as bad as she makes it out to be. She's an unhappy woman for reasons neither of us know why, but I'm pretty sure it ain't because she's subjected to a constant stream of racism (in Switzerland?) I guess Judson Vereen really called her out on that recently - someone sent me the article - and I was glad to see him take on the fact that she's middle class, has a good job, lives in a country with a decent standard of living. I'm beginning to feel real sorrow for her white husband, because I'll bet she's getting to be a real pain in the ass to live with.
One thing I've noticed about Medium three months away: I don't miss it that much. It took up a *lot* of my time, and while I felt a little 'cut off' at first I now realize how much I'd fallen into the Medium 'groove' of writing a certain way to feed the audience that wants what it wants. I have to write a little differently for Vocal, where your story has to be approved first. Their standards are similar to Medium's but not the same and in fact there's less leeway to be as extreme. Medium really does allow a lot of hateful content, my experience being a helluva lot of blanket man-hating and also plenty of whitey-hating. Extremism does sell and Medium is okay with paying for it, but only if you hate on the 'right' people.
Going to test Vocal with a rewrite of one of the articles Medium took down earlier last year. Taking out the snarkiness, the criticisms of the trans community, and focusing more on why I think 'transracialism' might be a good idea, based on some positive things I see coming out of its close cousin, the better parts of the trans movement. Let's see if Vocal can handle that...at least I won't get a strike mark against me if they don't approve it, I either rewrite it to their liking or I delete it :)
"I actually liked reading her stories when I first joined Medium, they seemed quite real, a view of racism I don't see myself, obviously."
Yeah, that's just it. I think with Rebecca it's a question of exposure. The first couple of stories of hers I read struck me as a little sensationalist, but I though, "sure, she's a different person, maybe her experiences have simply differed from mine." I believed she was at least being genuine and was willing to excuse some of the hyperbole as fear or a difference in personality.
But then there's the next one. And the next one. And each time it gets a little harder to take her seriously. Especially when she starts talking about the way black people in general are treated, and it's obvious that what she's saying simply isn't true. Eventually any sympathy I might have had is completely eroded because it's obvious she's just a liar.
This is a microcosm of racial discourse at the moment. Especially on social media. And it's doing exactly the same thing to people who I see becoming increasingly racist in their thinking. They didn't start out like that in most cases. Some I personally know started out perfectly reasonable and engaged. But the constant drip, drip of bullshit, coupled with being told how evil and racist they are all the time, has led some of them to reflexively deny racism even in situations where it's obvious, or to generalise about black people in response to the generalisations about white people.
Increasingly often I find myself having arguments with people because they've just assumed I hold a bunch of views that I don't, because they're the views "black writers" hold. People like Rebecca and Marley are doing real, measurable damage.
Good luck with Vocal, I haven't given them a go yet but I'll be interested to hear your experiences with them.
"The funny part about human beings is that while no one likes to *be victimized*, many of us sure do like *feeling* victimized. Acknowledging progress interferes with the victim narrative that gives you a reason to blame everyone except yourself for your problems."
There is some degree of "liking to feel victimized" but I believe that much of what we call victimhood cultures is about gaining power over others through exaggerated exposition of one's victimhood, rather than about actually wallowing in one's pain. If it didn't pay off in power, without that incentive, I believe a lot of it would die down. But if some professor having published something you don't like, and you can claim it makes you feel 'unsafe' to enter a campus where they work, the goal is less to feel sorry about yourself so much as to get that professor shut down - power.
And yes, I've come to believe that the Prime Directive for neo-progressives is "Reinforce the Narrative at all costs". Promoting the Narrative is their source of power, so any dissent which might undercut it at all must be suppressed. Research that shows a lessening of bias needs to be deep sixed, but anything which can be interpreted as supporting a narrative of oppression is to be highlighted.
One example was when at a certain stage of facial recognition the software was better at recognizing white faces than Black, this was portrayed as embodied white supremacy. The systemic racism in which white programmers were steeped was presumed to have leaked through their fingertips into a racially biased algorithm. The truth was that there are many more white faces available for training, and they on average have better contrast than the available Black faces, so the early iterations were better at one. Over time, by artificially biasing the training data not to proportionately represent the population, and general improvements, it will even out more. But suppose that it had for similar technical reasons been better at recognizing Black faces at that stage. I have no doubt that would be considered systematic racism as well - designed to detect Black criminal more than white. Being more easily identified by surveillance is not necessarily a privilege, after all. The reliable thing in common with either scenario is - Reinforce the Narrative at all costs. Find a way to accentuate the narrative of oppression, suppress anything which weakens that narrative. In the narrative lies power. Protect the narrative.
(I have more sympathy for what I consider the roots of that approach than it might sound. While I believe it has become dogmatic and corrosive today, I think that in part it's a bastardization of the call for moral integrity from sources like Dr King. However, it has mutated into something more malign today - a divisive tribalism rather than a unifying message among other things.)
There is a young Black content creator on YouTube whom I appreciate - Kimi Kitati. She grew up in several countries of Africa, then moved to the US. In college she got way into the woke ideology. But she describes how miserable it was to be constantly looking for and reacting to microaggressions and racial bias everywhere all day long.
It was so draining that at some point she decided to forgive (one of her heroes is Desmond Tutu), and a weight was lifted off her shoulders. She started seeing nuance and the good in people. She also has an intellectual analysis, but the deeper change was in her heart.
Putting this in my own terms (which she might or might not agree with), she found that the psychological payoffs of neo-progressivism were the booby prize; the real prize was in authentic connection and engagement. Still trying to make the world better, but not with those poisoned tools.
Never doubt that neo-progressivism has its psychological payoffs; once hooked on them deeply, it's very hard to escape. Her story inspires me with hope.
You might like to check it out for a contrast to Rebecca in terms of how she has evolved with exposure to the first world. Her take just feels so much more psychologically *healthy* as well as politically constructive.
Thanks for the rec! Yes, I will definitely check out Kim Katati. Sounds quite interesting. I often wonder how much people make *themselves* miserable with their increasingly twisted views of the world. I'd bet my bottom dollar people like Rebecca are at this point either consciously or unconsciously acting in such a way to invite hostility from others. I see this same dynamic from victim feminists who treat men the way Rebecca treats white people. The narrative is *always* about oppression, and you can always spin it to be proof of oppression, as you noted elsewhere about the 'racism' of facial recognition systems. Thanks again, now I have something new to listen to while I make dinner!