RebeccaB wrote:A few years ago, I got dragged in at very short notice (literally overnight) to take over an anthropology course at the tiny local college, when the sole anthropologist on staff got sick about four weeks into the course. The course was Ethnic Relations – not my area of expertise, but I was the closest thing to an anthropologist they could rustle up. I stepped into a minefield.
The woman I was replacing was a true-blue white-guilt-embracing PC-koolaid-guzzling SJW. ... [ :lol: ]
<snip>
The reaction from the class? They all looked puzzled for a few moments. The one of them timidly put up his hand, and said, “The last sentence is a bit racist, maybe?”
Well, that’s the punchline of this post—but I know it’s anything but funny.
Interesting story. And, as you say, anything but funny. Although it is maybe "encouraging" evidence that bigotry and racism are no particular respecter of boundaries, that they can be found in all classes and groups.
But, relative to the rather bogus sociological defintion - at least the one favoured by many SJWs, that racism= "
prejudice + power" - I tend to use, as a counter-argument, the analogy with mechanical
levers: even though different levers may have different mechanical advantages, different amplifications of force, the principle remains the same. Likewise with racism (as Tribble, more or less, recently noted): the belief that
all members of a group are superior, or inferior to
all of another group is rather different from, and frequently conflated with, the effects and impact of that belief.
In any case, relative to your "true-blue white-guilt-embracing PC-koolaid-guzzling SJW" comment, you might be interested in a recent post from Brenda O'Neill. The lead-off:
White shame is the new white pride
– Penthouse, August 2016 –
Are you white? Do you have a dick? If your answer to these questions is “Yes”, then you should be checking your privilege.
You should be watching what you say. You should be experiencing racial guilt. You should feel responsible for every bad thing that happened in history, because all of it was the fault of folk like you: white dudes.
White privilege checking is all the rage. In PC circles, you can’t swing a tote bag without hitting 10 white guys checking their privilege and 10 non-white people demanding they do more of it. ...
Unctuousness for the win? A case of dogma painting itself into a corner, saying black is white? Reminds me of Loyola's
Rules for Thinking with the Church:
http://i.imgur.com/2SMmewB.png
I remember practically falling out of my chair when I first saw that, waaay-back when, in a Wikipedia page on Loyola. Kind of amusing, if disconcertingly so, that, presumably, some Catholics have managed to have that passage deleted from the several pages that had incorporated it:
Though I'm surprised that the Holy See hasn't yet managed to proscribe, anathematize, and excise that passage entirely - as in
this article; maybe St. Mary's hasn't yet received the communique.
For posterity.
But, finally, somewhat apropos, something that
Ophelia Benson quoted from a post of Nick Cohen's (generally a sensible commentator, although I disagreed with his position on Brexit):
Benson wrote:Ah the way the left loves to devour its own. Nick Cohen says it has to do with the left’s self-image as the home of all righteousness.
Cohen wrote:Anyone who saw Gordon Brown and his aides in action, or watched the student left ban speakers for disagreeing with them, has found the myth of leftwing decency hard to swallow. But it has taken the triumph of Jeremy Corbyn’s “new politics” to finish it off. ....
Brecht understood that the certainty of your virtue will lead you into cruelty. Leftwing men can treat women appallingly and leftwing agitators can mimic the language and tactics of the far right. They are so convinced of their righteousness they cannot admit their faults. ....
It sounds right to me, given the quantity of words I’ve seen devoted to ostracizing and libeling people for minor deviations from putative orthodoxy.
Though, of course, such behaviours are hardly unique to the leftwing - or to FTBlogs as accusations here of pedophilia against Myers, and others, readily attests. That "certainty of virtue", that tendency to self-righteousness, that "
lust for domination" as Saint Augustine put it, seems to be rather ubiquitous.
