Hello everyone, welcome to This Week in Stupid for the 17th of May 2015.
This week we're going to learn how white people are just the worst.
But first, a few weeks ago I commented on a story from the Telegraph about how Nigel Farage had been harassed while out with his wife and children having a meal by extreme leftist activists.
It's come to light that UKIP themselves may well have been the primary instigator behind this in encouraging them to go out and harass him when he was in a pub.
So I'm not saying that this in any way ameliorates the guilt of what these protesters did, but I don't think the UK Independence Party members who were responsible for instigating this are innocent either.
And so to begin, the World Health Organization issues disease naming advice to avoid offence.
Of course they do.
New human diseases should be given socially acceptable names which do not offend people or countries or mention animals, the World Health Organization has said.
The Who Says Middle East respiratory system and Spanish flu are examples of what to avoid because they mention specific locations.
Well if I were from the Middle East or Spain I'd be offended because I would be really insulted that you would think I was such a giant fucking pussy that I would be insulted by the name of a disease because it happens to have originated in a location either near to or that I am actually living in.
Just look at this list.
So you may not use geographic locations.
Cities, countries, regions or continents.
You can't say something came from Asia or from Europe or from Africa.
That is too triggering.
There are people in Mongolia who had Asian flu and are just like that's awful.
I mean it's not not bad that I had the flu although I wasn't happy about it, but it's the name.
They called it Asian flu and I am in Asia.
But you also can't use people's names, you know, because that individual will suddenly be offended and you can't use species or class of animal or food.
Who the fuck is that going to offend?
Do they think that the animals will be offended?
Or the f- the food?
What the fuck are you on about?
This one's almost as good.
Cultural population, industry or occupational references?
What like Legionnaire's disease?
I mean, how is that offensive?
What are the people in the French Foreign Legion who are like, you know what, I'm not, I'm not going and I'm not going to war until they change the name of this disease.
Apparently, certain disease names had created a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities.
What?
In school or something?
Were they like, oh, you're Spanish, you must have Spanish flu?
Apparently, they had also put up barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and in some cases triggered the needless slaughtering of animals.
What like with mad cow disease that someone in Brazil was like, you know what, I better slaughter my cows, because in England some of the cows are sick.
Or maybe tourists were like, you know what, I don't mind all the instability, chaos and terrorism of the Middle East.
But they do have the Middle Eastern respiratory disease and I don't really want to catch that, so I'm not going to go there on holiday.
I guess I'm going to stay home and not be English.
I do not want to be English and any attempt to create an English identity will fail.
What the fuck are you talking about, Paul Mason?
That is moronic.
There has been an English identity for over a thousand years.
The scale of the Scottish National Party's victory in Scotland virtually compels all of the UK-wide political parties to start centering misspelt themselves on a place called England.
Whether we get English votes for English laws to the Commons or power devolved to the English regions depends on how big a priority the Conservatives make them.
Labour almost certainly will have to create a federal structure and an English party organisation to mirror its Scots and Welsh ones.
But as an English person, I would like to declare up front, I do not want to be English.
Well, don't be.
I am an English person and I do want to be English.
The author says, I am the grandson of a Lithuanian Jew on one side, steady on pole, and some miners and weavers whose roots go back for centuries in the same square kilometre off the East Lanx Road.
Neither this side of the genealogy makes me feel particularly enamoured with the concept of England.
Well, I hate to say this, but that's your problem.
I really failed to see why you're writing this blog post and why anyone would give you a platform for it.
Skipping over the waffle, the author says, beyond sport, in large swathes of public life, there is almost no requirement whatsoever for an English person to self-identify as English.
And that is because, as for no other nation on these islands, what it means to be English is completely subordinate to religion, class, ethnicity, and local culture.
As if these things are not aspects of being English.
But, okay.
On each of these measures, if I examine my own gut feelings, oh, this is an empirical measure we can all go on.
I still have more in common with Celtic cultures of Britain than with an Englishness defined around the public schools and the officer class.
Well, fucking great.
I don't care if you identify more with the Celtic cultures of Britain than the English cultures of Britain.
Why are you using this platform to denounce the concept of an English identity?
Because of the election results and the English institutions it could call forth, sooner or later someone is going to try and foist an Englishness narrative on us.
Even on the left, the idea is gaining traction.
Irving Welsh has suggested that the working class northern half of England might have to start playing the game of English nationalism just to prevent the upper class southerners from monopolising it.
But our author doesn't think that's going to happen.
And that's because at the centre of English culture lies neither institutions nor customs nor sports teams, but a global language.
No, you fucking moron.
The language that we are speaking is not the centre of our culture.
This is such an absurd thing to say.
As if French culture would change if they started speaking a different language in France.
As if German culture would change if they started speaking a different language in Germany.
This is ridiculous.
My English is not just the language of Dickens, Keats and Milton.
It is the English of Tolstoy, Arhand Pamuk and Flaubert in translation.
Yes, in translation.
Because they weren't writing in English.
They were writing in Russian, Turkish, and French.
You fucking fruit.
If an English national identity stubbornly refuses to emerge as the result of the Scottish shock, it will be because of the class and cultural divides within England.
As if there isn't already an English national identity that encompasses the class and cultural divides within England.
And because our linguistic identity is so full of free gifts from the rest of the world.
This, of course, is a legacy of empire.
But the empire itself was born out of trade and sailing, two activities whose centrality to English identity explains why it's so difficult to pin down.
It's just broad, for fuck's sake.
One might go as far to say, diverse.
If you were to run English history since the Roman Empire on Fast Forward, you would see wave after wave of invaders arriving by ship, depositing new words into the language and new hair colours into the gene pool, but barely settling before they embark on new ships to go and find new places to colonise and trade with.
Well, yes, remember that diversity we were talking about.
So I predict all attempts to create an Englishness that can encompass Wigan and Henley will fail, for the same reasons that Gordon Brown's Britishness initiatives failed.
One person's Englishness is another's racism.
Really?
The English national identity is a thousand years old and you think it can be directly tied to racism.
Because of what's happened in Scotland, we're certainly going to get more political control and new institutions for England and its regions.
But please don't try to burden me with yet another layer of bogus identity politics.
Oh, fuck off.
Just fuck off.
You want to talk about bogus identity politics, do you?
As if English national identity isn't something that has been consistent since Ethelstan the Glorious united the Septarchy, since Canute the Great conquered and became king of England, since William the Conqueror decided to wrest the crown from Harold Godwinson.
But do you want to talk about bogus identity politics?
Well, tell me something, Paul.
What gender neutral pronoun are you using?
I guess here's another thing that isn't really part of the English identity.
I know this is a day too old really to be in this week's, but I'm sorry, this pissed me off too much to exclude.
It's time to take the curriculum back from dead white men with a jolly picture of William Shakespeare.
Dead white men rule the roost at South African and British universities.
My goodness, how awful.
They preside over spaces and lecture halls.
I can see why the progressives are getting so sweaty.
They clog up the reading lists and dominate the syllabus, particularly in subjects like philosophy and English literature.
Oh yeah, but the two subjects where the things that matter most are the colour of the people's skin and not the things that they were saying or writing.
In eight years of university teaching in the United Kingdom and South Africa, I've had to cover works by Mallory, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Elliot, Sophocles, Ovid, Homer, Beckett, Joyce, Hopkins, Heaney, Anuil and more Shakespeare.
In all that time, I've been required to teach literary text by just three women, also dead and white.
Sappho, Virginia Woolf, and Jane Austen.
Oh, how monstrous.
In British universities, you had to teach the Western tradition of intellectualism.
That is just totally fucking racist.
So our author goes on to complain there was only one person of colour featured in their required reading.
Before going on to state that the students are rather alarmed by a different sort of dead white man.
For 81 years, a statue honouring British mining magnate, politician and committed colonialist Cecil John Rhodes occupied a perch on the University of Cape Town's campus.
But on March 9th this year, the statue's silent contemplation was interrupted when a 30-year-old student, a 30-year-old student, Chumani Maxwell, threw a bucket of human feces over the statue and sparked a movement hashtag Rhodes MustFall.
Now, this is fair enough, actually.
You know, I can understand how people in South Africa wouldn't be happy about having a statue of Cecil Rhodes.
I mean, as they say, Rhodes openly derided black people and foreshadowed the formal inclusion of apartheid back as far back as 1894, which he did.
He was not the sort of person that I can imagine people in South Africa would actually want a statue of.
But Cecil Rhodes is not William Shakespeare.
And despite the removal of the statue in South Africa being completely unrelated to the curriculum of the UK, this author's going to try and tie it in.
So students in the UK are also questioning the lack of diversity in higher education.
They're asking stupid questions like, why isn't my professor black?
And why is my curriculum white?
And then they say, well, why is the population of the UK 85% white British?
I agree.
It's ridiculous.
Why would a country that is 85% white have mostly white people in universities?
I mean, what a bunch of fucking racists.
The Rhodes Monument seems an apt metaphor for the looming presence of certain authors, texts, and narratives in the humanities and social sciences.
The problem is that they are not as easily dislodged as statues.
If we want to build on what movements like Rhodes Must Fall have achieved and really decolonize universities, it's time for dead white men to stop controlling things.
Are you suggesting that the British decolonize their own universities?
So to do this, academics and students must engage with English being a language born of and sustained by migration and cross-cultural contact both in Britain and overseas.
Just like the fucking other one from The Independent, isn't it?
This narrative must be a central part of the curriculum.
We must acknowledge the power structures that have allowed some people to contribute to the canon while keeping others out.
Oh yes, those power structures that require you not to be shit.
It's time to eradicate the notion that writing by women, people of colour and other socially and culturally excluded groups is only interesting to a limited number of people.
Well, it really depends what they're writing about, doesn't it?
The writing itself is not automatically validated by the gender or race of the person writing it.
Teachers must be re-taught.
We tend to reproduce the narratives we absorbed as students, so an ongoing process of research and sharing is crucial if we are to teach differently.
That makes perfect sense.
I mean, obviously the teachers think wrong and everything they've learned up until now has also been wrong.
They are indeed going to need re-education.
Race and gender do not just mean blackness and womanhood, but don't they?
That's how feminists use them all the time.
There must be a space in the core undergraduate curriculum for analyses of whiteness and masculinity too.
Oh yeah, I can't wait for people who aren't white and or male to sit there and analyse what it's like to be white and male.
Students must have opportunities to produce original research and pursue their own concerns and interests from the outset of their literary studies degree.
The University of Sheffield again leads the pack here through its radical theory module.
This asks students to actively engage in reinterpreting the university as a site for a philosophical speculation and theory-based intervention through independent projects and peer-to-peer learning.
I've gone no doubt that that will be intellectually rigorous.
And finally, creative writing can give students and teachers a chance to imagine the voices that are ignored in our existing curricula.
Oh I like this.
A possible starting point might be the responses of the Africans who in 1607 witnessed the first recorded performance of Hamlet on a ship off the coast of Sierra Leone.
Yes, why don't you tell me what you think those people thought?
I'm sure it will be absolutely spot on.
By allowing different voices to step up to the lecture podium, we can push dead white men like William Shakespeare out of the limelight and ultimately produce a curriculum that better reflects the diversity of English literature and culture, both past and present, by excluding Englishmen from it.
That is just marvellous.
Thank you for the double think.
Since we're talking about South African universities though...
Hitler took white people to starve them to death.
The same way they did to black people.
That's why they hate him.
I love Adolf.
Oh, yeah, brilliant.
Finally, someone's brave enough to say it.
I love Hitler because he starved white people.
Fucking brilliant.
So if you couldn't understand that, Axe Witt's student representative council president Macebo Diamani or something took to the University of Limpopo Turfloop campus to explain his love for Adolf Hitler to the students.
He, Adolf Hitler, reduced white bodies to the same level as black bodies, because according to a white man, just some unspecified white man, only a black man must be killed.
According to a white man, only a black man must be placed in a quarantine to die.
I mean, was this according to Cecil Rhodes?
Because I don't think we all agree with him.
Hitler took white people and killed them.
Hitler took white people and starved them to death, the same way they did to black people.
That's why they hate him.
I love Adolf Hitler for that, De Lamani said during his address to the students, who clapped and cheered.
You couldn't make it up, could you?
Apparently, South African universities still have some form of sensible governance because thankfully he was expelled as a member and president of the Student Representative Council.
Also, you would think, except the Vice-Chancellor and Principal Professor Adam Habib, said that his Hitler remarks were racist and offensive in the extreme, but made it clear that Delamani's expulsion had nothing to do with the comments.
And unfazed by public outrage, he made it clear that he would not apologize for his Hitler comments.
The world's gone fucking mad.
And speaking of world wars and the world going mad, university approves history class that doesn't mention both world wars.
Sacramento State University will now allow an anthropology course to fulfill the school's general education history requirement, a decision that has prompted fierce debate with history scholars noting it effectively allows students to take a history class that doesn't even mention either world war, among other important topics.
What a fucking ridiculous thing to happen.
That is absurd.
How can you have an anthropology class that doesn't properly inform you about the history of your civilization leading up to this point?
As it stands, the anthropology class will reportedly focus on the intersection of race, class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality, the political economy of institutions and ideas such as racism, classism, sexual stereotyping, family, religion, state colourblindness, multiculturalism, etc.
And the discourse of cultural diversity in the US.
Which is history now.
Sacramento state history professors had appealed the decision, but the request was denied.
It appears the change is a done deal, reports inside higher ed.
Sacramento State campus officials did not respond to emails and phone calls by the college fix on Thursday seeking comment.
A spokesperson who answered the phone said a comment would be produced by Thursday evening.
None was.
Sacramento State History Professor Joseph Palermo, who teaches a course that currently fulfills the requirement, wrote a scathing opinion piece in which he attacked the idea that an anthropology class is an acceptable substitute.
Listen to what is left out.
The new introductory history course leaves out, amongst other things, the progressive era, World War I, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, FDR, the New Deal, World War II, McCarthyism, the Cold War, the Korean War, the nuclear arms race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK assassination, Freedom Summer, the United Farm Workers Union, the Vietnam War, the Stonewall, Watergate, Second Wave Feminism, the Iranian hostage crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, globalization, the 9-11 attacks, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What the fuck?
Kind of history lesson are you teaching?
Fucking hell.
It's going to come as no surprise to you that the anthropology professors think leaving all that out is just fine.
Historians have a way of engaging with history and similarly we have a way of engaging with history.
We are supposed to do the major events within 100 years and within this course in particular we'll talk about civil rights, unionization in the US, we'll talk about women's enrollment into the workforce and the emergence of the black Muslim community and the interactions between diverse populations that made that happen.
Yes, okay, they are some things that have happened, but you appear to be leaving out a whole host of other things that are far more important that also happened.
Of course, what this reeks of is ideological bias.
Specifically from the sort of ideology that has led us to use trigger warnings.
If you can believe it, there are universities that are still teaching Greek mythology, but unsurprisingly, it needs a trigger warning.
Now, to be fair, I have actually read quite a lot of Greek mythology, and some of it is quite shocking.
But frankly, I really don't find that to be any kind of excuse.
In an op-ed for the student newspaper, four Columbia University undergraduates have called on the school to implement trigger warnings, even for classics like Greek mythology or Roman poetry.
Ovid's Metamorphoses is a fixture of lit-hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive materials that marginalizes student identities in the classroom.
How?
What the fuck has it got to do with student identities?
How is it marginalizing anything?
For fuck's sake!
Wrote four students who are members of the Columbia's Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board.
Why is that a thing?
These texts wrought with histories and narratives, exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of colour, or a student from a low-income background.
Fuck off!
Jesus Christ.
In the op-ed, the Columbia undergrads, all women of colour, recount the story of another female student.
And my god, this is just harrowing.
During the week spent on Ovid's Metamorphoses, the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault.
As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such a detailed account of rape throughout the work.
However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text.
As a result, the students completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation because she was going to die.
She did not feel safe in the class because someone in the class was going to rape her.
When she approached her professor after class, the student said she was essentially dismissed and her concerns were ignored.
I don't know what she was expecting her professor to do.
The students then call on Columbia to issue a letter to faculty about potential trigger warnings and suggestions for how to support triggered students.
Those poor fucking pumpkins.
Honestly, if someone could just give them a big cuddle, that'd be lovely.
And institute a mechanism for students to communicate their concerns to professors anonymously, as well as a meditation mechanism for students who have identity-based disagreements with professors.
What possible fucking identity-based disagreements could they be having?
Why would the professors care about their identity?
Sir, I identify as a transgender baboon.
Well, good for you.
That's great, but we're dealing with Homer, so fucking sit in your seat and open the book to page one.
And finally, the center should create a training program for all professors, including faculty and graduate instructors, which will enable them to constructively facilitate conversations that embrace all identities, share best practices and think critically, think critically, yeah, about how core curriculum is framed for their students.
Why?
How is that going to help you learn?
Which really seems to be a very much secondary or tertiary priority for these students, doesn't it?
Our vision for this training is not to infringe upon the instructor's academic freedom in teaching the material, the students conclude.
Rather, it is a means of providing them with effective strategies to engage with potential conflicts and confrontations in the classroom.
Can't they just be dealt with as and when they come up?
Whether they are between students or in response to the material itself, given these tools, professors will be able to aid in the inclusion of student voices which presently feel silenced.
Yes, shush!
You're meant to be working, you lazy shits.
And honestly, nobody cares what a 20-year-old humanities student wants to say.
Nobody gives a fuck.
You have nothing constructive to add.
Which is why the only thing you can add is identity politics bullshit.
Speaking of identity politics bullshit, where were you when you learned that white people themselves are a microaggression?
Or at least a room full of them is.
According to a new report released by the University of Illinois, just walking into or sitting in a classroom full of white people is a microaggression in itself.
In what is clearly too stupid to be made up, students of colour reported feeling uncomfortable and unwelcomed just walking into or sitting in the classroom, especially if they were the only person of colour or one of a few, stated the report, which designated the experience as a microaggression and the people suffering from these microaggressions as pathetic whining racist crybabies.
People do not necessarily say I do not belong, but I feel as if I do not when I'm in a classroom and I see I'm the one non-white person, said one student identified as a Latina female.
That's on you, bitch.
That is on you.
They're not telling you you don't belong.
Someone else, some identity politician, has told you that you don't belong.
This is the problem with identity politics, don't you think?
The report titled Racial Microaggressions was based on an online survey of more than 4,800 students of colour during the 2011-12 academic year, and it found more than 800 examples of such microaggressions on campus.
Now that may seem like a lot, but it's important to recognise that this high number could signify the prevalence of a tendency to assume that almost anything is racist rather than the prevalence of racism itself.
Given that we are at the point where a collection of white people in a classroom is now a racial microaggression, I do think we're at the point that anything is racist.
In this list there were of course some things that were genuinely racist, but mixed in with that were the most ridiculous things in the fucking world, such as being the only student of colour in the classroom, being discouraged during meetings with one's academic advisor, being dismissed or ignored by the instructor before or after class, or when I raise my hand I am often not called upon.
Despite the fact that so many of these quote microaggressions are designed as such based on questionable assumptions and boy are they questionable, the study still recommends that the school take drastic measures to stop them, requiring all students complete a general education requirement about race, white privilege and inequality in the United States because these things are all just you know just categoric.
There's no doubting them.
As well as a both a non-Western culture and a US people of colour cultural course.
Or the students could stop being such fucking babies.
I mean that's the other alternative.
This would fundamentally alter the curriculum to ensure that third of all college 101 classes include diversity and inclusion, providing workshops, trainings, campaigns, brochures to help students identify when racial microaggressions were occurring because if they don't know that they're occurring they should know.
It's not that there's clearly no fucking problem with them.
It's that the students just aren't paying enough attention.
Creating a slogan or language such as the phrase racism alert to use when they identify one and developing a mechanism for students to report perceived racial microaggressions because that isn't subjective as all hell and clearly going to end fucking stupidly for everyone involved.
Well, I for one am sure that this isn't certainly is not going to turn into a ridiculous quagmire of identity politics.
You see, I don't know whether you've been noticing a pattern with all of this because I mean that there is a distinct issue isn't there that we've been going over.
The problem really is white people.
White male people.
And thank God that one Boston professor is brave enough to stand up to the evil white male oppressor and really call them out on existing.
So fury erupted this month over incoming Boston University sociology and African American studies professor Saida Grundy's tweets about white men, race and slavery.
I've got a good feeling about this.
Grundy, a sociologist who studies race, gender and class, you know, really productive fields of study, received her doctorate last year from the University of Michigan's Joint Programme of Sociology and Women's Studies.
Say no more.
She is to start work in a tenure-track position at Boston University, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s alma mater on July the 1st.
Her personal Twitter count has since been made private, but the Boston Globe reported some of the tweets.
Why is white America so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?
Every MLK week I commit myself to not spending a dime in white-owned businesses and every year I find it nearly impossible.
I mean I can't I can't imagine why people got pissed off with that.
As you can imagine though this did trigger a backlash from the white supremacist patriarchy in the form of a young lady saying it's okay to be racist professor as long as you target the white race.
Hashtag Boston University hashtag Saida Grundy shame on you Boston you.
Naturally though Saida Grundy's supporters came out in force.
I find it deplorable that Saida Grundy has been labelled a racist and a bigot for speaking an inconvenient truth because that's it.
It's not that she's bigoted.
It's not that she's racist towards white people because we already know you can't be racist towards white people.
Power plus prejudice minus IQ times by calories consumed.
I don't know how it works.
Because only in an inherently racist system can you be racist for calling out racism.
That's where we are.
Hashtag Saida Grundy.
Because being white men is racist.
That's what you're saying.
Them being white men is inherently racist.
You fucking freaks.
One of these fucking idiots decided, you know, I'll start a petition to support Saida Grundy, which 3,000 other fucking morons decided to sign.
Well, thanks a lot for declaring yourselves as avowed racist.
So after a few days of this debate raging, Grundy made a statement to the Boston Globe.
I regret that my personal passion about issues surrounding these events led me to speak out about them indelicately.
What?
Passion?
Your passion for hatred for white men?
What the fuck are you on about?
Issues of race are uncomfortable for all of us.
What are you talking about?
It's your entire fucking career.
You study issues of race, gender, and class.
And yet the events we now witness with regularity in our nation tell us that we can no longer circumvent the problems of difference with strategies of silence.
But let's just, yeah, just declare white people are the problem.
That's the answer.
Boston University's sniveling response was brilliant though.
The university president Robert Brown weighed in defending Grundy's right to express her opinions, but expressing concern and disappointment about her tweets, which I'm sure would be exactly the same response if a white man had said, you know what the problem is?
That's right.
Black people.
Specifically black women.
And despite saying that we are disappointed and concerned by statements that reduce individuals to stereotypes on the basis of a broad category such as sex, race or ethnicity, I believe Dr. Grundy's remarks fit this characterization.
Grundy still has a fucking job.
But Grundy says that students will be able to discuss these issues openly and honestly without risk of censure or penalty.
Yeah, I can't imagine how much they're going to be enjoying talking about how awful white men are without being told off for it.
And you know what?
It is down to the point where simply merely existing is the problem.
I mean, we've literally come to that point where we've just decided, you know what?
It's just the existence of these people that is causing the issues.
I mean, there's simply no way that these new rules and laws and mores are being used as a way of exercising power over others.
Harass Mrs. Toby like that.
I'm not harassing no one.
You are.
I'm not.
I can call security.
You can fill out the form just like everybody else does.
Okay, I mean, I'm just waiting to talk to someone.
I'm not harassing no one, though.
Sitting here until somebody's available is harassing them.
That's not.
Would you like for me to call campus security?
I mean.
I will go do that.
Okay.
The bossy woman who was threatening that poor chap with the security forces on campus was Abby Dawson, an academic advisor, and has been put on administrative leave, which I presume is paid, pending a comprehensive investigation.
I don't really know what they're going to investigate.
She was being a bitch, and that guy was just sat there waiting for someone to assist him.
But what am I saying?
I mean, I'm there thinking there's no problem, and that guy was sat there being openly male in public in front of a white woman.