davidthompson

How To Impress Your Boss, An Intersectional Guide

Pogonip steers us to the pages of Everyday Feminism, where Sophia Stephens, a freelance writer and self-described “educator,” informs white employers of how to “ensure the safety of the black people and people of colour who work with and for you.” Not safety in the sense of fire regulations, of course, or loose stair carpeting, but with regard to the exquisitely delicate emotional state of All Brown-Skinned People Everywhere. Due to this perilous and inherent instability of mood, there are “questions to interrogate as you engage with people of colour and their labour.” Among which,

Are you asking or demanding? Many white people who approach Black and non-Black people of colour for labour do not ask for our labour — they demand it from us. Asking someone to do something leaves it open-ended with space for the person to say no… If you are exhausting and hurting Black and non-Black people of colour around you because you won’t take “no” for an answer when you request labour from us… it’s time to check your privilege.

If that’s not catnip for employers with tight deadlines, I don’t know what is. Oh, there’s more:

The most common opening for a demand that most white people don’t even realise is a demand is, “I need.” Of course you have needs, but is it necessary that you consistently go to people of colour, who also have needs that are systematically denied to them, to help you?

Yes, white employers must avoid using the phrase “I need such-and-such by the end of the week,” as this inflicts cruel and unusual hardship on those possessed of brown skin. And as an employer, a white employer, you must always remember to ask yourself, ‘Could I give this person’s work - which I hired them to do, and am paying them to do - to someone else - ideally, someone whiter?’ Or as Ms Stephens puts it,

It is important to reflect on how generations of access and entitlement to our labour does not mean you automatically get it from us now.

Needless to say, there are many other terms and conditions for white employers to observe, including parsing your requests for signs that they may be “inherently racist” or contain unspecified “microaggressions” and “triggering” language; and this:   

Take a peek at our social media (if you have access and permission), or go on Google and do some research before you ask us for labour.

Presumably, this is in order to perform a daily, perhaps hourly, check on the current moods of every single brownish employee, and thereby discern whether or not they may be willing to consider doing whatever it is you’re paying them to do.

Link Fest

Yes, huzzah, an open thread. Feel free to share links of possible interest and then bicker about them. I did briefly toy with the title Link Dump, but fest sounded so much jollier.

If all else fails, you can always poke through the reheated series and greatest hits.

Friday Ephemera

Drink or soak? || Mystery solved. (h/t, Julia) || That’s not a zoom lens, this is a zoom lens. || Close enough. (h/t, Dicentra) || Old but gold. (h/t, Obo) || Hey, ladies, come get some. || Cosplay interruptus. (h/t, Damian) || His is bigger than yours. || Cardboard machines. || At last, space beer. || “Good evening, Stuttgart.” || Jelly Tetris. Well, I’d play. || Journalism is a proper job. || I repeat, journalism is a proper job. || The 93 penises of the Bayeux Tapestry. || We want plates, revisited. Includes meat on a clipboard and other horrors. || These old trousers are older than your old trousers. || Continue the research. || Now make fire. || And finally, via Dicentra, and quite understandably, he’s still haunted by it.

I Denounce Your White Geometry

Tyson E Lewis, a professor of art education at the University of North Texas, fires his wisdom into our minds: 

Lewis posits that there is a “corporeal geometry of whiteness,” and that what emerges from his analysis “is a description of the aesthetic dimensions of discrimination through the geometric deployment of lines (that maximally extend white bodies into space) and an angle of vision (that constitutes totalized and rigidified racial hierarchies).” 

So far as I can tell, and having stared at it for some time, the pile of words above seems intended to repel comprehension. Perhaps we’re supposed to back away from it in bewildered deference.

“Race is lived through an aesthetic geometry of lines and angles that connect and disconnect bodies on a pre-conscious level,” Lewis asserts, adding that “whiteness is a kind of one-dimensional way of being in the world.” 

Ah. Bad whitey. That much is clear. Now do brownness.

According to Dr Lewis, “The question of whiteness cannot be avoided if we are to continue to uphold the idea of educational equity and equality.” However, as the word equity, when used anywhere near a campus, roughly translates as “equality of outcome regardless of input,” and is therefore both condescending and unfair, readers may not share our educator’s enthusiasm.

When not signalling his fashionable disdain for all things white and male, and doing violence to the English language in the name of “critical pedagogy,” Dr Lewis writes inexplicably neglected erotic literature. 

Elsewhere (278)

Grace Gottschling on what it takes to be a woke law professor: 

A Yale University law professor encouraged people to “hide” illegal immigrants from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, but says he has “no qualms” about revealing the home addresses of ICE employees.

Apparently, the law professor in question, Dr Gregg Gonsalves, plans to aid and abet law-breakers in the name of “civil disobedience.” Note too that Dr Gonsalves doesn’t like his own public comments – one might call them boasts - being quoted verbatim by people he deems insufficiently sympathetic. To the extent that he wants Campus Reform, which reported on his views, classified as a “hate group.”

Heather Mac Donald on selective outrage: 

In the first six months of 2018, more than 60 children under 15 have been shot in Chicago. In June alone, an 11-year-old boy was shot in the head; a 12-year-old girl was killed as she was carrying her baby cousin; and a 14-year-old boy was gunned down by a passing car. Black Lives Matter activists have nothing to say about this violence because it does not involve police officers. Officer-involved shootings are a minute fraction of Chicago’s ongoing carnage—in 2016, they made up 0.5 percent of all shootings in the city.

And Grace Carr on an unexpected development: 

Zander Keig, a Coast Guard veteran, now works as a clinical social work case manager at San Diego’s Naval Medical Centre. She started transitioning in 2005. She told the Washington Post that she was encouraged to speak up loudly and often when she was a woman, but now that she looks like, and identifies as, a man, she gets accused of “mansplaining,” “taking up too much space” or “asserting my white male heterosexual privilege,” by outspoken feminists like her former self.

Truly, we live in an age of wonders.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Friday Ephemera

Pachelbel’s Canon played on a rubber chicken. (h/t, Matthew) || Full-colour 3D x-rays reveal the meaty goodness within. || It’s a phone, it’s a shaver. || Lemon makes bid for freedom. || Because all houseplants need robotic legs. || Cool, yes, but just don’t lean backwards. || He bought a dog spa. || Sad and embarrassed. || “We had to crawl under the rotor blades.” || An iceberg passes by. || Oh, that black-supremacist-UFO-cult. || Iridescent insects. || Popcorn-powered robots. || At last, a phaser-controlled mood rock. || Smile-activated mirror. Ideal for tormenting moody teenagers. || And finally, via Julia, “The woman contended that police had no basis to make comments about her possible mental health issues.”

Milking Those Intersectional Teats

Are you neurotic, insecure, easily preyed upon? Or maybe just pretentious and desperate to participate in some fashionable agonising? If so, this exclusive online seminar - So… You Have White Guilt. What Now? - is just the thing for you. During the seminar, you’ll be taught how to “avoid acting out the guilty, white stereotype” by “channelling” your white guilt “through a healthy and productive anti-racist stance.” Provided, that is, you already have the all-important “white guilt,” without which no channelling can occur:   

You’ll receive guidance that will help you cultivate a “both/and” mindset that will allow you to hold the tension of being complicit with racism and white supremacy while simultaneously cultivating a healthy, white anti-racist identity.

Yes, all this and more can be yours. But first you must confess. And hand over $35.

We’ve been here before, of course. 

It Was Raining Outside And They Were Promised Sandwiches

Sshh. Art is happening. Today it’s the art of Ms Nika López, seen below as she “establishes an intimate relationship” between herself and nature. Specifically, an indoor pile of dirt. Thereby, of course, permitting us to behold, “The connection with the earth, the immersion of bodies in matter, the transformation from inside to outside, the tracking of a body that multiplies and distributes energy to people.” You see, Ms López describes her mission as nothing less than “expanding the consciousness of human beings.” As will doubtless become clear.  

Elsewhere (277)

Mark Bauerlein on Jordan Peterson and the hive-mind media: 

These cases typify what we might call the Peterson Effect. Peterson brings social science findings to bear on thorny matters of men and women. Those findings run against the progressive goal of eliminating male-female differences. The journalists are unaware of the science, but they are steeped in [progressive] ideology. It’s an obdurate mix of ignorance and certainty.

As we’ve seen, more than once. And which may in part explain why Peterson’s interviews often strike a chord with a wider public, in that they tend to reveal an eerie uniformity of assumptions and begged questions, and vanities, among the media class. 

Heather Mac Donald on “diversity” and dishonesty: 

Every remotely selective college is desperate to admit as many underrepresented minorities as possible, and brags openly about its diverse student body in marketing literature. Application forms solicit students’ racial identity not to exclude underrepresented minorities, but to favour them… Far from being a handicap, being black or Hispanic is usually worth at least a standard deviation in test scores and GPA in admission to selective colleges… At Harvard, test scores and a GPA that would give an Asian-American applicant only a 25 percent chance of admission provide a 95 percent admission guarantee to a black high school senior, according to data in an ongoing discrimination lawsuit against the university.

Victor Davis Hanson on calculations of “white privilege”: 

[In the world of “diversity,”] politics had something to do with skin colour, but how and why was inferred rather than defined. If a white-looking second-generation Arab American put on a head scarf and declaimed against U.S. policy, and if she had a name that was clearly not European in origin, then she too was a “minority” and could advance claims against “white privilege.” But should she dress in assimilated fashion and voice support for the state of Israel, then she probably possessed “white privilege” and joined the victimisers rather than the victims.

And Matthew Blackwell on the megalomaniacal horrors of the Khmer Rouge: 

Friday Ephemera

On second thoughts, maybe not. || Mosquitoes say hello. (h/t, Damian) || Are you wearing your anti-motion-sickness spectacles? || Something overhead. || Teeny, tiny tentacles. || Two phenomena, possibly related. || Ah, those simpler times, before white people arrived. || River bottom findings. || Continue the research. || The percentages of air in various bags of crisps. || Plaything of note. || Chinatown, New York. || “Queen of nuance.” || This is one of these. || “Why did the rescuers have to be white people?” || So much unbearable whiteness. || The eternal struggle. || At last, a Gregorian chant generator. (h/t, Things) || It’s a surprisingly versatile product. || And finally, his patience tested, Zeus shoots back.

Bums On Seats

Acting is about pretending. It’s also a business in which investors want to know ahead of time that they have a bankable star in the leading role. There may be other actors or actresses who would suit this part better, but I doubt many of them have had major roles in the Avengers films. Like it or not, that counts for something.

So writes John Sexton, steering us towards today’s pressing moral conundrum:

Is Scarlett Johansson too female to play a transgender man? 

Answers on a postcard, please.

Because Random People Must Be Punished

Narcissism versus reality: 

Update: