What is White Fragility?

[slashsteel]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Everything is fine in Minneapolis <a href="https://t.co/dbUbOr0vID">pic.twitter.com/dbUbOr0vID</a></p>— Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) <a href="https://twitter.com/KyleKashuv/status/1277072884754788353?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 28, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Wow crazy............

 

[Ironcitysteelers]

Wow crazy............

You get what you get what you wanted. There it is.


Now. Govt, we are sorry police. Please control this BUT, give us your weapons, don’t use force to restrain and do it peacefully. Police - **** you I got covid.

 

[Ironcitysteelers]

Don’t know this hot my head but. ...... But but whitey. It’s his fault these dudes are blasting into the streets. It’s his fault

 

[Steelworth]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Having read way too much Robin DiAngelo now, I'm convinced she's one of the most racist people in America.<br><br>And the more you read, the bleaker & more depressing it becomes that her cultish dogma will govern the stilted way people of different races must interact with one another: <a href="https://t.co/nr0dcJ1bVw">https://t.co/nr0dcJ1bVw</a></p>— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) <a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1277397947731369984?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 29, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Cope, if you're not familiar with journalist Glenn Greenwald, here's a snapshot of his family:

 

[Steelworth]

Now they're coming for residential neighborhoods. This is turning into a nightmare:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Leftists on Twitter are offended that this home owner stepped outside with a gun to prevent Black Lives Matter protestors from storming his home in St Louis. Good for him. <a href="https://t.co/qCszCoTmdI">pic.twitter.com/qCszCoTmdI</a></p>— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) <a href="https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1277417742182674432?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 29, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Good for the homeowners, but yikes, they need some range lessons and how to carry a firearm properly. And the Marxist pieces of **** are already looking to doxx them and ruin their lives:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Soyboys are already trying to ruin the lives of the homeowners. <a href="https://t.co/pVubB1APYc">pic.twitter.com/pVubB1APYc</a></p>— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) <a href="https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1277420849134333954?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 29, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[Steelin]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Having read way too much Robin DiAngelo now, I'm convinced she's one of the most racist people in America.<br><br>And the more you read, the bleaker & more depressing it becomes that her cultish dogma will govern the stilted way people of different races must interact with one another: <a href="https://t.co/nr0dcJ1bVw">https://t.co/nr0dcJ1bVw</a></p>— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) <a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1277397947731369984?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 29, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Cope, if you're not familiar with journalist Glenn Greenwald, here's a snapshot of his family:

On that same thread...they wanted police protection for a defund the police protest.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1276979313838080000

 

[Steelworth]

This is not going to end well:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Once they cross that gate they appear to be trespassing on private property <a href="https://t.co/4DsH4roBYS">pic.twitter.com/4DsH4roBYS</a></p>— Jack Posobiec &#55356;&#56826;&#55356;&#56824; (@JackPosobiec) <a href="https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1277438759005491201?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 29, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[Booted]

Maybe Cope will be along to start a thread titled "Black Brutality" and explain why this is all white people's fault....

Cope and his white skin is the reason for all this unrest in the streets and he knows it. He feels terrible but there's not much he can do about it.

 

[Stoney]

Cope and his white skin is the reason for all this unrest in the streets and he knows it. He feels terrible but there's not much he can do about it.

He can grab a potato peeler.....

 

[Steelworth]

Cope and his white skin is the reason for all this unrest in the streets and he knows it. He feels terrible but there's not much he can do about it.

Cope has kind've become the whipping boy here. But it's been justified. While I like Cope and his analysis of Steelers stuff etc., he's done some **** here that's just unacceptable to me. Examples:

a) claims his family works for the NIH and that Covid-19 lives on surfaces for up to 14 days, per their work. That's been shown to be a complete lie and I haven't seen any type of retraction on that from him. Own your mistakes.

b) claims he himself is a Scientist, so he knows the "facts". But upon any follow-up questioning about what field he has worked in or been educated in etc., we've gotten crickets. When you make a claim that you're a scientist, show your credentials.

c) has participated in one peaceful protest, and advocates whites read the book "White Fragility", but hasn't condemned any type of riotous or criminal activity on the part of his oppressed black brothers. If they're so oppressed, how can they cause the destruction they're wreaking havoc on all over the country and not even suffer any consequences?

Cope, this is a call for you to talk to us (and not condescend us) that I think is completely reasonable. If you don't think so, specifically tell me where I'm wrong.

 

[SteelChip]

not to worry, there is another generation of socialism about to graduate.

and the puppet master still gots lotsa money left to fund them...

 

[Steeltime]

Cope has kind've become the whipping boy here. But it's been justified. While I like Cope and his analysis of Steelers stuff etc., he's done some **** here that's just unacceptable to me. Examples:

b) claims he himself is a Scientist, so he knows the "facts". But upon any follow-up questioning about what field he has worked in or been educated in etc., we've gotten crickets. When you make a claim that you're a scientist, show your credentials.

I believe that Cope stayed at a Holiday Inn Express the night before his original post.

 

[Booted]

This just proves Shapiro's fragility. Right, Dope?

 

[Tim Steelersfan]

On “White Fragility”
A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests.

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like “AMAZING!” and “SAD!” that are simultaneously more childish and livelier.

Writers like DiAngelo like to make ugly verbs out of ugly nouns and ugly nouns out of ugly verbs (there are countless permutations on centering and privileging alone). In a world where only a few ideas are considered important, redundancy is encouraged, e.g. “To be less white is to break with white silence and white solidarity, to stop privileging the comfort of white people,” or “Ruth Frankenberg, a premier white scholar in the field of whiteness, describes whiteness as multidimensional…”

DiAngelo writes like a person who was put in timeout as a child for speaking clearly. “When there is disequilibrium in the habitus — when social cues are unfamiliar and/or when they challenge our capital — we use strategies to regain our balance,” she says (“People taken out of their comfort zones find ways to deal,” according to Google Translate). Ideas that go through the English-DiAngelo translator usually end up significantly altered, as in this key part of the book when she addresses Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” speech:

One line of King’s speech in particular—that one day he might be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin—was seized upon by the white public because the words were seen to provide a simple and immediate solution to racial tensions: pretend that we don’t see race, and racism will end. Color blindness was now promoted as the remedy for racism, with white people insisting that they didn’t see race or, if they did, that it had no meaning to them.

That this speech was held up as the framework for American race relations for more than half a century precisely because people of all races understood King to be referring to a difficult and beautiful long-term goal worth pursuing is discounted, of course. White Fragility is based upon the idea that human beings are incapable of judging each other by the content of their character, and if people of different races think they are getting along or even loving one another, they probably need immediate antiracism training. This is an important passage because rejection of King’s “dream” of racial harmony — not even as a description of the obviously flawed present, but as the aspirational goal of a better future — has become a central tenet of this brand of antiracist doctrine mainstream press outlets are rushing to embrace.

The book’s most amazing passage concerns the story of Jackie Robinson:

The story of Jackie Robinson is a classic example of how whiteness obscures racism by rendering whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible. Robinson is often celebrated as the first African American to break the color line…

While Robinson was certainly an amazing baseball player, this story line depicts him as racially special, a black man who broke the color line himself. The subtext is that Robinson finally had what it took to play with whites, as if no black athlete before him was strong enough to compete at that level. Imagine if instead, the story went something like this: “Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.”

There is not a single baseball fan anywhere – literally not one, except perhaps Robin DiAngelo, I guess – who believes Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier because he “finally had what it took to play with whites.” Everyone familiar with this story understands that Robinson had to be exceptional, both as a player and as a human being, to confront the racist institution known as Major League Baseball. His story has always been understood as a complex, long-developing political tale about overcoming violent systemic oppression. For DiAngelo to suggest history should re-cast Robinson as “the first black man whites allowed to play major league baseball” is grotesque and profoundly belittling.

Robinson’s story moreover did not render “whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible.” It did the opposite. Robinson uncovered a generation of job inflation for mediocre white ballplayers in a dramatic example of “privilege” that was keenly understood by baseball fans of all races fifty years before White Fragility. Baseball statistics nerds have long been arguing about whether to put asterisks next to the records of white stars who never had to pitch to Josh Gibson, or hit against prime Satchel Paige or Webster McDonald. Robinson’s story, on every level, exposed and evangelized the truth about the very forces DiAngelo argues it rendered “invisible.”

It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in White Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.

Yet these ideas are taking America by storm. The movement that calls itself “antiracism” – I think it deserves that name a lot less than “pro-lifers” deserve theirs and am amazed journalists parrot it without question – is complete in its pessimism about race relations. It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

Where we reside on the spectrum of righteousness is, they say, almost entirely determined by birth, a view probably shared by a lot of 4chan readers. With a full commitment to the program of psychological ablutions outlined in the book, one may strive for a “less white identity,” but again, DiAngelo explicitly rejects the Kingian goal of just trying to love one another as impossible, for two people born with different skin colors.

This dingbat racialist cult, which has no art, music, literature, and certainly no comedy, is the vision of “progress” institutional America has chosen to endorse in the Trump era. Why? Maybe because it fits. It won’t hurt the business model of the news media, which for decades now has been monetizing division and has known how to profit from moral panics and witch hunts since before Fleet street discovered the Mod/Rocker wars.

Democratic Party leaders, pioneers of the costless gesture, have already embraced this performative race politics as a useful tool for disciplining apostates like Bernie Sanders. Bernie took off in presidential politics as a hard-charging crusader against a Wall Street-fattened political establishment, and exited four years later a self-flagellating, defeated old white man who seemed to regret not apologizing more for his third house. Clad in kente cloth scarves, the Democrats who crushed him will burn up CSPAN with homilies on privilege even as they reassure donors they’ll stay away from Medicare for All or the carried interest tax break.

For corporate America the calculation is simple. What’s easier, giving up business models based on war, slave labor, and regulatory arbitrage, or benching Aunt Jemima? There’s a deal to be made here, greased by the fact that the “antiracism” prophets promoted in books like White Fragility share corporate Americas instinctive hostility to privacy, individual rights, freedom of speech, etc.

Corporate America doubtless views the current protest movement as something that can be addressed as an H.R. matter, among other things by hiring thousands of DiAngelos to institute codes for the proper mode of Black-white workplace interaction.

If you’re wondering what that might look like, here’s DiAngelo explaining how she handled the fallout from making a bad joke while she was “facilitating antiracism training” at the office of one of her clients.

When one employee responds negatively to the training, DiAngelo quips the person must have been put off by one of her Black female team members: “The white people,” she says, “were scared by Deborah’s hair.” (White priests of antiracism like DiAngelo seem universally to be more awkward and clueless around minorities than your average Trump-supporting construction worker).

DiAngelo doesn’t grasp the joke flopped and has to be told two days later that one of her web developer clients was offended. In despair, she writes, “I seek out a friend who is white and has a solid understanding of cross-racial dynamics.”

After DiAngelo confesses her feelings of embarrassment, shame and guilt to the enlightened white cross-racial dynamics expert (everyone should have such a person on speed-dial), she approaches the offended web developer. She asks, “Would you be willing to grant me the opportunity to repair the racism I perpetrated toward you in that meeting?” At which point the web developer agrees, leading to a conversation establishing the parameters of problematic joke resolution.

This dialogue straight out of South Park – “Is it okay if I touch your penis? No, you may not touch my penis at this time!” – has a good shot of becoming standard at every transnational corporation, law firm, university, newsroom, etc.

Of course the upside such consultants can offer is an important one. Under pressure from people like this, companies might address long-overdue inequities in boardroom diversity.

The downside, which we’re already seeing, is that organizations everywhere will embrace powerful new tools for solving professional disputes, through a never-ending purge. One of the central tenets of DiAngelo’s book (and others like it) is that racism cannot be eradicated and can only be managed through constant, “lifelong” vigilance, much like the battle with addiction. A useful theory, if your business is selling teams of high-priced toxicity-hunters to corporations as next-generation versions of efficiency experts — in the fight against this disease, companies will need the help forever and ever.

Cancelations already are happening too fast to track. In a phenomenon that will be familiar to students of Russian history, accusers are beginning to appear alongside the accused. Three years ago a popular Canadian writer named Hal Niedzviecki was denounced for expressing the opinion that “anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities." He reportedly was forced out of the Writer’s Union of Canada for the crime of “cultural appropriation,” and denounced as a racist by many, including a poet named Gwen Benaway. The latter said Niedzviecki “doesn’t see the humanity of indigenous peoples.” Last week, Benaway herself was denounced on Twitter for failing to provide proof that she was Indigenous.

Michael Korenberg, the chair of the board at the University of British Columbia, was forced to resign for liking tweets by Dinesh D’Souza and Donald Trump, which you might think is fine – but what about Latino electrical worker Emmanuel Cafferty, fired after a white activist took a photo of him making an OK symbol (it was described online as a “white power” sign)? How about Sue Schafer, the heretofore unknown graphic designer the Washington Post decided to out in a 3000-word article for attending a Halloween party two years ago in blackface (a failed parody of a different blackface incident involving Megyn Kelly)? She was fired, of course. How was this news? Why was ruining this person’s life necessary?

People everywhere today are being encouraged to snitch out schoolmates, parents, and colleagues for thoughtcrime. The New York Times wrote a salutary piece about high schoolers scanning social media accounts of peers for evidence of “anti-black racism” to make public, because what can go wrong with encouraging teenagers to start submarining each other’s careers before they’ve even finished growing?

“People who go to college end up becoming racist lawyers and doctors. I don’t want people like that to keep getting jobs,” one 16 year-old said. “Someone rly started a Google doc of racists and their info for us to ruin their lives… I love twitter,” wrote a different person, adding cheery emojis.

A bizarre echo of North Korea’s “three generations of punishment” doctrine could be seen in the boycotts of Holy Land grocery, a well-known hummus maker in Minneapolis. In recent weeks it’s been abandoned by clients and seen its lease pulled because of racist tweets made by the CEO’s 14 year-old daughter eight years ago.

Parents calling out their kids is also in vogue. In Slate, “Making a Mountain Out of a Molehill” wrote to advice columnist Michelle Herman in a letter headlined, “I think I’ve screwed up the way my kids think about race.” The problem, the aggrieved parent noted, was that his/her sons had gone to a diverse school, and their “closest friends are still a mix of black, Hispanic, and white kids,” which to them was natural. The parent worried when one son was asked to fill out an application for a potential college roommate and expressed annoyance at having to specify race, because “I don’t care about race.”

Clearly, a situation needing fixing! The parent asked if someone who didn’t care about race was “just as racist as someone who only has white friends” and asked if it was “too late” to do anything. No fear, Herman wrote: it’s never too late for kids like yours to educate themselves. To help, she linked to a program of materials designed for just that purpose, a “Lesson Plan for Being An Ally,” that included a month of readings of… White Fragility. Hopefully that kid with the Black and Hispanic friends can be cured!

This notion that color-blindness is itself racist, one of the main themes of White Fragility, could have amazing consequences. In researching I Can’t Breathe, I met civil rights activists who recounted decades of struggle to remove race from the law. I heard stories of lawyers who were physically threatened for years in places like rural Arkansas just for trying to end explicit hiring and housing discrimination and other remnants of Jim Crow. Last week, an Oregon County casually exempted “people of color who have heightened concerns about racial profiling” from a Covid-19 related mask order. Who thinks creating different laws for different racial categories is going to end well? When has it ever?

At a time of catastrophe and national despair, when conservative nationalism is on the rise and violent confrontation on the streets is becoming commonplace, it’s extremely suspicious that the books politicians, the press, university administrators, and corporate consultants alike are asking us to read are urging us to put race even more at the center of our identities, and fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our differences. Meanwhile books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, which are both beautiful and actually anti-racist, have been banned, for containing the “N-word.” (White Fragility contains it too, by the way). It’s almost like someone thinks there’s a benefit to keeping people divided.

 

[Stoney]

Cope has kind've become the whipping boy here. But it's been justified. While I like Cope and his analysis of Steelers stuff etc., he's done some **** here that's just unacceptable to me. Examples:

a) claims his family works for the NIH and that Covid-19 lives on surfaces for up to 14 days, per their work. That's been shown to be a complete lie and I haven't seen any type of retraction on that from him. Own your mistakes.

b) claims he himself is a Scientist, so he knows the "facts". But upon any follow-up questioning about what field he has worked in or been educated in etc., we've gotten crickets. When you make a claim that you're a scientist, show your credentials.

c) has participated in one peaceful protest, and advocates whites read the book "White Fragility", but hasn't condemned any type of riotous or criminal activity on the part of his oppressed black brothers. If they're so oppressed, how can they cause the destruction they're wreaking havoc on all over the country and not even suffer any consequences?

Cope, this is a call for you to talk to us (and not condescend us) that I think is completely reasonable. If you don't think so, specifically tell me where I'm wrong.

Cope will be along to answer all of these questions, as soon as he finds his USB cable.

 

[SteelChip]

Here it is in a nut shell. Evidently I'm not the only one that thinks this bullshit has gone far enough.

[video]https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0?ui=2&ik=873c534a23&attid=0.1&permmsgid=msg-f:1670865213019954370&th=17301b0f019c9cc2&view=att&disp=safe[/video]

And I'll follow that up with a letter from Oxford University to the black students attending as Rhodes Scholars who demand the university remove the statue of Oxford Benefactor, Cecil Rhodes.

Lord Patten commented: “Education is not indoctrination, our history is not a blank page on which we can write our own version of what it should have been according to our contemporary views and prejudice.”

"Dear Scrotty Students,

Cecil Rhodes's generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort and wellbeing of many generations of Oxford students - a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter and more deserving than you.

This does not necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime - but then we don't have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago. Autres temps, autres moeurs. If you don't understand what this means - and it would not remotely surprise us if that were the case - then we really think you should ask yourself the question: “ Why am I at Oxford? “

Oxford, let us remind you, is the world's second oldest extant university. Scholars have been studying here since at least the 11th century. We've played a major part in the invention of Western civilization, from the 12th century intellectual renaissance through the Enlightenment and beyond. Our alumni include William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, William Tyndale, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Erasmus, Sir Christopher Wren, William Penn, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Samuel Johnson,
Robert Hooke, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Emily Davison, Cardinal Newman, Julie Cocks.

We're a big deal.

And most of the people privileged to come and study here are conscious of what a big deal we are. Oxford is their alma mater - their dear mother - and they respect and revere her accordingly.

And what were your ancestors doing in that period? Living in mud huts, mainly. Sure, we'll concede you the short lived Southern African civilization of Great Zimbabwe. But let's be brutally honest here. The contribution of the Bantu tribes to modern civilization has been as near as damn it to zilch.

You'll probably say that's "racist". But it's what we here at Oxford prefer to call "true."

Perhaps the rules are different at other universities. In fact, we know things are different at other universities.

We've watched with horror at what has been happening across the pond from the University of Missouri to the University of Virginia and even to revered institutions like Harvard and Yale: the "safe spaces"; the? #?blacklivesmatter; the creeping cultural relativism; the stifling political correctness; what Allan Bloom rightly called "the closing of the American mind".

At Oxford however, we will always prefer facts and free, open debate to petty grievance-mongering,
identity politics and empty sloganeering. The day we cease to do so is the day we lose the right to call ourselves the world's greatest university.

Of course, you are perfectly within your rights to squander your time at Oxford on silly, vexatious, single-issue political campaigns. (Though it does make us wonder how stringent the vetting procedure is these days for Rhodes scholarships and even more so, for Mandela Rhodes scholarships) We are well used to seeing undergraduates - or, in your case - postgraduates, making idiots of themselves. Just don't expect us to indulge your idiocy, let alone genuflect before it. You may be black - "BME" as the grisly modern terminology has it - but we are colour blind.

We have been educating gifted undergraduates from our former colonies, our Empire, our Commonwealth and beyond for many generations. We do not discriminate over sex, race, colour or creed. We do, however, discriminate according to intellect.

That means, inter alia, that when our undergrads or postgrads come up with fatuous ideas, we don't pat them on the back, give them a red rosette and say: "Ooh, you're black and you come from South Africa. What a clever chap you are!" No. We prefer to see the quality of those ideas tested in the crucible of public debate.

That's another key part of the Oxford intellectual tradition you see: you can argue any damn thing you like but you need to be able to justify it with facts and logic - otherwise your idea is worthless.

This ludicrous notion you have that a bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes should be removed from Oriel College because it's symbolic of "institutional racism" and "white slavery". Well even if it is - which we dispute - so bloody what?

Any undergraduate so feeble-minded that they can't pass a bronze statue without having their "safe space" violated really does not deserve to be here.

And besides, if we were to remove Rhodes's statue on the premise that his life wasn't blemish-free, where would we stop? As one of our alumni Dan Hannan has pointed out, Oriel's other benefactors include two kings so awful - Edward II and Charles I - that their subjects had them killed. The college opposite - Christ Church - was built by a murderous, thieving bully who bumped off two of his wives. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves: does that invalidate the US Constitution? Winston Churchill had unenlightened views about Muslims and India: was he then the wrong man to lead Britain in the war?"

Actually, we'll go further than that.

Your Rhodes Must Fall campaign is not merely fatuous but ugly, vandalistic and dangerous.

We agree with Oxford historian RW Johnson that what you are trying to do here is no different from what ISIS and the Al-Qaeda have been doing to artefacts
in places like Mali and Syria.

You are murdering history.

And who are you, anyway, to be lecturing Oxford University on how it should order its affairs? Your "rhodesmustfall" campaign, we understand, originates in South Africa and was initiated by a black activist who told one of his lecturers "whites have to be killed". One of you - Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh - is the privileged son of a rich politician and a member of a party whose slogan is "Kill the Boer; Kill the Farmer"; another of you, Ntokozo Qwabe, who is only in Oxford as a beneficiary of a Rhodes scholarship, has boasted about the need for "socially conscious black students" to "dominate white universities, and do so ruthlessly and decisively!

Great. That's just what Oxford University needs. Some cultural enrichment from the land of Winnie Mandela, burning tyre necklaces, an AIDS epidemic almost entirely the result of government indifference and ignorance, one of the world's highest per capita murder rates, institutionalized corruption, tribal politics, anti-white racism and a collapsing economy.

Please name which of the above items you think will enhance the lives of the 22,000 students studying here at Oxford.

And then please explain what it is that makes your attention grabbing campaign to remove a listed statue from an Oxford college more urgent, more deserving than the desire of probably at least 20,000 of those 22,000 students to enjoy their time here unencumbered by the irritation of spoilt, ungrateful little tossers on scholarships they clearly don't merit using racial politics and cheap guilt-tripping to ruin the life and fabric of our beloved university.

Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you.

Yours, Oriel College, Oxford

Lots of correlation here, huh?

 

[Steeltime]

Great line from the article that TSF cited:

It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in White Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.

 

[SteelChip]

Such a touching story, I just had to share

LOS ANGELES, CA—We all know LeBron James is an amazing human being, but seriously. Just when we thought he couldn't get any better, local media caught this powerful moment and WE CAN'T EVEN. Cameras caught the inspiring, heartwarming moment LeBron approached a homeless man last week at one of LA's many tent cities.

According to sources, the homeless man held out his hand to LeBron's approaching car to ask for some spare change. What happened next gives us faith in humanity again.

The world-famous NBA player looked at the poor man's outstretched hand. Smiling kindly he said, "Silver and gold have I none, but in the name of #BlackLivesMatter, I offer you the gift of social enlightenment!"

LeBron James then proceeded to lecture the lucky panhandler on his white privilege, offering helpful ways to "be better" in the future. "I was shocked," said Mike "CrazyEyes" McCluckerson, the homeless Marine Corps vet after LeBron's helpful exhortation. "I was raised by a family of possums under an abandoned bridge, but I had no idea how many advantages my whiteness had given me in life. Furthermore, Mr. James illuminated a host of unconscious biases I harbored in my heart without even knowing it. This moment marks a turning point in my never-ending journey to relinquish the mantle of privilege Western colonialism has afforded me."

Mr. McCluckerson then offered Lebron James his scarf as a token of thanks. James didn't have any cash to offer the homeless man, but he did make a $100 donation to Black Lives Matter in his name. What a BEAUTIFUL gesture. Go, LeBron!

 

[Ironcitysteelers]

**** Lebron.

 

[SteelChip]

**** Lebron.

 

[Steelworth]

**** Lebron.

Puppet of the CCP.

 

[Confluence]

Puppet of the CCP.

not a puppet.

An extremely well compensated sales agent for goods made by children and those receiving below poverty wages, as allowed by those in leadership at the CCP.

He just ****** shoes.

Sent from my SM-N950W using Tapatalk

 

[SteelChip]

Behind the scenes, a populist movement rises in white America

 

[hamster]

<samp class="EmbedCode-container"><code class="EmbedCode-code"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Superb &#55358;&#56611; <a href="https://t.co/92VUqgGtLk">pic.twitter.com/92VUqgGtLk</a></p>— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) <a href="https://twitter.com/RitaPanahi/status/1281413677313220608?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 10, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> </code></samp>

 

[Super Dave]

I think they are already changing their behavior so they don't get killed during a traffic stop. I found it surprising that my black friends had to learn what to do when being pulled over by a cop. 2 hands on the wheel at all time. Only answer with yes sir, no sir. Don't move to get anything without notifying the police officer exactly what you are doing next. I would have never been taught this by my father, and would have never thought about it. When I get pulled over I'm like, oh ****, I'm busted. My friends are like, oh ****, I could die. Honestly I've followed these rules ever since my college roommate told me about them.

Being white, it doesn't hit me as hard, but if I'm being pulled over, I don't want to make this officer's day worse. And these rules didn't help a licensed gun owner from being gunned down in his car in front of his wife and child...

I was taught to do EXACTLY this. Decades ago. This is the universal way to interact with law enforcement. They have guns and are the law enforcement authority.