John Derbyshire reviews Civil War movies, sight unseen

John Derbyshire just can’t get a break. The poor man…first he was fired from the National Review for racist ignorance even they couldn’t take, and now he’s getting raked over the coals for his review of 12 Years A Slave. Don’t y’all think it would be unkind to expect him to actually sit through a whole two hours of an illustration of the injustice and horror of American slavery? He’s got an opinion, he doesn’t need to actually see slavery demonized to know it’s a one sided show.

It seems I’ve picked up an interest in the Civil War just as America is undergoing a revival of Abolitionist Porn. That, at any rate, is what I take this much-talked-of new movie 12 Years a Slave to be.

No, I haven’t seen the thing, but I’ve read reviews. Also I’ve seen (and reviewed) a specimen of the allied genre: Civil Rights Porn.

What a perfect example. Just as I know I don’t have to sit through every porn movie ever made to know that there will be a) naked people b) moaning as they c) have sex, just so Derbyshire doesn’t need to sit through every movie about slavery to know people will just be complaining and neglecting to tell the other side of the story, the story about kindly, noble masters taking loving care of their property.

To that end, Derbyshire feels obligated to tell the white side of the story, and unlike all those squeamish people who just shudder and speak from emotion at the awful thought of losing all liberty, Derbyshire brings the facts, the actual accounts of former slaves, who, he claims, weren’t treated all that badly. So he cites this brief anecdote.

Mars George fed an’ clo’esed well an’ was kin’ to his slaves, but once in a while one would git onruly an’ have to be punished. De worse I ever seen one whupped was a slave man dat had slipped off an’ hid out in de woods to git out of wuk. Dey chased him wid blood hounds, an’ when dey did fin’ him dey tied him to a tree, stroppin’ him ’round an’ ’round. Dey sho’ did gib him a lashin’.

[Mississippi Slave Narratives , Harriet Walker.]

I know, most of us are just appalled at the story of a man being hunted down with dogs, tied to a tree, and whipped. Read it with Derbyshire’s eyes, and instead, it becomes an account of a well-deserved punishment for a layabout, perhaps of the sort that the young wastrel who gave him the wrong order at McDonald’s ought to get, and notice instead only the first line. Master George gave his slaves food and clothing, and was kind. Just stop there. Don’t bother to read on to the bit about dogs and lashings. He was kind. His own slave said so.

As that extract illustrates, though, the Slave Narratives also remind us how remarkably often ex-slaves spoke well of their masters.

Plainly there was more to American race slavery that white masters brutalizing resentful Negroes. How much more, though? What was slavery actually like?

His conclusion? Slavery was irksome to some, but there were and are people who would be happy in slavery. Not him personally, of course, but other people. And of course it is entirely reasonable to judge who would like slavery best by the color of their skin.

The way this is described, maybe I need a man

Surely you must trust Fox News? They’re here to tell us why women still need husbands.

Fortunately, most women come to the realization that they do, in fact, need a man [Lesbians? How about just generally independent women?]—at least if they want a family [Or a turkey baster. It won’t change the diapers either, I know.]. 

Financial independence is a great thing [Well, yeah. Are you arguing that dependency is fine?], but you can’t take your paycheck to bed with you [Of course not. Because you’ve deposited it in your investment account, are using the revenue to pay your rent or mortgage, and are paying your health insurance and grocery bills with it. You can aspire to financial security and a love life, you know]. And there’s nothing empowering about being beholden to an employer [But being beholden to a man is OK? Why don’t we argue that independence and personal dignity are good things for every human being?] when what you really want is to have a baby [Not everyone does. Argument over.]. That’s dependency of a different sort.

This is the conclusion to which most women have come. Research shows that what women want more than anything else is not to work full-time and year-round but to live balanced lives. 

Hang on there. Women want “not to work full-time and year-round but to live balanced lives”…the conclusion is inescapable. I must be a woman.

Brilliant and sensible people, those women. They seem to have come to the same conclusion about what constitutes a good life that I have.

A most excellent answer

One of those agony aunt columns received a request from a parent unhappy with the fact that her son was gay, asking for advice on how to get him to stop. So Amy gave her a very reasonable answer.

You could teach your son an important lesson by changing your own sexuality to show him how easy it is. Try it for the next year or so: Stop being a heterosexual to demonstrate to your son that a person’s sexuality is a matter of choice — to be dictated by one’s parents, the parents’ church and social pressure.I assume that my suggestion will evoke a reaction that your sexuality is at the core of who you are. The same is true for your son. He has a right to be accepted by his parents for being exactly who he is.

You could teach your son an important lesson by changing your own sexuality to show him how easy it is. Try it for the next year or so: Stop being a heterosexual to demonstrate to your son that a person’s sexuality is a matter of choice — to be dictated by one’s parents, the parents’ church and social pressure.

I assume that my suggestion will evoke a reaction that your sexuality is at the core of who you are. The same is true for your son. He has a right to be accepted by his parents for being exactly who he is.

Weird, isn’t it? The people who want to change others’ sexual preferences all seem to suffer from a profound inability to empathize. Maybe opening their eyes like this will help.

Race-baiting is alive and well at UMM

The University of Minnesota Morris is a liberal arts university — that means that we teach a wide curriculum in which students are expected to graduate with a broad background. Our science students are expected to also get at least an introduction to the humanities and social sciences, and even within biology, we expect that our graduates will get training in both molecular biology and ecology (which is, of course, not as much of a reach as you might think). Our student body also tends to be rather more politically liberal and progressive than the community we’re imbedded within, although that is not a prerequisite for the liberal arts. We do have conservative students here — I expect that the majority are more conservative than I am — but they also trend towards being more the reasonable, rational, educated sort of conservative. Not the kind you’ll see on Fox News, and most unfortunately, not the kind who are likely to get elected to the Republican party.

This is not a story about any of those students. This is about our wingnutty embarrassments. We do have a few of them.

The embarrassments have a weekly student paper of their own, The North Star. We also have a regular campus weekly, the University Register. The Register is the paper we groan over; it’s student run, it’s sometimes terrible, but at least it is representative and sometimes does a good job. The North Star is a disgrace — its one virtue is that it makes the Register look professional. We’ve tolerated the North Star despite its inanity because hey, at least it’s sucking in money from external conservative organizations, and it does a fabulous job of demonstrating the ethical bankruptcy of movement conservativism. But now they’ve stepped way over the line. Their latest crusade is basically promoting racial hatred and discrimination, and I’m ashamed to see their drivel distributed on campus.

Their “new” game — it’s actually old and tired, so add total lack of originality to their sins — is “satirizing” racism. You’d think students at a liberal arts university would understand the actual meaning of satire, but they don’t, despite writing a sloppy disclaimer in their latest issue pronouncing everything they do as satire.

Here’s their most recent exercise in creativity: selling “Affirmative Action cookies,” that old game. White people are offered cookies for $5, while minority students get a discount or are even given money to take a cookie. One incident with John Geiger, the right-wing genius in charge of this demonstration, was described in today’s Register.

Mr Geiger assured me ever so sweetly that an undisclosed portion of all proceeds would go to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Mr Geiger pointed to my Native/female/LGBT friend and roommate standing next to me, she’s probably struggled so much, she could really use a cookie. He then proceeded to giver the cookie, and pay her $2.50, stating, though you’re taking proceeds from the NAACP, you probably struggled $2.50 more than them. How benevolent.

Nauseatingly patronizing, more like.

We are a university in the middle of a very white, very rural part of the country. We have been working hard to open the doors to a more diverse student body; we waive tuition to American Indian students, we want a more representative sampling of what America actually looks like, so we actively recruit students from underserved populations, so we have a large proportion of first generation college students and students on financial aid. We have had disgraceful racial incidents in the past — the Halloween practical “joke” in 1993 by our former wrestling coach Frank Pelegri is still a mark of shame — and we struggle to make this a more inclusive place. Having a group of young Republican assholes-in-training mocking our minority students is not a step forward.

Worse, they have a “satirical” series in their paper in which they call out various faculty and administrators for not doing enough to promote equality and combat racism. These are known progressive workers at our university, and are actually already working hard to create a more inclusive space — so apparently, if this is satire, they’re trying to mock leaders of our non-discriminatory policies, and are apparently opposing the encouragement and acceptance of minority students on campus. And this has taken a particularly vile turn.

On page 9 of the latest issue, they have…

Jesus, it disgusts me to even say it.

…a crime scene photo of Trayvon Martin’s dead face, with the caption Trayvon Martin, victim of racism and fascism, and what does [administrator] have to say about it? Nothing. Not a single thing.

And with that, they have crossed a line. Free speech is one thing, making light of murder and claiming that our chancellor of student affairs excuses it is another. Using dead black boys to “satirize” equality is contemptible. I would advocate the disposal of their flyers if the Ku Klux Klan started papering our campus, and likewise, the North Star has worn out its welcome and must go. Treat their scattered papers as hate-filled trash and dispose of it appropriately.

Not that it will help much. I’ve been told by one of our students that they’ve made arrangements with our town newspaper, the Sun Tribune, to have their evil rag distributed with that paper every week. I guess I won’t be reading that paper anymore, either, if they’re endorsing this kind of racism. And I guess the community will now get the idea that our university endorses racism, thanks to the racist idiots publishing the North Star.

This is currently our university’s shame. The measure of our commitment to equality will be determined by how we deal with it.

OH PAT CONDELL NO

He’s doing it again. This time he cites Frontpage Magazine…and we could stop right there. That’s ranting neocon loon David Horowitz’s organ (word chosen deliberately) for presenting contrived and fallacious arguments against academics, leftists, feminists, and anyone with a conscience. Facts do not disturb Horowitz’s crusade, ever. I was at a talk he gave at St John’s University in which he claimed persecution by the liberal university (which allowed him to speak, no problem) and made the paranoid argument that the liberal professors wanted to stop students from hearing his words…which led to a student standing up in the Q&A to mention that his entire Peace Studies class was there, and that the professor had dismissed her class and asked them all to attend.

So, yeah, Frontpage Mag — we’re talking lunatic far right ratbags on parade. Just the source says “Pat Condell is a right-wing racist.”

But worse, what is the article he’s citing? A hit piece titled “Gypsies, Camps, and Thieves”, all about the horrible Roma and their filthy, welfare-sucking, child-stealing ways, calling them “sticky-fingered, labor-allergic newcomers”. That part is worth quoting in full. It’s from a section complaining about an article by Helen Pidd on the plight of the Roma.

Yes, she affirmed that Page Hall is a mess: “rubbish fills the gutters, and stained mattresses and sofas are piled up in gardens”; there are garbage bins “crawling with maggots”; garden furniture is being nipped out of people’s yards and garments stolen off of clotheslines. But Pidd preferred to close her article by focusing our attention not on the hundreds of sticky-fingered, labor-allergic newcomers who have turned Page Hall into a toxic- waste site, but on a handful of exceedingly unrepresentative gypsies whom she somehow managed to track down: a factory worker who told her he wants his kids “to be lawyers and doctors”; two teenagers who also said they have career aspirations; and, finally, a 10-year-old (always end with a kid!) who had “already picked up a South Yorkshire twang” and wants to be “a paid interpreter.” This was activist journalism with a vengeance, utterly and willfully blind to the basic realities of gypsy culture.

How dare she point out that poor people can have aspirations and ambition! We all know that the “reality of gypsy culture” is that they’re all shiftless thieves, so finding examples of Roma with the same ideals as Good White British Folk is simply “activist journalism”!

It’s standard far right bigotry, blaming the poor and oppressed for their poverty and oppression. And Pat Condell approves of it.

Whoa, not keen on that reaction

You may recall my comments on that article about the sexism panel at NASW. It was an oddly glib summary of the panel that gave cursory attention to the women’s statements, and spent most of its time discussing the reactions of men in the audience — it was a sad example of how even women will prioritize men’s voices. Emily Willingham gave it an even more thorough and scathing review.

Tabitha Powledge and Beryl Benderly, the authors of the original review, then fired back at Willingham. It was a terrible angry reply: Powledge and Benderly basically belittled Willingham for being too young to understand, and ranted about having been Second Wave Feminists who created the environment that allowed Willingham to be employed…and they also literally called what Willingham had written to be a “cat fight”. It was ugly. Real ugly.

You can’t read it, though. The post was taken down by the PLoS Blogs community manager, although the comments are still left intact.

PLOS BLOGS has determined that the “On Science Blogs” post that had occupied this page violated one of the key principles we hold for our blog network, specifically, the following language which is included in our independent blogger contract: PLOS is interested in hosting civilized commentary and debate on matters of scientific interest. Blogger will refrain from name calling and engaging in inflammatory rhetoric.

Because, after careful review, we’ve determined that this post crossed the line delineated in this tenet, we’re taking the post down. We’ve left the comments intact.

We’re sorry for any distress that the content of this post caused to the target, Emily Willingham, and hope that discussion and debate can continue on the original and vitally important topic of sexual harassment without resorting to this level of exchange.

Yikes. While the post may have been hideous, I don’t like the idea that it could be deleted like that. Leave it up, close comments, make a statement that it was not acceptable, but erasing it is something I find even more offensive.

Willingham has updated her post with this comment:

The two people involved in the post I critique below, Tabitha Powledge and Beryl Benderly, NASW board members, have posted their comments about my critique here. I will let their two responses speak for themselves and just reassert that the original post was an example of the problem in having foregrounded men in every aspect, from text word counts to links included to who was named and quoted to art to tags to “the most powerful and significant statements came from men,” and that the tone of “back to our regular program” was inappropriate. Further, I add that because I was commenting on a high-profile summary of a very high-profile and edgy situation that is critical to our community, one written by a board member of NASW and featured on the site of another NASW board member, I also vetted my commentary with half a dozen relevant people before posting it. As for a formal post about the NASW panel from the panelists themselves, of which I was one, we await availability of the video recording of the proceedings so that the overview will be complete.

Right — it’s a “high-profile and edgy situation”, so I’d rather see that both sides of the argument were left visible.