In the Antiversity’s Harms Race, the More Evil and Dishonest a Professor is, the More She/He/It (S/H/It, for Short) is Rewarded

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

A friend passed this along, remarking, “What a joke ‘professorship.’”

The following is just one, long, blood libel, aided and abetted by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
 

Laurie Essig: Hate Crimes Won't End Until Toxic 'Bro' Culture is Reformed
April 08, 2018
Chronicle of Higher Education

Laurie Essig is a professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Middlebury College. Her forthcoming book, Love, Inc., will be published by
the University of California Press.

The N-word scrawled on a wall. [A hoax, committed by the victim.] Swastikas on a Jewish student's door. [Ditto.] Telling Muslim women to take their veils off. Writing "feminazi" or "die dykes" on women's-center posters. [Probably more hoaxes.] On college campuses, these manifestations of hate are all too familiar. According to a recent Education Department report, campus hate crimes increased 25 percent between 2015 and 2016, with most of them directed at racial and religious minorities. [Fake stats.]

Colleges respond to hate in depressingly similar and ineffectual ways: Find the "bad apples," punish them [liar], make some public display of
"inclusivity" or whatever term is in vogue that year, and then move on ... until the next flare-up.

[Campus hate hoaxers are rarely punished.]

As someone who teaches [hates] about men and masculinities, I have come to believe that there is a way out of this mess. Let us start with the facts.

[Essig lives in a fact-free world.]

Hate acts are not randomly committed on college campuses. They are primarily committed by white, straight men against those who are not white, straight, Christian, or male.

[Blood libel.]

We cannot solve the problem unless we change the culture. There are efforts in that direction, programs at Stony Brook University and
elsewhere to call out and examine toxic masculinity, but too few.

"For years this 800-pound white [!] gorilla has been raging and screaming, and most of us have been loath to see it." The reluctance of colleges to confront the toxicity of white [!] masculinity reflects a similar reluctance nationwide. For years this 800-pound white gorilla has been raging and screaming, and most of us--educators, politicians, journalists--have been loath to see it. This was obvious when police described the confession tape of white (and homophobic and Christian-raised) Mark Anthony Conditt as "the outcry of a very challenged young man." (You can easily imagine how they would have characterized him if he were African-American and/or Muslim.) The Virginia Tech shooting was committed by a Korean-American, but the vast majority of mass shootings are by white males. Pundits ignore the obvious connection between mass shootings and white masculinity. We mark white mass shooters as suffering from "mental illness" rather than a cultural problem. Kimmel and Matthew Mahler point out that focusing on mental illness or "bad actors" shifts "the blame away from group characteristics to individual psychological problems, assuming that these boys were deviants who broke away from an otherwise genteel ... culture."

We do the same on campus when we pretend that hate crimes are randomly distributed rather than far more likely to be committed by white, straight men--embodiments of "normal" masculinity. [Blood libel.] These are the bros we see walking on any campus, hats backward, the guys who throw the parties, buy the booze, play video games more fervently than they study. The guys who tell each other not to be a "pussy" or a "fag," and live in such constant need for approval from their bros that they participate in hazing rituals that can cost them their lives. These are also the guys who help to create rape culture, even if they themselves don't rape. They don't stop it. They don't report it. They protect their bros.

[There is no campus rape culture, but there is a campus rape hoax culture. However, there is a black, Hispanic, and Moslem rape culture, just no white, heterosexual rape culture.]

These young men are drowning in their bro culture, failing at school, at relationships, even, according to some recent surveys of hook-up culture, at sexual pleasure. They are also being taught all the wrong lessons in guyland: that they can do what they want, say what they want, spend their time how they want, and still have a wonderful career and an amazing life. They suspect that might not be true, but they are paralyzed by the fear of
disapproval from the ruling bro-geoisie.

Let us return to the N-word scrawled on a wall. [Hoax.] There are a variety of questions we could ask: Who did this? What kind of punishment do they deserve? How can we restore [?] the community after such an event? But there are other questions we should ask too: How does white bro culture normalize the use of the N-word, like when these guys are playing Call of Duty or singing a rap song? How does the absolute commonness of this racial entitlement make writing the word on a wall not an aberration but rather a continuation of everyday practices? Even if an individual bro is opposed to writing the word in a public space, he still says it privately with his bros, uses it as a badge of honor, proof that he won't be defeated by "political correctness" and the "feminazis" who try to control him.

This is not a great way to enter the work world. The bros are frozen in their Mad Men lifestyles, but the men of the 1960s were responding to the social requirements of their time, social strictures that made telling racist jokes hilarious, that made sexually harassing your secretary par for the course, that privileged white men in ways that did not allow for any fair competition from other groups.

Now, #MeToo and economic and demographic changes mean that being a straight, white man is no longer a guarantee of privilege and wealth. No doubt structural sexism and racism will not soon disappear into thin air, but they are weaker. Nagging doubt that these bros are going on to successful careers, lives, and relationships only makes them angrier.

It is among colleges' jobs to prepare their students for the world. But instead of doing that for young, white men, we continue to pretend that the bros are all right. [No, you constantly condemn them, cheat them on admissions, and discriminate against them in grading.] Social-science [propaganda] data tell us otherwise. These young men are psychologically, and often physically, unhealthy, self-sabotaging, and furious, thwarting themselves and threatening others.

Instead of helping these students develop the skills they need to thrive, colleges fear alienating donors, sports fans, and frat alums. Never mind that toxic masculinity and aggrieved whiteness are curdling the cultures and ideals cherished by most students today, and by the successful citizens and alumni of tomorrow.

Even if an individual bro is not caught perpetrating an act of hate, he is trapped in an ugly parallel universe. There he is taught not to care about school, about women, about people of color, about LGBTQ people, about anyone who is different from him and his bros. His obsolete world is colliding with new global, cosmopolitan realities. Help him understand that. Or let him wallow in a corrupted yesteryear, and then wait for the next hate crime.

[But Essig thinks it's just great, if her allies are utter chauvinists.]

COMMENTS

Law Professor John Banzhaf n a month ago

Administrators and faculty would do well to remember that so-called "hate speech"--no matter how racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.--is fully protected under the First Amendment at state schools, and often at other schools under a variety of legal theories; at least in the absence of a
clear and present danger, an exacting legal standard.

Moreover, as my law school colleague Prof, Jonathan Turley explained, rarely do the hate incidents which frequently occur on campuses meet the standards of a hate crime. SEE: George Washington University Investigates Swastika Postings As Possible Hate Crime
https://bit.ly/2dYbvI6

Here's a summary of what happened when GWU administrators went over the line and tried to expel a student for so-called hate speech.

A student who momentarily posted an ancient religious symbol, which was briefly mistaken by another student for a Nazi swastika, was suspended from campus (including his dorm room and his religious center) and investigated for possible criminal prosecution--even though the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the display of even the most hated of symbols, including the swastika, a burning cross, etc. is protected free speech. His expulsion was prevented only because I organized a resistance which led to worldwide condemnation and ridicule of my university's actions, threats of law suits, and of a reduction in alumni contributions, etc.

PUBLIC INTEREST LAW PROFESSOR JOHN BANZHAF
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navydad n a month ago

If a man wrote an anti-woman screed he would be trashed relentlessly. A woman writes an anti-man screed and..........

Ismael_D n a month ago

Hate speech is not free speech. One promotes violence and hate and one promotes change.


Joseph Colorado Ismael_D n a month ago

I believe the First Amendment torpedoes that post.

Try that argument before a judge and you would likely be laughed out of the courtroom.
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Jon Isham n a month ago

What are the data on who writes hateful comments on the walls, doors, and bulletin boards of other students? I am guessing that a very large share of these incidents remain unsolved. Of those that are solved, who are the perpetrators? What share of them are white, straight men? What other categories of people write such comments with regularity (if any)? There are many anecdotes and infamous incidents: has a researcher(s) collected data on these incidents over the last decade or so? If so, what can we learn from the data?
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