Like the cockroaches they are
Via Brian Leiter – there’s this piece that Zoé Samudzi wrote a few days ago. I saw it and skimmed it at the time, but was too fed up with her to blog it, so I missed what Brian quotes:
Both Dolezal and Tuvel demonstrate the infallibility and virtuosity of cis white womanhood: despite the harm they enact, they are still always worthy of understanding, protection, kid-gloves…It is not enough to simply hope that Dolezal, or any other career appropriator, simply disappears. As long as there is a structural and systemic investment in discrediting gender non-conforming and Black identities and subordinating the understandings they possess, these gaslighting genealogies that define and regulate humanity will continue, and the Dolezals of the world (and their defenders, and their defenders’ defenders) will spawn and flourish like the cockroaches they are.
Cockroaches.
Cockroaches.
Cockroaches.
Katie Hopkins called migrants “cockroaches” in a column.
Some Hutus called Tutsis “cockroaches.”
In 1992, Leon Mugesera, a senior politician in Rwanda’s then-ruling Hutu party, told a crowd of supporters at a rally in the town of Kabaya that members of the country’s minority Tutsi population were “cockroaches” who should go back to Ethiopia, the birthplace of the East African ethnic group.
Der Sturmer compared Jews to cockroaches:
Der Sturmer ran contests encouraging German children to write in. One little girl wrote, “People are so bothered by the way we’re treating the Jews. They can’t understand it, because [Jews] are God’s creatures. But cockroaches are also God’s creatures, and we destroy them.”
This is not “social justice.”
I remember a few years ago when some religious writer referred to atheists as “mosquitoes”. The obvious thing about comparing a human to an insect is to diminish their worth down to zero. That also makes it okay to call the exterminator. She’s a cockroach? Well, we squash cockroaches. We swat mosquitoes. We spray pesticide onto critters like that – the bile that has been spewed for so long is the pesticide. Since it hasn’t made the “cockroaches” go away, are more drastic measures called for? This is…not acceptable.
It’s neither social justice nor skepticism, and it’s disheartening to see this kind of conduct papered over or ignored by those who claim to value both. I’ve essentially given up on all of FtB, but PZ in particular; every time I’ve visited in the last couple of months it’s just seemed like a parody of anything that initially drew me there, and only Mano’s blog seems at all attractive…but that’s not really good enough of a draw anymore, either.
It’s tempting to think people like Samudzi are trolls, just as it’s tempting to think the die-hard Trump supporters one finds on Twitter are all Russian puppets, but this can’t be true. At least some of them (and indeed most of them) are sincere, with internally-consistent logics they’ve developed. In Samudzi’s case (considered as a representative of that type of ‘social justice’ activism), they all seem to have bought into the underlying logic of racism and inequality, but are simply disagreeing over the premises—over which particular identities are worthy of being oppressed, and which are worthy of being the oppressors. That kind of thinking does nothing to dismantle the system of oppression.
Indeed, if anything can be described as using ‘the master’s tools’, it’s certainly that.
Oh yes indeed.
Doubly so when the insects in question are hated and reviled as disease spreading and unclean, not merely a nuisance. It’s not as if we’ve been described as butterflies, silkworms, industrious little ants or some other pretty, useful or meritorious insects. No, disease ridden, dirty and destructive.
So, Tuvel’s article was so terrible because it constituted violence and caused harm but calling her a cockroach is fair game? What kind of warped logic is this?
As a scholar of conflict, I know a thing or two about what dehumanizing language is like. Reading the quoted passage has chilled me to my bones. This has no place in academia whatsoever. Absolutely disgraceful.
Anyone accused of being a witch is a witch.
Anyone who defends anyone on a charge of witchcraft is also a witch.
Anyone who objects to either of the above rules is a witch.
I wonder how many intersectional types will defend this shit? I’d love to hear a defense of how calling certain people cockroaches is not dehumanising.
Who am I kidding. I already know the response: punching up therefore good.
She’s defended herself on Twitter (in chronological order from oldest to newest):
“I said what I said. If my reasonable expression of anger is your major takeaway from this piece, so be it. I’ve nothing else to clarify.”
“If this doesn’t describe you, your politics, or your structural investments, there’s no reason for you to be fake offended.”
“You’re not about to pretend I’m using that language of insectification as though I’ve structural power to drive discourse, keep it moving.”
“TERFs are piling on pretending I’m using genocide language because, once again, they can’t touch my argument. I’m tired.”
“It’s a whole essay about logics. If mine are so bad, you can easily overwhelm me with your superior ones. I’ll wait.”
“I can’t tell with them: do they hate black people or just black women? Because they fetishize the black struggle like nobody’s business.”
“They love George Jackson, brother Malcolm, Fred Hampton, even Assata. They just don’t like black women’s scholarly interventions, it seems.”
“They don’t mind Assata talking about the state, about police violence. I’ve never seen them quote her talking about black womanhood. Hmmm.”
“Never seen them quote Angela Davis talking about womanhood either. I’ve also never seen them use Hill-Collins to discuss class formation ”
“Yeah. I have contempt for cishet white people who abstract our identities & experience into thought exercises. Not a state secret.”
And that was just in the last 50 minutes.
Jeezus, deflect much? Every single one of those is beside the point.
Relentless deflection and refusal to address the actual point, what does that remind me of?
Oh yes, Donnie Twoscoops.
Thank you for the collection, Robert!
Sadly, that “we are the future and they will be forgotten” attitude is common among people today who cite social justice to excuse doing bad things. I hadn’t noticed the use of “cockroaches”, but I noticed the use of “subhuman” a few years ago; its users either didn’t know or didn’t care that the Nazis called the people they wished to exterminate “untermenschen.” The original promoters of social justice, people like Dorothy Day, would be appalled by many of those who have appropriated the term.
Seth, someday someone should trace how “social justice” made the leap into the atheist community from the religious community, where it began in the 1840s with Catholics who were opposed to socialism in part because it attracted atheists. My guess is the move began in the 1970s. The civil rights workers and the peace protesters of the ’60s didn’t use the term.
You forgot Tony Montana from “Scarface”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpHiZAne1aY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz5E0SQ9dGQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVUEK6MubcY
You still exist. I hadn’t read your name in years. You’re still at it. And Leiter is becoming more and more absurd. The bubble is shrinking
If it’s worthy of serious consideration whether white people can decide who is and is not black -if ideas and desires take precedence over facts- it’s worthy of discussion whether Israeli Jews can decide who is and is not a Palestinian; drag queens will testify before congress on women’s issues, because they’re real women; a transgirl will sue under Title IX because there are no urinals in the girls bathroom. All that matters is desire. “I’m a feminist” because I say I am. “Honey, could you get me another beer?”.
At some point substantive politics becomes more important than polite conversation.
Not everyone is as polite as Martin Luther King. I assume you’re familiar with his response to the statement below.
http://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen/09a/mlk_day/statement.html
Not everyone is as polite as Martin Luther King, or Jordan Peele for that matter. Have you seen Get Out?
Dolezal is a deluded fool, and a liar. Jungle fever taken to extremes. Only a philosophy professor would bother trying to defend her actions, but rationalists rationalize. Samudzi is as blind as you are, but I don’t care about her tone. She thinks that only straight men can be misogynist. She fantasizes a corps of allies.
Seth Edenbaum is a mostly unemployed actor in New York, who follows Leiter links and then posts most irrelevant and often incoherent comments, like the preceding. It is always best to block him before he becomes a pest.
Agreed. I have a faint memory of his irrelevant and incoherent comments from years ago and don’t need more of them, but I decided to let him expose himself just the once.
How very dare you, Ophelia. Existing, and all.
Well it’s like Trump, you see. If he doesn’t know it, nobody knows it. If he just found out about it, it’s something nobody knows. If Seth Edenbaum forgot about me, I ceased to exist.
Solipsism seems to be more popular than ever these days…
Ironically this is the exact language Zoe’s relatives in power in Zimbabwe have referred to Matabele people on several occasions in the past. To repeat this sentiment without even reflecting on its usage which I am sure she is aware of is downright disturbing
Oh, christ, really? I did not know that.
Is “relatives in power” figurative?
http://bulawayo24.com/index-id-opinion-sc-columnist-byo-90996.html
“In decent and civilized countries, VP Mnangagwa would have left his office of the Presidency long back. This labelling of “other” as cockroaches is an act of verbal diarreah, unfortunately a wording that led to the shedding of blood of three quarters of a million Rwandese in Rwanda in the 1990s. As VP and an aspiring President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, this casual and loose labelling of “other” using hate speeches is a sign that he remains above all and every law in the land. This is scary indeed; the Minister of Justice Mnangagwa has on several occasions quoted as having indulged on hate speeches more often without being reprimanded by the law because Mnangagwa, according to him is the law himself; Minister of Justice and Vice President of the Republic of Zimbabwe. Why do the citizens of Zimbabwe respond to these hate speeches with silence?
Hate speech is defined as an expression which abusive, insulting, intimidating, harassing, a hate speech that incites to violence, hatred and discrimination. Hate speech is a violent expression of absolute hate and therefore very dangerous. Does our Minister of Justice know this? Does the constitution of Zimbabwe have a clause regarding hate speech? When VP Mnangagwa utters such abomination not even three weeks ago, and in the presence of his master: President Robert Gabriel Mugabe, “he will deal with cockroaches,” he said, what does that tell us about the calibre of Emerson Mnangagwa as future President of Zimbabwe? Does that not confirm to us the architects of genocide of yesteryear are still contemplating bloodshed tomorrow but of greater magnitude? Are these utterances not warning signs that something greater than anger is looming?
When Mr Emerson Mnangagwa says he is going to crush cockroaches, which are these cockroaches meant in this instance? It is Jonathan Moyo? Is it Kasukuwere? Is it Dr. Grace Mugabe or any of the so-called G40 group? My second guess will be that he meant Jonathan Nathaniel Moyo, of Ndebele ethnic group, who, according to VP’s definition of cockroaches: are the people of Mathebeleland and Midlands whom he claimed in 1983 harboured dissidents. Zapu members too, even if they were of Shona origin, belonged in this category of cockroaches. It can never be the wife of the President, the wife of the man he was body guarding during the Bush war.”
Hi Ophelia, sorry I missed your post.
Zoe is the granddaughter of once Prime Minister Bishop Abel Muzorewa, her family belongs to one of the most powerful and wealthy political dynasties in Zimbabwe (though she likes to play the role of broke millennial with no structural power, there’s a reason she went to LSE). Much of the family she speaks so fondly and visits regularly back in Harare are highly placed in the ZANU-PF administration and some are rumoured locally also to have been intimately involved with the Fifth Brigade since it’s inception (one can only wonder why when prompted she blanks on Gukurahundim and the Bulawayo massacre). Though she actually once brazenly retweeted the account @povozim 2 months ago with the text “The Fifth Brigade was not a tribal army of Shona’s againt the Ndebele’s it was a (Zanu-PF) political army against ZAPU – Joshua Nkomo” which is an absolute kick in the stomach for survivors and families of the massacred who know otherwise.
To put it bluntly her family is intimately involved in Shona Supremacist politics all the way to the national level and nothing she says indicates she is at odds with that. She’s a fraud, it’s only outside Zimbabwe can she present her actual politic as something marginalised, but she doesn’t fool anyone here.
See this local article which paints her a political naive but I don’t believe so, she’s much smarter than it gives her credit for, her words highlighted are carefully chosen.
http://www.thezimbabwean.co/2017/02/mugabes-earnest-supporter/
Hi Ches – thank you. And…wow. Words fail me.