... in our search for witches.
Dig this.
You can care about certain scholars, students, material culture, and texts within a field and still want that field to be dismantled and burned so that those elements can be truly saved & white supremacy can be smothered.
— Dr. Sarah Bond (@SarahEBond) January 23, 2021
This lunatic is an associate professor of history at Iowa. The search for the witches, warlocks and necromancers that bedevil the countryside is driving her to dismantle and burn classical literature. Surely, that will drive out the evil spirits!
It's telling that our fight against the Forces of Hate™ requires ever more focus and energy while the results of the battles are, shall we say, less than we'd hoped.
ST. LOUIS — On the last day of 2020, St. Louis leaders read 262 names aloud from a church podium — each name representing a person killed in the city over the previous 12 months. Their deaths brought the city’s homicide rate to a level 30% higher than any of the past 50 years, records show.
Oh well. You and your comrades must soon begin to dance with all your might, Sarah. It's our only hope.
Bonus Thought: You know, there's a possibility that dismantling and burning the classics won't be enough because there weren't enough classics to burn. We might have to contemplate what we had thought impossible. We might have to write more classics and then burn them!
If we know that dismantling Western culture is the path to success and we fail to succeed, then that must mean that we didn't have enough Western culture to dismantle.
Science!
12 comments:
In an odd coincidence, I actually follow her on twitter, and she is extremely thoughtful. She also liked one of my tweets some time back, so at the very least she has exquisite taste. First off, look at her pinned tweet:
https://twitter.com/SarahEBond/status/1353756891336372230
Does that seem like somebody who wants to dismantle the classics? You utterly misrepresent her position in this post. My understanding is that what some are after is not having classics as a separate department, that it should live as a focus in a department that has it as threads within a broader fabric of ancient studies.
If there is anyone searching too hard for witches, I believe it is you.
Nothing says thoughtful quite like dismantling and burning a field of study to root out the works of an undesirable race!
Speaking of which, do you know a lot of white supremacists, personally? If so, you and I must run in different circles. I don't know any.
You know, KT, I really have to wonder how much of a "frenzy" we are actually talking about. I mean, I'm not seeing much evidence of this sort of thing in daily life from people I actually know. The stuff I keep hearing about (mostly through you) seems to be primarily coming out of Twitter and Facebook and dedicated outrage blogs and others of much ilk.
The problem is, Twitter claims 145 million daily users. If we assume that just 0.01% of Twitter users are completely barking-mad attention-hounds, that's still 14,500 maniacs. And if they have enough time on their hands to tweet continually, they can easily make themselves look like a dominant viewpoint online, even though in real life you might never meet one.
So are these people actually as big of a problem as you think they are, or is this just the rantings of the deranged fringes?
And for that matter, since Twitter seems to be designed to shear away context and leave things ripe for misunderstanding, are we even sure, as "anonymous" points out, that all these people are as crazy as they sound?
Just read her replies in the thread:
"I would just like to make it a global antiquity department and to rename it while abandoning Latin and Greek as its core basis. I am not proposing firing people in the least. Quite the opposite. Expanding, combining, and learning—and then abandoning Classics as a field."
"Never any book burnings. Ever."
The reality is that the classics do have a somewhat tortured history. Indeed, Pinckney used them extensively in his justifications for slavery in the Constitutional Convention. Calhoun did as well. There is a reason why so many antebellum homes have those Greek architectural influences.
I don't know many white supremacists, but I do see racism. I'll tell one story, my daughter interned at a Highschool with heavy minority demographics, Black and Hispanic. Their football team travelled up to Orange County for a game. During the game they had to pull their cheerleaders off the field because there were so many racial epithets coming out of the stands. These girls couldn't even go to the restrooms. They had to put them on the school bus until the game was over. I think there is a lot of racism that lurks beneath the surface and it shows up in the way justice is applied and how jobs are handed out.
Tim, I used to think it was confined to the padded rooms of academia, but I'm now seeing it where I work and we don't do any humanities at all. We're a large, STEM organization and we're shot through with this madness.
Well, anon, I hadn't considered that. Please, carry on. Had I known there might be trash talking at a high school sporting event, I would have led the way to abolish the Greek classics myself. Not to worry, I'm sure we can replace Socrates and Plato with some slam poetry. Personally, I've never heard racial trash talking in my life and would have fainted away on the spot. You must have been made of stronger stuff.
As for the Greeks, think of the opportunities it gives academics to discover novel topics upon which to write once we act like telos, ethos, pathos, kairos and logos were never a thing! Novelty, being the Holy Grail* and Golden Fleece** of intellectuals, is in short supply these days now that you've exhausted the limits of gender, discovering that tab A and slot B don't necessarily fit together and make babies or growths or lumps of tissue or whatever it is you call them these days before they're poisoned, pureed and vacuumed out of black wombs at a rate of 50%. Which is fine, of course. Because justice.
* - The Holy g-Rail refers to a Nigerian custom, badly translated by white imperialists, involving mass transit.
** - The Golden Fleece is a legend from slaves on Southern plantations about a day in the future when fat, androgynous scholars with hair painted colors never seen in nature, would save them from white supremacists.
Timmy - well, now that I'm well lubricated, let's get down to stories. On my social networking tools at work, designed and built so that our widely-dispersed and global organization could share STEM-related opportunities and lessons learned from our many groups, I had the misfortune to read a perfect example of the madness of which I write here.
A young engineer wrote a little of his origin story which was the prelude to him confessing his white privilege. He took responsibility for racial crimes he had not, in fact, committed.
In his origin story he described what it was like growing up in West Virginia and spending part of his childhood homeless.
I've been through a few things much worse than what I've divulged on this blog, but I was blessed with parents who taught me to never, never, NEVER tell anyone else, "You don't know what it's like to ***."
I have quite a few black friends at work. They would have been mortified to have read a young, white boy who grew up as a homeless kid in West Virginia apologizing to them. They would have been embarrassed for him.
His post received plenty of likes and reposts from his age-peers.
And so here we are. The madness that leads academics to fantasize that they're helping a community writhing in agony from the breakdown of the family by eliminating the study of the classics has filtered into society at large.
We've gone mad.
More, from a recent article on The Telegraph:
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The Empire (Churchill) led against Nazi Germany in the Second World War was branded morally poorer than the Third Reich, and the view that a virtuous Britain defeated the genocidal state was deemed a “problematic narrative”.
Professor Kehinde Andrews, author of The Psychosis of Whiteness, said Churchill was: “The perfect embodiment of white supremacy”.
He claimed that this supremacist view dominated the politics of the day, and currently dominates in post-Imperial Britain, adding: “The British Empire far worse than the Nazis and lasted far longer.
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At this point, the only solution that occurs to me would be the Roman solution to the Carthaginian problem applied to all of our universities. (Yours, Tim, of course, would be spared.)
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For my anon friend, the Romans became aware of Carthaginian support for white supremacists that they banned them from Twitter, Tiktok and YouTube. It was brutal.
Well, you often go on about how racism doesn't really exist any more. I'm just saying it does, and goes a lot deeper than you seem to admit in my opinion. That 'my culture can beat up your culture' runs through that process. Do a google on Identity Evropa and see what kind of images come up.
Now I guess you can say, well how many of them are there, it's not really a problem. But if your work were being abused to promote a repulsive ideology and you could reform it such that it were less likely to do so, you might take a shot at it.
Your work has led to 1400 added black-on-black murders just in the last 8 months. Get yourself a cookie.
It's not my work, my work is fairly mundane. I respect Sarah Bond's work though. She is passionate about it, and her work is teaching people about Classical Studies. I don't dispute that there is terrible Black-on-Black crime, but would suggest that some is the result of unemployed people becoming desperate within the context of the pandemic, and perhaps does not revolve around the organization of Classical Studies in higher education. I would even go further and suggest that perhaps easy access to guns plays a role; but that is for another time.
My main beef here is your categorization of her as a lunatic. I get there is a divide between how we see things, but she is earnestly trying to make things better. Let me lay out how I see how your post came about. One of the blogs you read had her tweet in isolation posted as an outrage. You, not knowing anything about her, and weeks after the initial tweet decided she fit a simple Outrage-O-The-Day type post. I really come here to see what the other chickens are on about. But I'm telling you and your audience you are absolutely wrong here. For anyone really interested I would suggest looking at her timeline and making your own judgement; I'll just leave it at that.
You know, KT, I really have to wonder how much of a "frenzy" we are actually talking about. I mean, I'm not seeing much evidence of this sort of thing in daily life from people I actually know.
How much of that is the Crazy Uncle defenses coming on line?
For years-- decades before I was born-- we had two or three relatives who could shut down any discussion at a family reunion.
Because they would flip into a mode that made things uncomfortable for others.
Finally, I had had enough.
It was because I had the unmitigated gall to become pregnant, before our first born was in school.
Because of the previously observed behavior, I knew to expect the attacks.
And instead of shutting down because they piled on when informed that I was pregnant, by my husband, and happy about it, I responded.
You would think I had kicked them in the crotch.
At the next family reunion, when the crew took a cheap shot at my husband-- instead of letting them tear down what I love, I responded, calmly and politely.
I refused to scream, or throw a fit, or treat their hysterics seriously.
After a few years, it stopped.
They turned their aggression from the family, into having personal hysterics and having to go home, because when they did something like demand if someone's engagement ring was "blood diamonds," they didn't get to shut down another's joy. They had people actually ask what the ever loving crud was wrong with them, that they had to urinate on any joy that someone else had.
The problem with presuming on the manners of others, is that eventually they remember that manners do not demand that you enable bad behavior.
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