I’m running out to see “Spotlight,” so I will avoid my usual rambling introduction to this Comment of the Day, authored with skill and humor by reader Chase Davidson. A “Blazing Saddles” term I have used recently to describe the ideological jargon and convoluted double-talk we have been hearing of late from progressive protesters, ideologically committed bloggers and Presidential candidates, “authentic frontier gibberish,” seems to have taken root, and Chase has done a magnificent job translating large, stinky chunks of it revealed in my post today about the various college student demands.
“Rarit!!”
Here is Chase Davidson’s Comment of the Day on the post Campus Protest Ethics Yin, Yang and Yecchh: Unethical Website Of The Month “The Demands,”Ethics Hero Dr. Everett Piper, And Ethics Dunces, The Occidental Faculty:
“incorporate into each department at least one queer studies class.”
What? That doesn’t even make sense, and I say this as a bisexual Hispanic man (and a bastard at that, so they can’t tell me to “check my privilege”). What does ‘queer studies’, a very specialized offshoot of sociology, have to do with any departments other than Sociology and the Humanities? Calculus don’t give two figs what your gender identity or sexual orientation is. Java and FORTRAN don’t change because you kissed a girl and you liked it. What does ‘queer studies’ have to offer Architectural Engineering except snickering at how phallic many buildings are?
“[Every Dartmouth student] must be taught and made aware that the land they reside on is Abenaki homeland”
Outside of an American History or Sociology classroom, this doesn’t serve any purpose at all except to try to create “white guilt”. I’m half Mexican, you don’t see me bitching about how Texas belongs to the Tejanos (the native Mexicans left on the American side of the line, who integrated into Texan culture and are the reason the really interesting parts of San Antonio feel like northern Mexico. They also make some of the best damn cookies and pastries in North America. You go to southern Texas and you take a duffel bag of those home with you. But I digress…).
“mandatory programming [on] ways in which racial capitalism, settler colonialism, & cisheteropatriarchy structure our world.”
News flash, kids (I’m only 23.9 and I feel old as shit now), “cisheteropatriarchy” isn’t a word. Stop trying to make it a thing. This is called trying to confuse outsiders with insider jargon instead of simply saying what they mean, which is “straight white males are evil”. For additional translations for those who don’t speak batshit crazy, “racial capitalism” is the theory, discredited in the West and most of Asia but popular in South America and Africa, that capitalism is a tool by white Europeans and Jews to keep other races and regions subservient. You see this a lot in the polemics of anti-Western demagogues, particularly in South America and the Middle East. (It was a favorite of Hugo Chavez, and its anti-Semitic flavor is widely used by Islamists.) “Settler colonialism” is a gentler way to say “no mixing of the races”, because people rightly look at the KKK and the NoI as crazy for saying such things. It’s the human movement version of ‘cultural appropriation’, the far-left theory that cultural syncretism is actually an evil white plot to keep the black and brown people down.
”White professors must be discouraged from leading and teaching departments” studying colonized/enslaved people/societies”
…is outright racist, and seems (in my opinion) to be a product of the conspiracy narrative that all whites (and Jews) are, by virtue of birth, part of a vast “cisheterpatriarchal” conspiracy against all those who are not straight white males. By this logic, Greeks shouldn’t be able to teach the history of the Hellenistic world, because the Greeks enslaved peoples from Asia Minor and Eastern Europe.
One might wonder why I keep pinging on the Jews here, and the reason is that many of these concepts had their roots in anti-Semitic thinking and conspiracy theories. “Racial Capitalism” in particular has its roots in a specific anti-Semitic tract, the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Ethics Alarms 
And they said an online education wouldn’t get me anywhere. The sad thing is that I actually learned almost all of this from the GE portion of a technical school degree (I’m a Junior at Strayer University), which is terrifying considering how thin those textbooks are. It makes me wonder just what these kids are learning in their equivalent classes, that a code monkey knows more about culture and history than these liberal arts majors.
You are assuming that they actually go to class and once there, pay attention. I was a math major and never realized how cistheteropatriarchal calculus is; it was, after all, developed by white male Europeans, so it must be evil.
My understanding is that “cisheteropatriarchy” means “Straight white males run our society,” not “straight white males are evil,” though of course some who believe the (obvious) former also make the unjustifiable leap to the latter.
The rest is pretty spot on, though now I’m curious what a queer studies in an agricultural department would look like. Just the movie Brokeback Mountain playing on a loop?
Actually, the term refers to the structures and societal factors which ensure that white, straight men hold power and continue to hold power relative to other demographic groups.
Yeah, that too.
Well, cisheteropatriarchy must be a good thing, given it produced America.
Is that really the way you think? Slavery also helped produce America. Does that make slavery a good thing?
No. It turned out to be far more trouble than it was worth.
People during the time of the American Revolution opposed slavery?
How many of them opposed cisheteropatriarchy?
If they knew about all of the modern-day pissing and moaning, they would have, and have you never heard the famous “give me gender equality, or give me death” speech by Patrick Henry?
Also, people think slaves grew on trees, never had medical issues, and ate grass.
Based on the Pew Poll results from a few posts earlier, it would seem the cisheteropatriarchy is the group that believes in freedom and universal civil rights.
The Pew Poll results are the most optimistic I have seen in awhile. When you phrase the question in more contemporary terms (the ones being tossed around by the media) you get results like this.
https://today.yougov.com/news/2015/05/20/hate-speech/
Which explains President Obama.
“Which explains President Obama.”
Are you arguing that the existence of one black president in a line of 44, in a country where white men are way overrepresented in positions of power, proves that white men have no structural advantages?
Do you really think this way?
Are you suggesting that “white structural advantages” are the result of some sort of coordinated effort to keep the black man down? Are you suggesting that not being able to get one’s shit together, in part at least to the victim mentality on display in the whole movement we’re discussing, doesn’t account for a great deal of that disparity?
“Are you suggesting that “white structural advantages” are the result of some sort of coordinated effort to keep the black man down?”
No. No coordinated effort is necessary–just bad ideas, passed from person to person.
Well, I’d have to agree here. Probably not exactly in the way you’re seeing it, though.
Do you think we should start an affirmative action for chief executives program? Actually, judging by his performance, one has to wonder if this is what got him elected.
“Do you think we should start an affirmative action for chief executives program?”
No. Where did I suggest that?
You didn’t. I was just curious.
What structural advantages do white men have? Keep in mind that structural advantages arise from law.
Hence the quotation marks. There are people who still believe we have a systemic mechanism of legal oppression in place, and will cite as evidence unrelated things like income disparity, or a cursory glance at arrests, conviction rates, sentencing, without applying statistical rigor or a consideration of all factors.
Also, see Alexander Cheezem’s comment above.
“Keep in mind that structural advantages arise from law.”
Only from law? Are you arguing that social customs aren’t structural?
Private actions are just that, private actions. They do not rise to the level of state action unless rewarded or mandated by the state.
But there’s the Good Ol’ Boy network, Secret Handshake, etc.
I didn’t say anything about state action. Again, are you arguing that social customs cannot lead to structural advantages?
“What does ‘queer studies’ have to offer Architectural Engineering except snickering at how phallic many buildings are?”
Holy shit. I understand everything now…. Social Justice is trying to undo the evil patriarchal oppression of buildings by turning the world into a giant crater!