The Now-Shameful Fact Of Being A Man -- And Especially A White Man
Niall Ferguson writes in The Boston Globe, in an op-ed entitled "White men are bad?":
Last month I organized a small conference of historians who I knew shared my interest in trying to apply historical knowledge to contemporary policy problems. Five of the people I invited to give papers were women, but none was able to attend. I should have tried harder to find other female speakers, no doubt. But my failure to do so elicited a disproportionately vitriolic response.
"I should have tried harder to find other female speakers, no doubt."
Um...why?
Your job, organizing a conference, is to find qualified speakers who can come.
(And how insulting to be a person who's booked largely to be a much-needed fill-in vagina.)
The truth is -- per a @Jason tweet -- women often say no to speaking engagements.
Of course, it is not the job of people who bring in speakers to be running a nursery school, encouraging the ladychildren to get past their fears.
That didn't stop various media and academics from blaming Ferguson for all those ladies who said no -- and for not, I guess, strong-arming or bribing other people with vaginas and people with, um, tans, into talking.
Ferguson continues:
Under a headline that included the words "Too white and too male," The New York Times published photographs of all the speakers, as if to shame them for having participated. Around a dozen academics -- male as well as female -- took to social media to call the conference a "StanfordSausageFest."So outraged were Stanford historians Allyson Hobbs and Priya Satia that they demanded "greater university oversight" of the Hoover Institution, where I work, as it was "an ivory tower in the most literal sense."
The most literal sense?
Now let's be clear. I was raised to believe in the equal rights of all people, regardless of sex, race, creed, or any other difference. That the human past was characterized by discrimination of many kinds is not news to me. But does it really constitute progress if the proponents of diversity resort to the behavior that was previously the preserve of sexists and racists?
Publishing the names and mugshots of conference speakers is the kind of thing anti-Semites once did to condemn the "over-representation" of Jewish people in academia. Terms such as "SausageFest" belong not in civil academic discourse but on urinal walls.
What we see here is the sexism of the anti-sexists; the racism of the anti-racists. In this "Through the Looking Glass" world, diversity means ideological homogeneity. "The whitesplaining of history is over," declared another heated article by Satia last week. Hideous Newspeak terms such as "whitesplaining" and "mansplaining" are symptoms of the degeneration of the humanities in the modern university. Never mind the facts and reason, so the argument runs, all we need to know -- if we don't like what we hear -- are the sex and race of the author.
via @SteveStuWill
Sadly we have reached the point where everything someone doesn't like or understand is now sexist, racist, or homophobic. Rational thought and critical thinking are extinct. RIP reason.
Jay at April 4, 2018 4:59 AM
To be honest, I've read a lot of history and I'd never heard of Satia or Hobbs. They're not on my list of go-to historians: Lord, Prange, Hanson, Keegan, Ambrose, Levinson, Lewis, et al. I'm always eager to read a new point of view or a subject on which I've not read before.
Looking them up, I can see why I'd not heard of them. Both are relatively new. Satia has one book out and one on the way while Hobbs has one book out. Both seem to be possessed of the grievance studies outlook so prevalent today in academia.
Satia's published book is on the tone deaf imperialism of the British toward the Middle East. Her new one is a rethinking of the Industrial Revolution as an expansion of the arms trade.
Hobbs' book is an examination of light-skinned black people who chose, by design or necessity, to pass as white in American society.
Despite my clear disdain for the grievance studies point of view, the subjects sound fascinating and both books and authors will go on my list of things to be read.
Conan the Grammarian at April 4, 2018 7:17 AM
I remember when those who opposed affirmative action in the 1980s and early 1990s (that GHW Bush was happy to expand, and all the white women and those who pass as white women loved because it benefitted women) said that this tokenism would lead to the weird position where it was just a census of specific checkboxes, not literally the best, and even if there was a particularly good person of favored category X, everybody would assume she was there because she was a woman.
It's the Lemon Market problem. Why would good women work at being great if all they have to be is female?
Remember when those who were for affirmative action said that there were evil social forces that were holding people back, and that, now, finally, the cream would rise to the top? After all these decades, the cream rose to the top at this conference...and it was all unfavored demographics. Imagine that.
I remember my idiot junior high school teacher crying as he contemplated all the great art that was denied us because women were persecuted, and, oh, how he looked into the future of a greater culture than we'd ever know. He longed for the female Rembrandt; the female Bach; the female Chopin; the female Michelangelo. I sure hope the old man was alive long enough to see Buzz Feed Girls Paint With Menstrual Blood - a lateral move from toddlers painting on the bathroom wall with whatever was at hand - But the Buzz Feed Girls check the right demographic boxes, so they must be good.
El Verde Loco at April 4, 2018 7:44 AM
People who act like jerks can be very readable jerks!
I pride myself in using the research (in my column and books) of researchers who've been rude to me or are just assholes -- though, of course, not BECAUSE of their behavior. What matters in using it is the science. If the science is good, it goes in.
Amy Alkon at April 4, 2018 7:48 AM
Just a single anecdote here about how toxic men are and how useless. When I got real sick, the women in my family (wife and kids) were totally freaked out because they need me to be healthy. Likewise, when I am out of town, disorder increases (broken things). Women need men. Men need women, not to cook for them (oh boy, better not say that!), but for social and emotional support. This drive to demonize men is simply sick.
cc at April 4, 2018 8:51 AM
If the leftist demonization and demands that people "pick sides" in all this continues, there will be a LOT of white people who figure they have nothing to lose by coming out as REAL racists and sexists. Nothing to lose, right?
The grievance-mongers are literally creating the enemies they see under every bed. Things change when your opponents transform from being largely imaginary to very real.
Jay R at April 4, 2018 10:18 AM
That is already happening Jay. For quite some time you could rail against 'white people' because no one called themselves white. But after ~50 years of affirmative action and other policies that detailed who was white and who was not, who was favored and who was not, people who are classified as white are identifying as such. And then they are acting in their own interest as they are classified.
You also see the same thing in 'tax the rich'. Virtually no one thinks they are rich but once they figure out they are the guy getting stuck with the bill they change their tune on 'tax the rich'.
Ben at April 4, 2018 10:24 AM
Well, you want to step up to the plate, then... do.
You have some catching up to do if you think this is a competition. It's really a cooperative in many ways, but this is denied by those who must trumpet the matchless worth of the individual.
Radwaste at April 4, 2018 4:01 PM
If you want to read Priya Satya, here'a an article she wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education. It's about what you'd expect.
Conan the Grammarian at April 8, 2018 3:52 PM
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