Sunday, October 31, 2021

Bringing The Hate


Bigotry can come from an individual of any ethnic group, from government, business, the public at large, academe, or anywhere. In this case (video below), it comes in a five minute-plus segment edited from a chat on The Root.

The professor of Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, regrettably the state university of New Jersey, did get one thing right, remarking "but I do think that all of us can sort of agree that a politics that says, like, "there are superior and inferior human beings just isn't the way to go."  Unfortunately, everything  else she says suggests that she doesn't believe that. Cooper continued

And that's the thing that white people don't trust us to do because are so corrupt, you know their thinking is morally and spiritually bankrupt about power, that they can't let-you know, they can't- they fear viscerally, existentially, that letting go of power because they cannot imagine there's another way to be. It's that you either dominate or are dominated.

Cooper doesn't not specify racists or Republicans or politicians, let alone name names of individuals determined to dominate. Bigots do not. Instead, it is "white people."  They're wealthy, they're poor, they're middle class. The only thing they may in common may be their whiteness.

And that they are- well, "so corrupt," the morally and spiritually bankrupt people of society. Moreover

and it's like, no, that's what white humans did, white human beings thought they're the world here, and we own it. Prior to that, black and brown people had been sailing across oceans, interacting with each other for centuries without subjugation, domination, and colonialism.



That's what the professor would like us to believe. However, history does not agree because, as an historian and former mayor of Ghana's capital city explains

Europeans weren’t going out and capturing Africans. They couldn’t — they got sick and died from illnesses like malaria. Some African ethnic groups went into business, warring with other groups so they could capture prisoners they sold as slaves to the Europeans. Amarteifio says they were organized and intentional about it.

“To pursue slavery successfully, you need a highly organized group because somebody has to go out there — somebody has to locate the victims; somebody has to lead an army there; somebody has to capture them, transport them to the selling centers; all the time, keeping an eye on them to make sure they don't revolt,” he said. “And then sell them, and move on.”

Someone often was black, truly an inconvenient truth proving that neither virtue nor vice resides in any one race alone. But aside from excusing the corporate and politically powerful- but I repeat myself- Cooper simply makes things up. She claims

It's not that white people don't know what they have done. They know. They fear there is no other way to be human than the way in which they are human, which is- so you talk to white people and you have a reckoning about it, they say stuff like "It's just human nature. If you all had this power, you would have done the same thing.

"It's just human nature- if you had all this power, you would have done the same thing: said no white person ever.  And again: it's the whole group of "white people," evil knowing what they have done while weak and cowering in fear.

It does no good to point out the obvious- that if any professor (white or otherwise) had made Cooper's arguments in reverse, she would have been promptly fired and probably blacklisted. Aside from whatever protection for hate speech there may be in the contract between the union and the college, Rutgers University is a public institution and the First Amendment of the US Constitution may be applicable. Moreover, cancel culture has gone far enough, and too far. 

Still, Rutgers University, which will retain Brittany Cooper without hesitation, does have a responsibility. It is responsible to declare that these remarks do not represent the college's views and that Ms. Cooper will remain a professor there as long as she fulfills the terms of her contract, and only because she fulfills the terms of her contract. If it does not- and we all know it will not- it will be a de facto endorsement of bigotry at a state university.



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