In 2006, the Oberlin College campus buzzed over the appearance of some uncomfortable racial posts on the school’s community website. So, like they did yesterday with their teach-ins, Oberlin students held a forum to discuss, discuss, discuss:
What are the implications of a website where someone can post a question asking why “negroes” have more children than whites and offering the suggestion that it is because they are “closer to the animal kingdom?” This is what 35 students gathered in Wilder to discuss on Sunday in a talk called “Racism and the Oberlin Confessional.”
The event was hosted by the Oberlin College Dialogue Center and worked to shine light on the negative consequences of a website where anonymous postings can induce a ripple effect across the community. The unstructured format of discussion offered the opportunity for free expression.
Irony, thy name is Oberlin.
As the conversation progressed, it became clear that students came primarily to voice concern over the posts, but some also offered creative suggestions for how to bring the issues to the attention of the broader campus. The suggestion for guerilla, or activist theater, for example, was met with much enthusiasm. This idea was to take the posts out of the obscurity of the Oberlin Confessional into the light of day.
“The posts we’ve been talking about can be used as a rallying point, because if anyone has doubts [that Oberlin contains a racist element], being shown these posts will open their eyes,” said one participant. “There [are] obviously issues here that need to be dealt with.”
Another person offered, “I think putting up quotes from the Confessional all over campus could also be a useful tool.”
Is that what is going on at Oberlin now with the various anti-black and anti-Semitic scrawlings in various spots on campus? Guerilla activists finally took matters into their own hands.
Back in Dec. 1993, it was believed that hate acts were taking place on campus. Some anti-Asian markings were found on a monument to the Boxer Rebellion. Everyone assumed it was purely and earnestly racist. Instead, it was discovered that an Asian student had performed some of this “activist theater” on the grounds that since racism existed somewhere, her actions were justified. This is a common leftist/progressive tactic.
I’m not going to marry myself to the argument that what has recently happened at Oberlin is all a hoax – maybe someone did write epithets on the wall in earnest and maybe someone not allied with the anti-racist spirit of the school donned a KKK outfit – but it seems to be the case that this type of hypersensitivity fosters a lot of Type I errors. It causes people to assert things which are not true. It’s having a hammer and seeing a nail.
Oberlin values diversity…in theory. Its student body is 75% white, 8% Asian, 6% black, and 4.6% Hispanic. It has this legacy of anti-bigotry stretching back to the Underground Railroad mixed with a demographic landscape that lends itself to a giant guilt complex. These people are so bent on thwarting any sniff of racism that they over-react and see everything as racist. How can they make their abolitionist forbears proud? They have to come up with something. And worse, it seems that this strong desire to grant aid and comfort to anti-racist activists creates an environment in which hoaxes can be successful. So hoaxes can happen, but when you think that hoaxes can’t happen, they’re much more likely to happen. Why don’t high-IQ Oberlin students see that? Why aren’t they skeptical? How have they become so enthralled by this hive mind?
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It feels good to unite against a common enemy. They want this stuff to be real (or at least they think they do). They desperately want a genuinely dangerous KKK presence on their campus, and since they can’t have one in this century, they’ll settle for the fantasy. There’s a commenter over at Gawker who thinks they have to have a campus-wide encounter group BUT QUICK to stop this terrible train of events before the guy in the white hoodie “empties a few clips into a crowd”.
They honestly live in a fantasy world where the Klan commits mass murders all the time. It’s not just them, either; I know a girl who’s convinced that the Westboro Baptist Church’s visually distinctive signage is used by hundreds of different groups all over the country. She believes this because signs with that look are now used in fictional TV shows to signify “hate group”. She KNOWS she’s seen this stuff all over the country for years. It’s an epidemic! It’s everywhere! She’s never seen it with her own eyes, but she feels that it’s real.
These people are crazy, as in fundamentally unmoored from reality in significant ways.
I’d be surprised if the Unfair Campaign” didn’t make a stop in Oberlin.
I can read a news article about a crime and predict with pretty good accuracy the race of the perp (and I’d say i’m more profiling the SWPL reporter than the perp. The code words are usually a dead giveaway). Being 80-90% accurate makes me a racist but I bet all these Oberlin students hear kkk and picture some white guy running around campus when the hoax rate is probably >50%. Progressives aren’t very good at math.
Are we allowed to discuss why birthrates are different for different races? Seems like an interesting phenomena for social sciences to study.
@Tim:
Sure, I’m all for it – but to what end? Social sciences don’t (or shouldn’t, let me say) study stuff just because – there should be a specific end in mind, at least in theory and when first starting out.
@Scott:
As a Black Man, please let me inform you that you merely pointing out that a perp is Black/Brown does NOT make you a “racist”. What makes you a “racist”, is to impute said perp’s behavior to an entire group of Black/Brown people, simply BECAUSE they’re Black/Brown people, and not taking into account other factors – such as class, age, social grouping, neighborhood, et al. If you are doing the former, you are NOT a “racist”. If you are doing the latter, chances are, that you ARE, being a “racist”.
Got it?
As for Dunham’s involvement with Oberlin, my take is that it seems that she sees and understands the sort of ridiculous lengths the school goes to try to be “diverse and inclusive” and she handles all this in a very subversise and sardonic way on her show “Girls” – and I think that’s the show’s appeal. That it takes quite a few pokes at the presumptive values that the SWPL Left claim to hold dear – she skewers them, puts them on a spit and slowly turns it over a roiling fire.
Comments?
O.
Obsidian,
to what end anything? if i go out and shoot hoops, to what end? no avenue of academic exploration should be off limits. and you never know when what is uncovered might have real-world applications.
and i think you don’t really get Dunham. you saw her tweets. she’s not in any way cynical or critical of the Oberlin way. what seems to be the case with “Girls” is that it is just as exclusive but empty as that college campus. 75% white, yet they are so very, very concerned with racism.
@Obsidian
It’s nice that you think that’s how “you’re a racist if” but it’s more like
Are you a racist?
Black people don’t seem to understand that the evil racist whites can usually tell the difference between blacks based solely on how they dress and carry themselves. But any time someone who looks like a thug is profiled it”s “racial” instead of just “looks like a thug” profiling.
Nevermind those hoods and burning crosses on America’s most liberal college, we have a real problem to worry about – rascist porn stars!
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/05/interracial-sex-still-taboo-for-many-porn-stars.html
Well, it’s important to remember that even if this turns out to be a hoax, it still is evidence of racism. Why? Because of how believable the incident sounded! It is a testament to the pervasiveness of racism that such an incident seemed so real, even if it wasn’t.
Or at least that’s how the reasoning went in the aftermath of the last few hoaxes.
@Chuck:
“to what end anything? if i go out and shoot hoops, to what end? no avenue of academic exploration should be off limits. and you never know when what is uncovered might have real-world applications.”
O: Nor did I say they should be. Just asking “why should it be studied”? This is basic research, Chuck – I think you know that. You start out with a particular question, investigate it, and take things from there. Your comparison to shooting hoops in the backyard is a far cry from conducting actual scientific investigations.
Why is it important to know whether Black people have more kids than White people, Chuck? You tell me.
“and i think you don’t really get Dunham. you saw her tweets. she’s not in any way cynical or critical of the Oberlin way. what seems to be the case with “Girls” is that it is just as exclusive but empty as that college campus. 75% white, yet they are so very, very concerned with racism.”
O: And I think that’s the point Dunham’s making with her show – she’s taking a rather subversive view of both herself and the mileu out of which she comes and is a part of. And I think she’s fairly brilliant at it. Certainly more brave than any guy in the White Manosphere would be if given the same chance to tell the truth and shame the devil about themselves…
@EveryBodyHatesScott:
“It’s nice that you think that’s how “you’re a racist if” but it’s more like
Are you a racist?”
O: Ballocks – what I said had nothing in the least to do with whether I or anyone else Black did or did not like the White person in question. Try again.
“Black people don’t seem to understand that the evil racist whites can usually tell the difference between blacks based solely on how they dress and carry themselves. But any time someone who looks like a thug is profiled it”s “racial” instead of just “looks like a thug” profiling.”
O: Uh, I know you might not have gotten the memo, but…RACIAL is a bit different from RACIST. what you said above is in no way the latter, though it most definitely can be the former. Please tell me that I don’t need to spell out such distinctions for you?
@Phillyastro:
Yea, I saw Aurora Snow’s article on The Daily Beast too, and was going to send it to Chuck to get his take on it. I think Ms. Snow’s analysis, such as it is, is bunk. Simply put – and I base this on much more scholarly work than Ms. Snow’s offerings – if you’re White and especially female in the porn business, it behooves you to avoid doing Black guys in particular, IF you have designs of going the Jenna Jameson route. It’s a fact that Black actresses make a fraction of what White actresses make, and the same is true for Black actors vs. White actors. Why this should come as any shock or surprise to anyone, is beyond me; the porn business in America mirrors fairly well life in general in America – and porn audiences, which are still overwhelmingly White and Male, simply aren’t all tha interested in seeing certain types of White Women getting it on with Black guys, nor are they too keen on watching Black Women in any event. It is, what it is – I don’t see how this can prevent a Black porn director, etc, from carving a niche out and doing well for himself. T.T. Boy has built a very lucrative business in Evasive Angles that caters to a Black and IR market. There are other examples: Justin Slayer, Lexington Steele, there was even a Sista actress turned director whose name I can’t recall right now – all of them have proven successful following more or less the same formular Boy did. They all cater to the Black and IR market.
O.
“Why is it important to know whether Black people have more kids than White people, Chuck?”
Black people, in America, don’t have more kids than white people. Not since the early 1990′s.
Obsidian,
if someone just wants to talk about or think about something for purely academic reasons, then that’s justification enough for me. some people think that discussing racial differences in cognitive ability is not a useful endeavor. so should we let the people who don’t think it’s useful determine whether or not it can be discussed? nah. we’re adults and we can rise above something if we think it is not worth discussing. if it’s not worth discussing then why discuss it even if only to decry that it is being discussed?
as far as Dunham: you have got to be shitting me. she picks on the weakest and most caricature-esque parts of liberal SWPLdom and hipsterdom – the type of shit that is OK to make fun of – and you think she’s offering a trenchant critique of her own tribe? she picks on some of the idiosyncrasies of individuals, but she is in no way offering an overall critique of the ideology underlying it. if someone paid me to be introspective about my niche you should bet your ass that i’d pick on the oddities exhibited by a lot of the people i encounter around here while still being generally supportive of their ideological basis.
Seems like a lot of people missed the memo
Which one is this?
Christian Landers it the one that legitimately ‘picked on’ Dunham’s niche and it was both initially controversial, insulting and extraordinarily milquetoast.
Dunham seems to be merely capitalizing on what Landers made safe harbor, and both have failed to expand any further on the moral tribalism (which has an ethnic component itself if viewed outside of the paradigm of “whiteness”) of the group being lampooned.
@K(yle): Feel free to pickup where Lander and Dunham have left off. Doesn’t take much to start up a website, get some YouTube video webisodes going, etc, et al…
O.
@Chuck:
“if someone just wants to talk about or think about something for purely academic reasons, then that’s justification enough for me. some people think that discussing racial differences in cognitive ability is not a useful endeavor. so should we let the people who don’t think it’s useful determine whether or not it can be discussed? nah. we’re adults and we can rise above something if we think it is not worth discussing. if it’s not worth discussing then why discuss it even if only to decry that it is being discussed?”
O: Because you know and I know that what’s being discussed or scholarly investigated is more than a mere matter of shooting hoops in a pickup game in the backyard, Chuck, and you know it. Anything of a racial nature in our society carries with it the potential to be explosive. And it’s this reckless, careless nature that is rampant in the Manosphere that is yet another problem that should be dealt with.
You know as well as I do that there are concerns – legitimate ones, I think – that those who don’t have a flattering view of Blacks could use such information as a framework for their bigotry. That’s why such things have to be approached with great care, and we can say this about other areas of scientific inquiry – take nuclear energy, for example.
“as far as Dunham: you have got to be shitting me. she picks on the weakest and most caricature-esque parts of liberal SWPLdom and hipsterdom – the type of shit that is OK to make fun of – and you think she’s offering a trenchant critique of her own tribe? she picks on some of the idiosyncrasies of individuals, but she is in no way offering an overall critique of the ideology underlying it. if someone paid me to be introspective about my niche you should bet your ass that i’d pick on the oddities exhibited by a lot of the people i encounter around here while still being generally supportive of their ideological basis.”
O: OK, so let me get this straight – you would support your own’s ideological beliefs, but you wouldn’t have any problem profitting off of lampooning them – do I understand that right? And, what hasn’t Dunham taken on that is in someway lightweight for you? Let’s count the ways:
She’s taken on the question of the utter lack of “diversity” on her show, with her Sandy episodes; in which she further showed just how messed up and out of touch, and yes, bigoted in her own way, towards Sandy and perhaps by extension, Black folk
She’s made it clear that a Woman like herself only has no-strings-attached sex to offer any Man, especially one of any consequence, and even that isn’t enough to keep them around once they get wind of how utterly self-absorbed and vapid she is
She also has made it clear that no matter how loudly feminists want to try to convice the rest of us that beauty standards and the like are socially constructed, there is simply no getting around the fact that White Women who look like her friends can and will get further in life than she will (recall the episode where Marnie, I think that’s her name, made some very nice coin by merely being a hostess)
She’s showed how out of touch and utterly dependent her generation is on their parents and grandparents for their very existence in NYC; that the vast majority of them are nowhere near as talented, to say nothing of disciplined, as they were led to believe by their parents and social ecosystem; and that how most of them can and will likely washout bigtime chasing the big elusive dream of being a creative type in NYC
And that’s just for starters, off the top of my head.
But, I’ll tell you what – since you seem to have the view that Dunham is soft-peddling the SWPLs, what do you think she should do to better bring home the message that they are the Devil incarnate? Please enlighten me, because I really would like to know…
O.
@Scott:
OK, now you’re really going off the reservation. Not only is the Derb’s article in Taki’s Mag off the mark insofar as the point you’re desparately trying to make, but I actually supported pretty much everything Derb said in the piece. To date, and he’s noted this as well, no one has actually refuted, with evidence, what he has said.
That is completely different from what I’ve said.
O.
Why is it important to know whether Black people have more kids than White people… — Obsidian
Because when you couple this with the fact that the vast majority of black males are anti-miscegenationists who “feel nothing” for the sexual disloyalty of their daughters, sisters, mothers, etc., then it is clear that an amplification of pathology is proportional to the number of children a black male spawns. Likewise, if your ideological mandate is to introduce this same “I don’t GAF” mentality to the white man as it concern the sexual disloyalty of his women then there is also going to be the question of creating pathology through white man procreating.
In short, we need black and white birth numbers to measure increases or decreases in black and white pathology.
@Thordaddy:
If pathology is your concern it would seem to me that you have quite a bit to deal with right under your own racial roof. Just in the past week we have the goings on out in North Dakota, where high earning White Men are being flatly rejected as mates by the native White Women there in the state – a solidy Red State that is probably the most economically successful in the country. Overall, White birthrates are falling. And of the White babies that are born, more and more of them are born to White parents that aren’t married – Chuck’s recent post about his pregnant smoking coworker is an example. What this has to do with Black birthrates, is hard to ascertain.
Perhaps you’ll hash it all out?
O.
Obsidian,
you’re off on too many tangents for me to circle back around and pay any attention to what you’re writing. i’ve told you very many times to work on brevity. it’s a very powerful writing tool.
Obsidian,
I am quite concerned with the pathological state of White Man. I am also concerned with the pathological state of the Black Man because the infection of Liberalism is contagious.
Self-annihilation begets self-annihilation and one of the places it starts is in the father/daughter relationship.
Anti-miscegenationists like yourself are telling the world that you as a father or future father of a daughter DO NOT GAF about the sexual waywardness of said daughter. This is pathological. This pathology can be spread. This pathology is rampant in the manosphere where childless white liberal males simply cannot give reason to their visceral reaction to sexually wayward white females. Their true enemy is THYSELF… Future father who is indifferent to the sexual selections of his daughter. He has adopted the radical nigel’s pathological ethos.
@Chuck:
What I lack in brevity I more than make up for in precision. My response to you above was pointed and detailed, especially in light of the charges you leveled at Dunham. Too bad you’re too ADHD addled to respond in kind.
O.
@Thordaddy:
The Manosphere is largely made up of either Conservatives or Libertarians of varying stripe; it is hardly a haven for Liberalism.
Moreover, it sounds like you are against the right to freedom of association; I support it, and I respect the right of my kids to seekout their own path in life. Would you be OK with others telling you who you had to live around? Do business with? Go to school with? Spend your time and dime with and on?
The bottomline is that far too many in the White Manosphere spends way too much time and energy caught up with what everyone else is doing but themselves. And until this is addressed, the Manosphere will continue to get punked and clowned by the very people they have marked out as the banes of their existence.
O.
Obsidian,
I’m not part of the male liberationist movement you call the manosphere. I pull out the microscope and you say you’re cool with your bifocals.
Black “fathers” DO NOT GAF about their black daughter’s sexual proclivities even when it evidences SELF-annihilation. This is pathological. And part of pathology is to cover up pathology and so you smother it with the brainless and thoughtless notion that your daughter is free to associate as SHE pleases. So basically, you are not really a father, but an ideologically programmed “liberated” fool who cares nothing for his black daughter.
This is anti-miscegenation meets the pavement.
Obsidian,
So which side do you really come down on?
I tagged you as an anti-miscegenationist and you did not disagree. But one can read that you would feel nothing to see your daughter intimately involved with white Supremacy?
Where do you stand?
And what is really pathological? Pining for miscegenation or absolutely rejecting it?
I strongly suspect the Oberlin monument from the 1993 hoax was not a monument “TO the Boxer Rebellion”, but a monument honoring the Christian missionaries who were killed by the Boxers. In other words, the Asian was upset that cool, hip Oberlin was honoring the Evil Colonialist White Oppressor Christians who were justifiably killed by the Good Nationalist Anticolonialist Boxers..
Obsidian’s presence here is irritating. He is too self-important. I skip his posts. Just the fact that he has to sign his posts at the end indicates how self-important he is. And his tone suggests, “This is my blog”, rather than “I’m here to participate in a discussion”.
Obsidian’s presence here is irritating. He is too self-important.
He’s a black male, so of course he loves to pose and posture and proclaim his own importance. He doesn’t mean anything by it so I’m not offended, I just chalk that up to a case of JNBN.
Obsidian is a “black” autononomist and he comes here to maximize his autonomy by minimizing the autonomy of his rivals. His existential rival is the genuine white Supremacist. His worldly rival is the “white” autonomist who is attempting to do the exact same thing to him.
So while Obsidian pretends that he is tangling with his existential rival, he is simply battling with his worldly rival for a more radical autonomy.
He believes in “free association” when it comes to the chastity of his daughter. He thinks this is an intelligent stance that plays well to the “conservative” ear. Lol. Sounds like liberal degeneracy.