Behold a mean person
I’m told that Zoé Samudzi perpetrated a Twitter storm on Friday, and I gather that may be what set off the flamers who quickly got Hypatia to agree to throw Rebecca Tuvel under the bus. Samudzi tweets a lot, so I haven’t found the storm yet, but I found a more recent squall, and it’s nasty enough for any taste. She’s responding to Jesse Singal’s article yesterday.
This @chronicle piece on the Hypatia backlash is bad: it gives Tuvel a platform, but no black or trans academicshttps://t.co/Wg2Zt612RS
— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) May 1, 2017
The piece is about Tuvel, specifically the attack on Tuvel and the retraction of her article along with a public attack by the editors. It doesn’t “give her a platform”; it reports on her abrupt deprivation of a platform. It’s not obliged to give other academics a “platform”; it’s an article, not an academic department or a conference.
And of course her comments are dog whistle identity politics critique and whining about "censorship rather than discussions." pic.twitter.com/Dm6p5Uqzep
— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) May 1, 2017
“Whining” indeed. As if Samudzi wouldn’t “whine” if somebody published an article of hers and then retracted it and publicly excoriated her. And she’s lying about the dogwhistle.
Meanwhile it's academics making leveled critique about content and her lazy sociological treatment of race and gender (including my THREAD).
— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) May 1, 2017
Oh, is she being neglected? Is that a whine? Also, is she really complaining about not getting enough credit for her Twitter yammering? It’s Twitter; it’s not publication. Nobody is obliged to pay attention to her THREAD.
But as with Dolezal, it's ultimately a white woman being given the opportunity to be legitimized & affirmed as a victim. I'm fucking tired.
— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) May 1, 2017
Oh I see, this is white privilege, is it? Having an article retracted and having the editors publicly trash you? And it’s being affirmed as a victim? That’s how that works?
If this stuff is representative, Samudzi must be a remarkably callous and malicious human being. If that’s lefty politics, we’re all fucked.
This isn't "stifling dialogue": it's responding to a dangerous and frankly irresponsible piece of "scholarly work" that misdefines identity.
— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) May 1, 2017
It’s not “dangerous.” That blackmailing catastrophizing bullshit is what’s dangerous: it’s driving feminism out of public discourse.
…Tuvel bludgeoned trans materiality and then has the audacity to whine about "academic freedom" when her epistemic violence gets pushback.
— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) May 1, 2017
That’s simply disgusting. She’s not “whining”; her academic freedom was very obviously infringed; she hasn’t engaged in any “epistemic violence”; and retracting an article and demonizing its author is not mere “pushback.”
I wonder if her tenure committee is following this…
— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) May 1, 2017
Sure, go ahead, destroy her career. Why not?
I feel dirty now.
“Phd Student”, she styles herself. I wonder if she’s considered that her own future tenure review might look back upon her social-media behavior now.
This all reminds me of the whole drama. around Huffington Post SA – and the sort of mentality that allowed that whole hoax to work.
I don’t remember seeing you talk about it, so I’ll just sum up quickly in case you missed it:
A white guy wrote an article posing as a progressive feminist calling for white men to lose the right to vote or own property.
The article was purposely written with a whole load of factually incorrect stuff in it, and the name given to the Huffington Post was a fake one. The guy who wrote the article provided a cover picture which was digitally altered to make him look female.
His reason for writing the article was to see if various publications would publish any old shit provided it suited their ideology, and the Huffington Post SA was the one that did. They didn’t even correct his spelling errors.
Before the whole hoax was revealed, the article went viralish, and the Huffington Post’s SA blogs editor bragged about it. The editor at large then wrote a piece defending it, saying that the article didn’t reflect the Huffington Post SA’s views, but it was largely correct and the objectors were full of white male privilege.
Aaand then the hoax was revealed, the hoaxer got fired, the Huffington Post got pulled before the Ombudsman who said “WTF even if this wasn’t a hoax it is actually hate speech,” and the editor’s defense was effectively an endorsement, and the editor resigned in shame. I’m not sure it is what triggered the HuffPo changing its name, but the timing was awfully close.
Here is the thing: None of this would have happened if we didn’t see this sort of shit on the left, where someone writes something offensive and gets no platformed, rather than having anybody come forward to actually explain what was wrong with what they were thinking.
In which when it comes time for that to happen, it is somehow acceptable to lie for the cause. I’m an atheist, I’m disgusted by liars for Christ, I’m not going to look to kindly on liars for social justice.
There is a kind of brain-dead leftism that has become popular in which it is better to declare at the top of your lungs that even exploring a topic is tantamount to violence, where we hear about how XYZ person is causing suicides by simply discussing an issue, and where being unclear on something means you should shut the hell up rather than ask the questions involved in learning about it.
That isn’t fighting social justice, that is fighting heresy. That is what my RE teacher told me in school when I asked where God came from. “That is an evil question.”
So what happens? The left become vulnerable to fake news, and to uncritically accepting bullshit that if we stopped and thought about it for even one minute they’d know was bullshit.
I mean that sincerely – in and amongst a lot of the stuff I see online with Trump there is a flood of that any old shit that is genuinely fake news. There is almost this uncritical acceptance in left circles of things coming from the left, to the point where we cannot tell the difference between politics, and facts.
A while back I got into an argument with a lefty who was saying “Well if their motives are bad why should we care if their facts are correct” – I’m sorry if their facts are correct that’s reality. No matter how nice your motives might be, without some grounding in fact they’re about as meaningful as making foreign policy decisions on exports to Narnia.
This all started with the argument that it is not incumbent on the oppressed to explain their oppression to the oppressor – well sorry if you’re not willing to explain it, then it is not incumbent on the oppressor to care. Privilege is two things, it is the ability to be a-political on a subject and it is the ability to not know about it.
If you’re a man you can easily choose to not know about the bulk of workplace sexual harassment, if you’re a woman who is the target of that harassment? Not so much. The culture of “I don’t have to explain” has not furthered social justice.
And that sort of ideology has built up a sheer sloppiness that even I, as the sloppiest person I know, think is kind of gross. A sloppiness which tolerates pepper spraying the faces of Trump supporters in lieu of presenting arguments, and thinks that science has to kow-tow to mystical mumbo jumbo or risk the terrible crime of being offensive.
That is the other side to explaining things, explaining them forces you to actually think about them, to go through in your head exactly what it is you’re talking about and consider them fully, because not being the majority does not stop someone from being human, from having ideas that are unexamined and wrong. It does not make one immune to error, or one’s ideas below criticism.
So what happens? The left become vulnerable to fake news, and to uncritically accepting bullshit that if we stopped and thought about it for even one minute they’d know was bullshit.
should be they. I no longer consider myself as being on the left because of this shit becoming so prevalent. I’m not on the right or centrist either, because frankly I don’t think God, Ayn Rand or the Golden Mean somehow make it acceptable on their parts either.
The genius behind Far Corner Cafe (formerly Evolving Perspectives. Whoops! Deadnaming again) seems to have the solution to mean bastards like Samudzi; http://farcornercafe.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/sterilize-sterilize-s-t-e-r-i-l-i-z-e.html?m=1
Your being oppressively cisracial, Zoe.
Hmm. Why doesn’t that work? Can someone tell me how transgender, in particular transwomen have become sacred cow, a class above all others who do not have to play by the rules the rest of us do and are totally immune from any kind of criticism?
Maybe its a flaw in ‘our’ own psychology that’s being exploited. The Liberal Left is so tuned to protect what appears to be oppressed that, in some cases of transwomen, you have aggressive, domineering individuals putting on behaviors and dress considered the markers of an oppressed class and suddenly they find they gain both attention and status they never had before. And they exploit that, as certain personalities in any social group would tend to do.
Or maybe we’re in the ‘Age of the Narcissist’, and no further explanation is needed.
Wait, she did what now?
She extracted forces from historical function?
And she did that very bad thing to force analogy where there is none. Because there is no analogy between being trans “gender” and being transracial. It’s impossible even to think of such a thing, so stop thinking it. There is no analogy there. NONE I TELL YOU.
I scrolled down to comment on the extracting of forces from historical function…
Someone can receive an ‘education’ in which incoherent drivel like that can pass for real thought?
This is categorically indistinguishable from the alt-right. A conspiracy mindset that makes anything acceptable if its packaged with the appropriate ‘tone.’ Talk about dog whistles!
I’ve just read the ingredients list on the packaging of some food in my fridge and found it contains transfats. My cisfat is offended and harmed by this gastronomic violence.
There is a large dent in my desk where my head has hit it repeatedly.
If you have to talk about “epistemic” violence, you have never experienced or understood what real violence is. And, surely, that automatically puts you in a position of privilege..?
I rue the day post modernist thought was ever given the opportunity to see the light of day. It’s word salad, angry word salad wherein you can posit your own special snowflakeness till the cows come home. Deadnamed and genderised.
I have read that “extracted structures from historical function” tweet about a dozen times and can’t make head or tails of it. I don’t know if Samudzi is trying to say that Tuvel disregarded the historical context of race – but the same can be said about the way gender is treated by some trans activists and third-wave feminists. And I’m not even sure if that’s what she means here.
It’s interesting, to me, that most of the criticism flung at Tuvel (and the most vitriolic of it; “epistemic violence,” etc) is because Tuvel is “transmisogynistic.” Not a lot of it seems to focus on the “trans-racial” aspect of it. Certainly a case could be made that Tuvel was being racist by entertaining (even hypothetically, as part of a thought experiment) the possibility that a trans-racial identity could in any way be “valid.” Especially the kind of people who see “epistemic violence” in using the phrase “biological sex;” and in noting Caitlyn Jenner used to be known as Bruce. Couple days ago, Ophelia did a post about the open letter to Hypatia, the one demanding the journal retract the article. There was a post-script to that letter, added because the letter writers had failed to mention any problems with the racial aspect of Tuvel’s article. They first concentrated solely on the trans aspect of the article. Samudzi seems plenty steamed about how Tuvel handles race, but saves the accusation of violence for Tuvel’s handling of trans identity.
Also, I would really like to have a post-modernist-jargon-to-English dictionary.
OMG is Tuvel going to survive? Is she on life support right now? I cannot believe someone was mean to the latest clueless cis person to go on and on and on and on and on and on about trans women’s actual fucking lives! I’m shocked!!! And appalled!!!
You seem nice.
But more seriously…did she even do that? Did she in fact “go on and on and on and on and on and on about trans women’s actual fucking lives”? Not that I saw. She discussed how we think about race and gender and identity. That’s what philosophers do. It’s a good thing that somebody does.
None of this is about anyone’s “actual fucking lives.” That’s exactly the kind of bullying jargon I’m objecting to in the response to Tuvel. Actual lives are one thing and how people “identify” is another. “Identifying as” something, especially something very non-obvious to other people, is not “life”; it’s an abstraction, and a new and often contorted one.
“It’s not “dangerous.” That blackmailing catastrophizing bullshit is what’s dangerous: it’s driving feminism out of public discourse.”
No, just driving your white, shitty, feminism out of the discourse. How is it blackmailing when it’s a criticism of a public piece? She didn’t extort a thing for value.
You’re painting this young talented scholar under the “angry Black woman” umbrella because she called out another white woman you feel the need to defend. “Callous and malicious human being” & “means for rightful criticism.
Tuvel’s piece wasn’t even retracted. So remove that lie and stop exaggerating: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hypa.12327/full
It wasn’t just “criticism”. It was a call for Tuvel’s piece to be retracted.
And it is perfectly fair to call out the sort of emotional blackmail that attempts to silence people by throwing around words like “dangerous” and “violent.”
To be replaced by a “feminist philosophy” whose Thought Police do their damndest to make sure no dissenting voices will be heard. Thanks for admitting it, at least.
Ah, it’s Zoé Samudzi’s friends who are turning up, because she’s been tweeting at me.
Knock yourselves out.
Samudzi is constantly on the lookout for the next moral outrage to detract from introspection on her own less than virtuous behaviour which she is ironically deeply reactionary about when she is confronted, whether it’s her pontificating about gentrification despite herself being an Oakland gentrifier (which she rationalises is okay though cause she’s black), portraying herself and her family as from humble small farming background (despite belonging to one of the richest and most politically powerful families in Zimbabwe, with its own deep entwinings in Shona supremacist politics which she refuses to speak against) or the time when she kicked back at a hurt transwoman for mocking “male pattern baldness”. Her Twitter is an hourly exercise in mental gymnastics
I see Zoe has predictably gone on the defensive against my comment which I imagine must be disconcerting for her considering as a rule she does not not allow open comment on her op-eds, dissent is verboten. All I will say is I have screenshots I am gladly willing to share of these incidents and many more (a lot of comments suspiciously aligning with open antisemitism, defending Louis Farrakhan and his movement as a hate group etc)
And her fans are saying she was just doing a scholarly critique of Tuvel’s article, THAT’S ALL. Oh yes, very scholarly – calling the article
bad
whining
lazy
a dangerous and irresponsible piece of “scholarly” work
[with] no care, no nuance
epistemic violence.
And then hoped her tenure committee was following – in other words she hoped Tuvel would be denied tenure, which means also being fired.
Yeah. That’s not just “scholarly critique” folks. It’s venomous, ugly shit.
Thank you so much for doing a takedown of Zoe Samudzi’s tweets. I have been hoping that someone would do so, because her “argument” against Tuvel was so laughably poor and mean spirited. Let me note, for the record, that although she insisted in response to Jesse Singal that she had indeed read the article, that her having read it was purely incidental. She had decided BEFORE she read the article that it was “trans-misogynistic.” On April 28, at 12:12 p.m., she posted this on Facebook:
“who’s on the editorial board over at hypatia? i honestly want to talk about this absolutely disgusting and harmful legitimization of “transracial” identity beyond adoption. what kind of garbage de-raced and probably trans-exclusionary gender studies professor wants to pretend that socially constructed identities use the same logics and are interchangeable? is gender suddenly inheritable the same way race is?
who wanna put together some kind of letter because i refuse to allow this garbage to gain traction. if anyone has institutional access and wouldn’t mind sending me copy so i can read it and properly put forth a response, i’d deeply appreciate it.”
Two things:
1. Rebecca Tuvel addresses this issue in footnote 1 of “In Defense of Transracialism.”
2. Zoe Samudzi had by her own admission not read the article at the point at which she decided to try to put together a letter of complaint about it. Clearly, what she then live tweeted was a well-thought-out “sociological” critique, based on a careful and nuanced reading of the article.
Oh did she indeed. How interesting.
This is cute too.
https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/822845609338019840
[…] Commenter helterskelter alerted us to a Facebook post by Zoé Samudzi on April 28 vehemently dispraising Rebecca Tuvel’s Hypatia article and suggesting a letter. […]