“We do not tolerate…”
Student Maxwell Meyer wrote in the Stanford Review a couple of weeks ago:
When I moved back to Stanford last week for the first time in over a year, I grinned almost childishly when I saw the Hufflepuff name-tag on my door. For all that’s strange about campus during the pandemic, it was nice to see my new dorm continue the Stanford tradition of each house choosing a fun theme: “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.”
Uh oh. We know that can’t end well.
As it turns out, choosing a beloved children’s fantasy series as a theme for a college dorm in 2021 is dangerous territory. Being well-versed in the ways of the woke, I admit that I should have seen it coming. But I did not, and was completely floored when student staff read the following statement during our first virtual house meeting:
“We want to acknowledge that J.K. Rowling has made many transphobic, anti-semitic, and racist statements over the past year. Her beliefs do not reflect our values as a house, and we want to make it clear that we do not tolerate comments like hers in this dorm. Our theme… is intended to make this space safe and fun for you this quarter.”
The hell she has. She has said some things critical of the belief system that undergirds trans activism, but that doesn’t make her phobic. As far as I know the “anti-semitic and racist” bit is just a straight-up lie. Meyer points this out.
This brings me to the most chilling part of the house theme statement: the implied threat that if you don’t join the witch hunt, you’ll become the next target. “Her beliefs do not reflect our values as a house, and we want to make it clear that we do not tolerate comments like hers in this dorm.”
We weren’t asked whether J.K. Rowling’s beliefs reflect our values, we were told that they don’t. No examples of “comments like hers” were given, but we were still warned that they won’t be tolerated. Just what sorts of comments do they mean — perhaps the “anti-semitic and racist” ones that they made up?
Like J.K. Rowling, I believe in both equal rights for trans people and the reality of sex as a category. If that now constitutes thoughtcrime at Stanford,then I should probably start packing my bags.
Maybe just find a better dorm?
Well, it was only a matter of time before they accused her of racism and anti-Semitism. Suddenly being gender critical means that you hate anyone who is not part of the white Judeo-Christian tradition, and want to genocide everyone. Because not buying the trans dogma in every particular (because even those who do buy in have to watch their step and be careful not to say the wrong thing) is the same thing as racism and anti-Semitism.
Why didn’t they just go for the throat, and call her Karen?
I suspect that if I was there and asked them to elaborate on the matter, I’d be called a witch for asking.
“What did J. K. Rowling say that was racist or anti-semitic?”
“Do your own research. It’s not our job to educate you.”
The anti-semitic lie has been going around for quite a while. As I understand it there are some elves or goblins or something in Harry Potter who are archetypal grasping bankers (I’m sure someone can correct/elaborate). These goblins or whatever are supposed to be Jewish, or rather stereotypical thereof.
The obvious rebuttal is that they are stereotypical goblins and it says more about the state of mind of people assuming they’re stereotypical Jews than about Rowling’s intentions.
The racism charge is similarly tenuous. I think there are only a handful of non-white students at the wizard school and one of them is Chinese or Indian and has a common Chinese/Indian name, which is apparently racist.
Exactly. And when you say you’ve read every single word she’s written on the relevant issues and don’t see any problems, you get shunned, blocked, or unfriended, or you get told: she liked a tweet by someone who works for some organization that sometimes publishes another writer who said something mildly unsupportive; or she has some connection to an online store that sells things they deem offensive.
#1 ikn
Yep, I am an avowed Trumpist according to some of FTB’s irrational narcissists.
And now that I refresh…
#4 latsot
I’m not a Potter reader, so I once asked about the racism accusation in …reddit I think. I was told that it was because an asian character had the name Cho Chang. I looked up Cho and found that it is Korean family name, and Chang is pretty well known as a Chinese name. So, both plausible for an east asian character… the only fault people can find is that both names are generally family names, and that it was super ignorant of Rowling to not know this.
Storm in a teacup, used as ammunition against her now that she is declared an enemy.
And yes, the Jewish thing is pathetic too. Characters in various works of fiction are sometimes going to be greedy about money… are all such characters automatically Jewish stereotypes? So, no characters that inadvertently match racist stereotypes of anyone anywhere, because any coincidence of that nature is automatically racist.
When an enemy does it, at least.
Yes, Sackbut, it is even worse, if you don’t see how problematic her words are, you must be a racist and antisemite yourself. Kind of the emperor’s clothes, but in a negative way.
Names are an arbitrary thing. Some real names are just odd-ish, whether given or chosen.. McGeorge Bundy? Dweezil Zappa? Many might consider mine odd. Just imagine the furor if years ago she’d written a trans character by the name of Veronica Ivy. I mean come on. Who would ever call themselves that?
As another example, my last name (before I changed it) is not unusually a first name; it can be both. At some point, this nonsense will stifle fiction writers, because they will be afraid to name their characters, have their characters have any characteristics at all, or allow their characters to do anything. Fiction is dead when that happens.
I dunno. They could always brood in silent anonymity.
“Do your own research. It’s not our job to educate you.”
Did they actually say that? I don’t see it in Ophelia’s post or the article they linked to.
Not that I haven’t seen that in places so it is plausible.
If people do say that I take it to mean they can’t actually back up their claim & are liars.
Not in the article, sorry. GW was relating something that many of us have experienced.
To be fair, sometimes people are genuinely tired of having to provide background information that is easily available to the curious. The incidents that GW and I and many of us might be referring to, though, are as you stated; they can’t back up their claims and are liars. They have not done the research that they demand other people do, even if they think they actually have done it.
@Iatsot #4
Concerning the Anti-semitism-claims: In the books, the goblins are indeed money-loving creatures, but IMHO there is nothing to relate them to Jews.
In the movies, they depicted the goblins as human-like, but with a low brow, usually a long, hook-shaped nose and thus at least a bit similar to the stereotype of Nazi-era jewish caricatures. (Google Harry Potter goblin for examples.) So for the movies, the claim seems not to be totally unfounded, if still overblown.
Considering the generic embrace of Louis Farrakhan, HAMAS etc. by the Woke Brigade, maybe the antisemitism accusation was meant to be ameliorative?
Very true. As an environmental scientist, I can assert the truth of how utterly exhausting this is. But…it is what you do if you are promoting any position. You educate. You elucidate. You explain. You explicate. You enlighten. (Okay, enough words beginning with an e for now.)
That’s even more important for an area where there is a lot of conflicting information, and a lot of it false. If the TRAs really had a case, they would definitely push the information out there, but if they send people to educate themselves, and those people do, they are very possibly going to stumble into highly persuasive (and accurate) information put out there by the GC feminists and their allies. If they stop at only a superficial, one Google page of information, they might see nothing but the TRA information, which is, I suspect, what is happening to most of these fellow travelers, like Daniel Radcliff and others that are piling on JK Rowling. They don’t have any idea of what it means to research a topic, so they stop at the first thing they see, which is as likely a TRA document as any, saying, okay, I educated myself.
Others who are actually really interested in the issue, and really curious, and not lazy, may continue to the second page, the third…they may notice the emptiness, meme-based non-arguments, and sheer ridiculousness of the TRA ‘arguments’ and keep pursuing, hoping to make some sense of it all. Eventually they may come to an article on AGP, or they may stumble on B&W, or Jane Claire Jones, and read the eloquent, tightly argued, and researched arguments against.
But the TRAs bank on the fact that most people won’t go past the first page. And they are lazy activists. Rather than do their own work, they stick their T onto a successful movement that worked a long time to get the rights and recognition the T now claim by default. Now they are reaching their tentacles into feminism, and have made too many inroads, but those damn GC feminists just keep insisting that only women are women! They’re also putting feelers out into the anti-racism and anti-anti-semitism groups. Can they get those groups to center transgender people of color? Transgender Jews? Depart their own noble purpose to focus solely, 24/7/365 on OOTMMM?
As for the depiction of the goblins in the movies, it is rare for a writer to have much, if any, say over casting decisions and the producer’s ‘vision’, which if I may say so, frequently departs from the writer’s vision.
Re #16
Excellent comment, but I must note: “Okay, enough words beginning with an e for now” made me laugh heartily. And you did that with such great, er, ease.
Here you go. A character in a BBC series, played by Idris Elba, is apparently not “Black enough.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/18/is-luther-not-black-enough-if-doesnt-eat-jerk-chicken
And if his character did do those things, there would likely be those who would decry it as stereotyping. I have not watched the show, so I don’t know how many scenes include the character a) eating or b) hanging out with friends.
A misreading of a phrase in the above leads me to propose a name for the phenomenon described: Shallow Travellers.
How about: Fallow Travellers?
Re #19
On his blog Kenan Malik posted a longer version of that Observer article, and I think it’s quite good:
https://kenanmalik.com/2021/04/18/authenticity-identity-and-luther/
” “To be fair, sometimes people are genuinely tired of having to provide background information that is easily available to the curious.”
Very true. As an environmental scientist, I can assert the truth of how utterly exhausting this is. But…it is what you do if you are promoting any position. You educate. You elucidate. You explain. You explicate. You enlighten. (Okay, enough words beginning with an e for now.)”
Have you checked out “Index of Creationist Claims”?
Something similar is needed for any issue where there are a lot of lies spread about.
That way you can just post a link to the relevant webpage.
BTW an edit function for when eg: I hit ‘Submit Comment’ too soon would be useful.
The gone and lamented edit button was a victim, I think, of WordPress’ insistence on randomly changing their templates every five minutes so nothing works any more.
I like to think it makes us all focus and write more carefully, but really we just ask Ophelia to fix what we screw up.
covfefe
WordPress did a massive change to the New Post bit a year or so ago and – yay! – made the process MUCH more difficult and irritating. Gee, thanks, WordPress.
Rowling has not, as far as I’ve found, ever made any racist/anti-Semitic comments. As for the books’ contents…
Can I default to, “It’s complicated”?
The traditional depiction of classic creatures of mythology often contain unfortunate racial stereotypes at their base. When more recent authors blithely include those creatures in their own works, they unwittingly tap into that history. And when it comes to fantasy ‘races’, there’s much more danger in the fact that they are often presented as monolithic in terms of inclination and personality. So, yeah, there’s a fair cop to be made that Rowling, without any intention of doing so, tapped into a bit of folklore that was used to dehumanize a particularly oppressed community. See also: Tolkien’s orcs. And don’t even get me started on Lewis. It’s there, it’s real, and it deserves some intelligent discussion.
But of course, going from “You’re tapping into some systematic cultural biases that have had harmful consequences” to, “You’re an anti-Semitic [insert preferred gendered insult with no sense of irony here]” is simply absurd.
As for racist, well… again, complicated.
No, she didn’t indulge in racist stereotypes. But let’s face it, her portrayal of magical society was painfully Euro-centric. Visitors from other schools are still French or German; there’s apparently no magical traditions or academies in Asia or Africa. It’s lazy, and unconsciously biased in a way that I’m okay with saying feeds into racism by failing to present a more cohesive picture of the world. But again, it requires an intense act of will to look at that and then say, “And therefore racist [ipgiwnsoih]”.
*************
On Luther, it’s even more absurd. He didn’t hang around with his black friends because he barely had any friends, period–that was much of the point of the character, that he was unable to tend to his life outside the job of police-work. And it did an amazing job, IMNSHO, of showing the inherent contradiction there, in how readily his colleagues (particularly those not on daily terms with him) would fall back on their standard treatment of blacks whenever there was some attempt to frame him. The show did a fantastic job of portraying the truth of both systemic and unconscious racism, way better than if they’d had a single out-and-out wannabe Neo-Nazi as a police official, or somesuch. It was subtle, but the thread of how his race affected his career and life was a constant presence in the show. Missing that requires a deliberate intent to ignore anything that doesn’t let you jump on a “Popular Thing Bad” bandwagon.
In a way, I don’t blame Rowling for making her series Euro-centric. To include African, Asian, sub-continent, or Australian or Native American magic history and traditions would have bulked out the stories significantly, with every chance of falling into serious mistakes from lack of familiarity.
Meh, I’m so used to encountering place-centrism that I don’t even take it as indicative of anything. Not laziness. Certainly not racism. Not even poor writing. It’s just … There’s this thing called decision tree pruning. (Alternatively, you can think of it as satisficing.) Whatever story I’m writing is about d–n, so I prune off a–c and m–z, because they’re not prima facie relevant. Don’t even get me started on а–я or あ–わ.
… was supposed to be d–m and n–z. Obviously.