Tag: cockroaches

Updating to add a new batch:

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/865599993716948992

Ah well as long as it’s only cishetero white people she’s calling cockroaches that’s fine.

No it isn’t. The Hutus saw the Tutsis as oppressors too; the Nazis saw the Jews as all-powerful and oppressive; othering dehumanizing language is not always aimed downward.

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/865600185627426817

That’s a peculiarly dense question. Historically, “cockroach” has been a racist epithet, but the word isn’t inherently limited as such. It’s a fungible epithet; it works to dehumanize anyone.

______________________________________

Zoé Samudzi says it’s fine to call people cockroaches.

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/865569692097724416

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/865570989366575104

It’s not “fake” and it’s not “offended.” She sounds like Rush Limbaugh. It’s a principled criticism of using othering language like that, with a note of the way it has been used by e.g. the Nazis, Hutus inciting genocide against Tutsis, Katie Hopkins inciting loathing of migrants.

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/865571628624650242

That’s just a deflection. It’s like shouting “But her emails!”

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/865571838939742209

There’s no “pretending” about it. “Cockroaches” does in fact have a history of being a precursor to genocide.

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/865573070169194497

Not the point. The point is that it’s not ok to call people cockroaches.

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/865573307935973376

Well that’s embarrassing for the editors.

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/865574282327236615

Her “argument” is of no interest. What interests me about her is her way of bullying people on social media. The fact that she calls them “cockroaches” is the subject, while her “argument” is not.

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/865575216570785794

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/865575456539525120

Yes, indeed it is. It’s very racialized. Why, exactly, is that funny? Why the lol?

Via Brian Leiter – there’s this piece that Zoé Samudzi wrote a few days ago. I saw it and skimmed it at the time, but was too fed up with her to blog it, so I missed what Brian quotes:

Both Dolezal and Tuvel demonstrate the infallibility and virtuosity of cis white womanhood: despite the harm they enact, they are still always worthy of understanding, protection, kid-gloves…It is not enough to simply hope that Dolezal, or any other career appropriator, simply disappears. As long as there is a structural and systemic investment in discrediting gender non-conforming and Black identities and subordinating the understandings they possess, these gaslighting genealogies that define and regulate humanity will continue, and the Dolezals of the world (and their defenders, and their defenders’ defenders) will spawn and flourish like the cockroaches they are.

Cockroaches.

Cockroaches.

Cockroaches.

Katie Hopkins called migrants “cockroaches” in a column.

Some Hutus called Tutsis “cockroaches.”

In 1992, Leon Mugesera, a senior politician in Rwanda’s then-ruling Hutu party, told a crowd of supporters at a rally in the town of Kabaya that members of the country’s minority Tutsi population were “cockroaches” who should go back to Ethiopia, the birthplace of the East African ethnic group.

Der Sturmer compared Jews to cockroaches:

Der Sturmer ran contests encouraging German children to write in. One little girl wrote, “People are so bothered by the way we’re treating the Jews. They can’t understand it, because [Jews] are God’s creatures. But cockroaches are also God’s creatures, and we destroy them.”

This is not “social justice.”