So why are so many white dudes so desperate for an excuse to use the n-word? Consider this white dude, who recently posted this bit of, er, wisdom in the Men’s Rights subreddit:
Is this going to become a new slogan for the Men’s Rights movement? It certainly seems to be popular amongst Men’s Rights Redditors, sporting a couple of dozen upvotes and no criticism (at least at the time I wrote this) from other MRAs. (There were a few critical comments from opponents of the Men’s Rights movement, however.)
Bear in mind that the Men’s Rights subreddit is 86% white, which is a good deal whiter than the United States as a whole, and only 1.5% black, which is way less black, according to a recent survey of its members. I’m pretty sure none of the white dudes upvoting this little slogan have obtained the proper n-word privileges. (Note: The survey in question was spammed with a number of identical responses, BUT the percentages I’m giving are based on the survey data with all the spammed entries removed, thanks to the industrious Angelica Field; see here for details.)
It’s hardly surprising that black men haven’t exactly flocked to the Men’s Rights movement, given the overt racism of a significant number of MRAs and other Manospherians. And even those MRAs who aren’t so obvious about their racism tend to be dismissive of issues that disproportionately affect men of color: MRAs almost never talk about the drug war that has put so many black men behind bars (two thirds of all those in prison for drug offenses are people of color. mostly men), nor have they ever attempted to organize or even offer any real support to campaigns against prison rape (60% of all prisoners are people of color).
This slogan isn’t likely to help the Men’s Rights movement with what the politicians like to call “minority outreach.” It might help reach a different sort of audience, however — an audience already quite fond of the n-word. When I did a Google search for the phrase “men are the new niggers,” the first result was a discussion on the Vanguard News Network Forum. I won’t link to it, because the Vanguard News Network is a virulently antisemitic, white supremacist website that the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “gutturally racist.” The site’s motto: “No Jews. Just Right.”
Of course, the notion of describing men as “the new nigger” didn’t originate with white supremacists. It was clearly inspired, in a backwards way, by the John Lennon song “Woman is the Nigger of the World,” a feminist attack on misogynistic hypocrisy. While Lennon wrote the lyrics, the titular phrase originated with Yoko Ono, who deliberately used the racial slur in what was evidently an attempt to shock people into recognizing the ways in which women, like black people, were dispossessed.
It was a bad idea. Even though Ono and Lennon didn’t mean to reinforce racism by using the slur, it’s not a word that they had any cultural right to appropriate for their own purposes; not only that, but Ono’s slogan seems to implicitly define all “niggers” as men and to ignore black women, who don’t need John or Yoko to remind them that many people already see them as “niggers.” In the end the title ended up undercutting the message of the song. It can’t listen to it; it makes me cringe.
But glancing over the lyrics again, which aside from the title are essentially about the hypocritical messages sent to women by sexist society, one line in particular stands out to me, because it so deftly captures a certain kind of sexism — and even though it was written years before Warren Farrell first started going on about “disposable men,” it also captures pretty well the MRA tendency to view gender relations upside down:
While putting her down, we pretend that she’s above us
Yep, that’s what the Men’s Rights movement does, all day, every day.
And it’s that kind of delusional thinking that leads some of them to conclude not only that they are the “new niggers,” but also that using the n-word is somehow an appropriate thing for their almost all-white movement to do.
I have to disagree with this, because the amount of damage vigilantes do _is_ fathomable. There are clearly inappropriate vigilante actions which are wrong regardless of the guilt of the target. There are also completely appropriate actions individuals and groups can take to minimize future risk, even when the accused is innocent.
Organizations like businesses, schools and social groups are well within their rights to set boundaries between group members if abuse is occurring, even if it hasn’t risen to a criminal complaint. There has been a lot of good discussion about enforcing harassment policies which provide accountability and a paper trail, to keep an eye out for repeat offenders. Similarly, It would be risky and foolish to put someone accused of a crime in an supervised position with maximum opportunity to repeat the crime. (I.e. The Catholic pedophile shuffle, or banks after the meltdown)
There are certainly moral grey areas. I’m not a fan of economic vigilantism for a number of reasons, both practical and ideological. If a product is good enough to buy despite knowing the nature of the producer, I do my best to mitigate the damage of that purchase through a donation to a charity working in opposition to that damage.
I think a false equivalence between risk minimization strategies and retaliation is dangerous. It puts people at risk, and allows those who can dodge the legal system the ability to do maximum damage.
I generally agree. Yes, rape convictions are tough to get and yes, of course you can evaluate someone’s behavior and act accordingly apart from what has been decided in a court of law, but judging people based on accusations is just a bad, bad road to be going down and I’m never very impressed by arguments of the type “but it’s OK in this case because of mitigating factors X and Y.”
@hellkell
Mine does; it’s fun when I recognize the person in the picture. 🙂 A favorite was when an acquaintance got arrested for breaking into houses. My parents recognized his picture in the paper, called me up, and told me about it. The charges lasted a couple of days before they were dropped. Turns out that a fellow addict got in some hot water and tried to roll on everyone around him. The system sometimes overcharges to shake people up. In this case, he was a thief, and they shook him into admitting to a few petty crimes. He spent no time in jail, lost his drivers license, got put on probation, and they ignored him as long as he kept paying off his fines little by little. Which he struggled to pay, being a. an addict b. denied to good jobs since he had a public record a quick google search away.
@Auntie Alias
I have to disagree with you; I don’t think it makes anyone any safer, in particular with sexual crimes. As I said, only a tiny fraction of rapists see the inside of a courtroom, and only a tiny fraction of those ever see the pages of a newspaper. It has to be “juicy” for a newspaper to run it.
Heroin addicts stealing from old ladies is in general pretty juicy. I see arrests for break-ins all the time, but there are dozens of rape convictions that happen in my area every year that I don’t know about until I know their names and cough up the cash for a background check. I can’t avoid those guys until they creep on me.
So in conclusion, if something almost never helps, it doesn’t make you safer. 😉
a). So it’s ok if something terrible happens as long as it only happens to a few people?
As I said before, to focus solely on rape is short-sighted. This is an issue with how we treat the accused in our society in general. And it effects all of us. What about women, falsely accused by their abusive partners? Should their names and faces be plastered in the newspapers before trial as well?
b). Of course it negatively effects the accused. Just in this thread, two people, including you, have said that we should publicly name the accused so that we can avoid them. Now being avoided by a couple random people may not be so bad, but what if you hellkell were a hiring manager? Or someone looking for a babysitter?
@titianblue
This is true, and there’s no perfect solution for this. However I’d rather that a guilty man went free than a innocent man suffer.
Ah, I forgot an @hellkell there in the middle of my post. Sorry about that. 🙂
It’s not just a matter of my avoiding accused persons. It’s a matter of public interest when people accused of crimes are part of an institution like teachers, clergy, lawyers, judges, law enforcement, politicians, etc. When viewed in that context, we deserve to be informed to avoid legal and financial risk, to protect the safety of our children, and to oversee the integrity of the justice system and government.
The traditional quote is “than an innocent man go to jail” and that is why, in the UK at least, the bar for “guilty” in a court of law is set so high at “beyond reasonable doubt”.
But carrying your approach to its logical conclusion, we couldn’t charge anyone (because of course being charged with a crime of which you are innocent is horrible). Or else no one must know that someone has been charged – practically difficult and looking scarily like secret courts to me.
Instead, we have everything done in public so that everyone can see what happens and how justice is done. And part of the reason for that is to make the public confident that vigilantism is unnecessary and to ensure that the accused is protected. And so everyone knows if a person is found not guilty. Transparency is the greatest safeguard there can be.
This is kind of a strawman, because most people would want to know what accusations were out there, and I think most people would do some deeper digging to find out what happened.
RE: canuck_with_pluck
DO go to the doctor. Bipolar shit can get very serious, and you really don’t seem to be pleased with how your brain is treating you. If you can get a therapist, by all means, please do.
I know a lot of bipolar folks, though I’m not myself. Would you like me to beat the drum and call up my buddies, see if any of them can help? I can also recommend Ellen Forney’s comic book Marbles if you need something down-to-earth that talks about bipolar stuff.
And for the love of god, TRY NOT TO DRINK. That is NOT a good solution, and it’s possible to be manic and depressed at the same time, which alchohol is terrible for.
RE: AK
@LBT, thanks for that book recommendation!
No problem! I didn’t realize it was in mid-series; nothing on the cover or pages told me. I will have to seek out the other books, though.
RE: MEZ
Could you please explain why this is?
I’m not Ally, but I can field this. Basically, it acts like there are women, and then transwomen. Which isn’t so. Trans is an adjective, not a noun, so there are cis women and trans women. It makes perfect sense once you think about it, because it makes the focus the ‘women’ bit instead of the ‘trans’ bit.
RE: Angelica
It is not up to any individual or “society” (outside the justice system) to condemn a person based on unproven assumptions,
The hell you say. Angelica, I come from a family with multi-generational incest and child-molestation. The perps were never charged, never arrested, and so went on abusing with impunity. By the time I was born, all evidence had been gone for decades. I spent time with them as a child throughout my life and wasn’t warned until my mid-teens, likely AFTER I’d aged out of their preferred victim stage. I really would’ve APPRECIATED my family giving me a proper warning, condemnation or not!
@LBT
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Oh, why am I not surprised???
And of course they fixate on university campuses. Because that’s where all the uncontrollably horny dudes are. Young, dumb, and full of…you get the picture.
The misandry is incredible.
I’m mixed on the subject of public shaming of the accused.
In general I’m against it. I’m against it for reasons like this one Auntie Alias uses:
No. That someone has been accused ought not paint a scarlet letter on their life. True story, I know of a school district which had some very troubled schools. Schools where teachers were likely to get formal complaints filed by parents. The parents were doing it as a form of self-defense when “Little Johhny” started whaling on some other student and the teacher intervened.
Why? Because the school district would then clear the students record. After a teacher got a few of those said teacher was stuck. They couldn’t leave that district to go to another one because they would have two or three accusations of “abusing a student” in their files. The district knew they were false, but no other district is going to take the risk they aren’t.
What I want is not a public shunning of the accused*, but rather a formal process, where complaints are treated with concern, investigated with attention and the results in keeping with the facts. I don’t want to have to say, “rapists get away with it, so I need to know who was accused so I can assume they did it in fact”.
Because, even if the number of false accusations is, relatively, low (call it 5 percent, which is in the middle of credible evidence, and bit below other crimes), that’s still 5 people in a hundred who then get the, “it’s too much of a risk to take”, when they aren’t guilty.
But if the numbers prosecuted were something more in keeping with the idea that 95 percent were legitimate accusations, things would be different.
I’d also like to see the US adopt the British model and do away with plea bargains. I’d also like to see a better funded public defender, the sense that Jury Duty is a public good (say a law which mandates two weeks paid leave when one is called to Jury Duty; and half-pay; with the state picking up the rest, for trials which last more than two weeks (which is a relatively small number).
We’d also need more judges, whom I dislike seeing as an elected office. Ideally I’d like to see a system whereby atty’s who apply are vetted by an independent board, and put into a pool, from which they are randomly selected as vacancies appear.
Because justice requires balance; and what we have now is a tilted deck
*in part because I worry about cops deciding not to present cases to the DA, lest someone have this happen. The false-trusim that, “rape accusations ruin lives” already skews things. It is were less of a false trusim I think the failure to lay a charge against someone would go up.
Seconding this.
Maybe we can put some crowbar separation between “reacting to factors other than the verdict of a court” and “reacting to the accusation itself.” Because we seem to be talking about both simultaneously.
I’m in favor of the crowbar of separation. I’m also in favor of the blowtorch of misandry, if we’re talking about handy tools in general. XD
Today in oppressed white people news: Here is a hilarious and sickening argument I got into about diversity in SF and other genre movies.
Wow. Just, wow. First he appropriates rape to speak about how oppressed he is that a black actor “appropriated” Norse mythology. Then he calls me 75% African, as if that is a bad thing (although I am actually very white) and then he tells me I don’t have the right to an opinion about my own heritage. Even if the rest of my ancestry was sub-Saharan African, guess what? I would still be Norwegian!
Why does it piss people off so much when someone dares suggest that movies don’t cater to only white men? I know the answer of course, it’s just baffling to me.
I didn’t respond any further except to post shocked face gifs because that pos was really not worth speaking to. I just thought it was so outrageous and I needed to commiserate.
Todd352 is clearly threatened by Elba and just wishes that he were anywhere near as talented and handsome. What a toolshed.
RE: WWTH
Welp, my roomie is a Norse Heathen, and he’s told me that his religion is infested with literal neo-Nazis. I am completely unsurprised by this sort of racism.
Idris Elba is awesome and I think he should be in everything. I’d way rather see him than another goddamn Stubble McWhiteman.
Todd532 needs to provide evidence that all Norse gods are in fact white skinned. That the stereotypical Norwegian is proves nothing, unless he can also prove that gods always look just like the people who worship them.
He’d also need to show that the marvel characters are accurate representations of Norse mythology in every other way too.
ToddStringOfNumbers is threatened by a handsome actor who is probably (and in Todd’s mind, most certainly) massively better endowed than he.
In every way.
What a bag-o-tools.
Im with pecunium on the matter of public shaming of accused. I dont like the idea of innocent people getting ‘branded’ for things they didn’t do.
There is room for discussion on how severe a problem being branded a sexual offender actually is, and room for discussion on just how rare someone being accused falsely is, however, I should point out that one doesn’t have to be a lier to be mistaken on the identity of their assaulter. Even so, I could probably find myself persuaded to lean the other way with my opinion based on those two points
That being said, the amount of *actual* rapists not being put away is pretty sickening, and As a sort of stop gap, I suppose I wouldn’t be against shaming of the accused, though if/when this problem is fixed, Id rather avoid dragging innocents into it.
(part of the reason Im ok with shaming being a stop gap, is the potential for Innocents to avoid being assaulted in the first place, which would presumably be a higher number then the amount of people being branded unfairly, but Thats just speculation based on what little I know on the matter.
(Full Disclosure, and a somewhat separate opinion from the above. I don’t actually believe in Prisons being an effective way to deal with criminals. I would much rather people be reformed then thrown into prison for awhile then back into communities, except in cases where rehabilitation isn’t likely, In which case something else would have to be done.)
I’m not sure how allowing the publication of people’s names who have been charged with a crime turned into public shaming.
Depends, I suppose. I say ‘Shaming’ because these things have a way of sticking with people. (and again, Its debatable how bad that actually is, so.. it might not be that big of a thing?)
To be fair though, I may have misunderstood the context because I failed to real all of the conversation from start to finish.
Read*
marinaliteyears, it started with MEZ’s comment:
Auntie Alias: It came about because people said they wanted to know who had been accused, so they would know whom to avoid, and you made the point that people should be able to search for such accusations, so as to make certain types of hiring decision, protect the children, etc..