Racist, woman-hating fantasy author Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day) is upset that people are calling him racist. I mean, it’s not like he called all black people “savages,” he objects; he merely called one black woman — speculative fiction author NK Jemisin — a “half-savage” in a portion of a blog post that, he complains, has been taken out of context. Indeed, he sniffs,
the fact that the same ungrammatical excerpt chopped out of the middle of a sentence keeps being trotted out again and again should alert the dialectical mind to the probability that there simply isn’t very much, if any, there there.
Ah, context! A lot of shitheads who say terrible things complain, when others point out these terrible things, that their words have been taken out of context. So I thought I’d do Vox a little favor here and provide the context to his infamous quote so we can all see how much there is there.
You may notice that the context here does not actually make Vox look any less racist.
I’ve taken the liberty of bolding the especially egregious bits, though to be honest there isn’t much here that isn’t egregious:
Jemisin has it wrong; it is not that I, and others, do not view her as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not.
She is lying about the laws in Texas and Florida too. The laws are not there to let whites ” just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence”, those self-defense laws have been put in place to let whites defend their lives and their property from people, like her, who are half-savages engaged in attacking them.
Jemisin’s disregard for the truth is no different than the average Chicago gangbanger’s disregard for the traditional Western code of civilized conduct. She could, if she wished, claim that privileged white males are responsible for the decline of Detroit, for the declining sales of science fiction, even for the economic and cultural decline of the United States, but that would not make it true. It would not even make it credible. Anyone who is paying sufficient attention will understand who is genuinely responsible for these problems.
Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males. If one considers that it took my English and German ancestors more than one thousand years to become fully civilized after their first contact with advanced Greco-Roman civilization, it should be patently obvious that it is illogical to imagine, let alone insist, that Africans have somehow managed to do the same in less than half the time at a greater geographic distance. These things take time.
Being an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by “a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys” than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine, Jemisin clearly does not understand that her dishonest call for “reconciliation” and even more diversity within SF/F is tantamount to a call for its decline into irrelevance.
In case you want a bit more context, elsewhere in the same post he 1) mocked a man for taking his wife’s name, 2) suggested that one of his female critics was totally not as hot as his wife, the mysterious “Spacebunny,” and 3) reminded anyone who had forgotten that he had “three Billboard-charting club hits,” a fact that evidently makes him irresistible to women.
You see, Vox was briefly a member of a largely forgotten techno group called Psykosonik more than two decades ago. Well, “largely forgotten” by everyone but Vox, that is.
CONTEXT!
@Rabukurafuto – Good stuff. I have to go to town on Friday, so I’ll take a look then. I’ll post in the open thread to let you know if I have any luck.
Thank you Flying Mouse. It would be especially interesting if Beale’s out of print work showed up. Apparently it was aimed at young adults instead of adults like his “Vox Day” works.
Wow! You know that feeling? The one you get when you read something that you know is true, but is just so incredible that your mind wobbles a bit, you think perhaps you’ve dropped into an alternate universe or timeline? That’s how this post made me feel. I knew V.D. was an insufferable, neoNazi pig, but MAN! I had no idea just how bad he really is. Your right Vox. Context makes all the difference.
Wait, King Tut was a stegosaurus?
How depressing. I liked Psykosonik back in the day. Had no idea he turned into *this* guy. I’m listening to “Within” one last time. 🙁
Nequam, thanks for the Fred Clark reference. That’s what I thought of as well.
By a meaningless coincidence, I just finished a history of the world through trade and commerce. Turns out everybody everywhere has been traveling all over since forever. The idea that humanity wallowed in Chaos and Old Night until Pericles struck the rock and Socrates popped out full grown is supremely wrong headed. Now I’m reading “Europe Before Rome”, which is a bit dry but full of things I did not already know.
Regarding the legendary Native Princess great-grandmother, my great-great-grandfather’s younger brother was a pathfinder and fur trapper during the middle XIXth century. According to the historical record, he had a Shoshone wife. There is a family story: once, when visiting relatives in St. Louis (then on the frontier), he was asked by a woman when he had to return to ‘the wilderness and the savage Indians ‘. He replied that he would be returning as soon as he could, ‘because white people are just too damn mean’.
Wait, he was in the band that did the music for “Mortal Kombat: Anihliation”?
And he admits to this?
Reblogged this on Sumiko Saulson and commented:
Vox Day would like you to know he’s not just some racist! He’s also sexist and colonialist as hell, and would appreciate it if all the wimmens and colored people would stop trying to ruin Sci-Fi and Fantasy by writing it and get back in the kitchen and make him a sammich.
Studies do show that racially European people and racially African people are not equally H. Sapiens. People of European descent have about 4% H. Neanderthalensis DNA. Which means that black people are purer examples of modern humans. Which I think is the inverse of what Vox was trying to argue.
Also, Ancient Egypt was an advanced culture in Africa while Europeans were wading in shit
And yet Vox has Mexican and Native American heritage running through his veins. So by his own logic, he himself is a “half-breed savage” who relies on the external support of European whites.
BTW, here are some different ancestors of early Homo sapiens who originated primarily from Africa and other countries, who migrated to what would become Europe and evolve into modern humans.
Australopithecus afarensis: fossils found in Eastern Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya) that are nearly 4 million years old, existed for nearly 1,000,000 years (much longer than modern Homo sapiens has existed for)
Australopithecus africanus: fossils found in South Africa, 2-3 million years old, possible descendent of A. afarensis
Homo Erectus: fossils found in China suggest that it was first Homo species to expand outside of Africa (China, Republic of Georgia)
Also, Mr. Vox, you do realize that many early tools used to hunt, engage in warfare, or build civilization were first utilized by these early non-European species before the migration into Europe and subsequent evolution into modern Homo sapiens, right?
Here are some citations if you want to look it up yourselves, guys. Sorry if I’ve made a text wall. I took an evolutionary anthropology class in my freshman year at university.
http://humanorigins.si.edu
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-human-migration-13561/