Less than 24 hours after an apparent white supremacist murdered nine black churchgoers in cold blood during a prayer meeting in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, one prominent MRA is trying to put the blame on feminism, because of a remark the killer reportedly made about rape.
One of the survivors of the church killings reported that, before he began shooting, the killer told those in the prayer group that “you rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
Dylann Storm Roof, the accused killer, wore his racism on his sleeve, almost literally: a former classmate tells the press that Roof “made a lot of racist jokes”; his license plate featured the Confederate flag; his Facebook profile picture shows him in a jacket with patches representing the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa.
But Dean Esmay, the second-in-command at A Voice for Men, probably the most influential Men’s Rights site, thinks that Roof’s killing spree may be the result of too much feminism. Earlier today, he posted a link to an article on the shooting to the Men’s Rights subreddit with this headline:
To their credit, the Men’s Rights subreddit regulars voted his comment down; one told him “[n]ot everything is about us, man. This is distasteful.”
Two hours later, apparently undaunted by the criticism and oblivious to irony, Esmay returned to the Men’s Rights subreddit to make another accusation:
No one has declared the shooter to be an MRA. The little we know about Roof right now suggests that he was a garden-variety old-school racist. The paranoid notion of black men raping “our” white women is one of the oldest racist tropes out there; as Jessica Valenti noted on Twitter, Roof’s language is “the language of white supremacist patriarchy.”
The alleged threat to “our women” was used for generations as an excuse to lynch black men and terrorize the black community as a whole. In the case of Roof’s shootings, it’s an even more transparent ruse. As Rebecca Carroll notes in The Guardian, it’s hard to argue that these killings had anything to do with real fears or even paranoid fantasies about the rape of white women when most of the victims were not black men — the symbolic “rapists” in the equation — but black women:
There is something inconsistent with the Charleston shooter’s alleged evocation of the historical myth of black man as beast and rapist of white women, and the fact that he killed mostly black women. Did he only shoot black women because there were no more black men to kill? Because black women birth, care for and love black men? Or because he didn’t see black women as women at all …
The idea that white women’s bodies represent that which is inviolable while black women’s are disposable hasn’t changed enough since it was first articulated by white men; but again, aimed at black men on Wednesday night, it was predominately black women who suffered by their invocation.
We will find out more about Root’s twisted beliefs in days to come. But it is clear already that they had nothing whatsoever to do with feminism.
H/T — r/againstmensrights
EDIT: I’m making this a NO TROLL, no-derailing-with-idiotic-MRA-or-incel-talking-points thread.
@Lea
Cool. Does that mean we can crash on out couch? Maybe use some of our money to buy some cider and Chinese food and watch scary movies on our Netflix? Be pretty sweet if we did that.
The awful is all over the internet. I spent time yelling at online atheists who were posting stuff like, “he may have been going through a psychotic episode,” “churches are intolerant and segregated,” “praying didn’t do them much good, did it,” and “this is clearly not terrorism.” Glad to see y’all holding down the fort here and pushing back on nonsense.
Sure, there’s been an idea thrown around that some people are wired to be nearly incapable of killing and others aren’t (perhaps even some evidence of that being the case, I don’t remember), but you can be completely neurotypical and still lack that trait.
And even if you’re going out on a limb to call having the capability to kill another human being a mental illness, the vast majority of people with the capacity to kill don’t use it. Much like the vast majority of those with mental illness are more the victims of violence than the perpetrators.
Sadly, while atheists may not have the history of hatred that many religions do, there are those within the movement who are doing their best to catch up. Almost any horrendous position will have an atheist defending it, especially if that position is one popular among white male nerds.
I do my best to fight it and to set a good example within atheist circles, but yeah. It’s sickening. Especially online.
There are clones here?
http://www.thefrisky.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/22/clone-dance-party4.gif
In my experience in the sphere of social justice, referring to an action (or even a person) as ‘evil’ isn’t necessarily verboten.
The thing that tends to be taken exception to is when awful people are referred to as ‘monsters’ or ‘less than human’ and the like, because that is simply shoving those people into a box marked “Other” and not addressing the culture, norms, or beliefs that lead these people to feel justified in doing what it is they did.
I mean, it’s a very common reaction; when something awful is done, people want to distance themselves from the asshole who did it. If they’re of another race or religion? Bam! There we go, they’re already nothing like us good, normal people. The same race, religion, or gender? There must be something else wrong with them, they must be crazy! Or a monster, something inhuman and incomprehensible! They can’t be similar to me, they can’t share similar viewpoints as I do! That would mean examining my own beliefs, culture, and assumptions and that’s really uncomfortable.
@EJ I think it’s the intolerant brand of anti-theism that’s the problem. All anti-theists are atheists (I think? A religious anti-theist is pretty strange to imagine), but not all atheists are anti-theists. Anti-theist regimes have racked up a vast record of atrocities in the twentieth century alone, making up for lost time as you said, and these days anti-theism seems to be a popular front for imperialism, racism, and sexism.
[Atheist digression]
If there’s an antitheist party then you must number me within it; and you should also number people such as Watson, Benson and Christina, none of whom can easily be accused of being misogynist white men.
Yeah, there’s a lot of unreasonable, smug, hate-filled people within the movement. I’ve considered disengaging from it a few times. However, the cause itself is still valid and just as Twisty Faster does not invalidate feminism, Justin Vacula does not invalidate atheism. It just means that those of us who don’t subscribe to the worship of white male power need to fight even harder to reclaim the movement.
[/Atheist digression]
The way these guys wave their ignorance around like fucking flags. Christ. As David pointed out, the specter of black men raping white women is as old as racism itself.
@EJ @PPT
I am always cautious with this argument, that either atheists or religions have particular potential for hate, or a history of hatred. Most of the atrocities that are usually listed – crusades on the one hand, Stalin on the other – have other, more important reasons (economic, political, social), and religion (or another ideology) is often at most a contributing factor. For example, David Priestland surmises that Stalin’s atrocities were partly motivated by the voluntarism that was inherent in communist ideology and that necessitated a permanent state of revolution and mobilisation to industrialise the country in a short time and fundamentally change its social structure. Granted, the Catholic Church has a long list of crimes, but the Church was never simply a religious institution. The history of the Middle Ages in Europe shows a lot of religiously expressed but socially motivated revolutions, as well as wars and atrocities. I always find myself going back to Marx’ argument when it comes to religion: it is at the same time the expression of suffering and the protest against it.
As for the atheist movement: I get the impression (although I’m not too familiar with all the intricacies) that those who defend horrible positions are precisely people who belong to certain social strata – like the white male nerds. That’s a very particular social group, and even if they use their interpretation of atheism to say horrible stuff, doesn’t mean atheism is the reason for them saying it.
A very polite political dismissal with added sidelining until he;s least remembered and then it will be distancing.
@EJ I only think anti-theism is a problem if it’s intolerant. Wanting to keep religious groups from imposing their religious strictures through the power of the state, for instance, is a common-sense position that I fully stand behind. I only have a problem with people who take it in weird directions, like equating all religion with religious fundamentalism or insisting that religious groups have no role in civil life period. I’ve even had some fool tell me the Civil Rights movement was conducted wrongly churches were so central to its organization.
And considering that blacks are the most religious group in the United States, women are more religious than men and so on, I tend to side-eye arguments that secular people are smarter or better etc. than religious people.
@Bernardo Soares Agreed. I think repression and violence are human phenomena that are not limited to religion or lack thereof. The “Religion is the source of all evil!” argument is just as silly as the “Without religion there is no morality!” argument that some religious people spout.
And while atheism might not be the motivation for a subset of white male nerds saying horrible shit, these people are nevertheless justifying and framing it within the frame of atheism. That doesn’t affect my atheism but it does affect movement atheism, which is why I want nothing to do with it. I can be an atheist on my own and read my Bible, Sutta Nipata, and Tao Te Ching just fine without smug assholes mansplaining and whitesplaining my spiritual life.
That is, I’ve even had some fool tell me the Civil Rights movement was conducted wrongly because churches were so central to its organization. I suck at proofreading, but that fool was still a fool.
@PPT
Wha. Are you…
…
Wha.
I think what disturbed me most is that there are so few resources to be proactive about situations like these, or if there is proactivity we never get to hear about it.
From what I understand, is that Roof was getting himself worked up to do this for SIX MONTHS with “friends” acting like toxic enablers. No one seems to have flagged him anywhere and this comes out if the blue.
It saddens me that we live in societies where there is little facility to handle this and pre – habilitate (I hope that’s a word) rather than, as it seems to me, facilitate.
There only seems to be intervention after the fact and this appears to apply to any agency who end up involved. Sadly, it appears that we still rely on snitches in the community, than a mechanism for proactivity.
We need a way to prevent this occurring again, yet there is more in the way of toxic enablement than otherwise. If I was to do a search “I hate ” I don’t find sites at the top of the list that would help me change my stance instead its the ones that fuel the hatred.
I’m dismayed by things now.
They’re now naming the nine victims.
I’ll bet Esmay just read the headlines and assumed all the victims were men because men are the default people, he was probably preparing an editorial in his head where he accused feminism of driving white men to murder black men. I daresay in Esmay’s mind black women don’t really exist.
@PussyPowerTrantrum:
I appreciate that you are trying to separate people into “good atheists” and “bad atheists”, labelling the second group “antitheist”, so that you can then lump any behaviour by atheists which you dislike into the second group and then feel untainted by this.
Please do not do this.
I like and respect you but I feel I have to call you on this and teal dear a little here. There are three reasons why:
1) This is not a distinction which exists except in your head. Look at Catalpa’s explanation of how distancing works, above: this is what you’re doing. You and I both know how tremendously annoying it is when people say “You’re a good feminist, you’re not one of those evil radical feminists like [names of non-radfems].” It is also annoying when you do it.
2) Antitheism is a word which already means something. It’s not a sect of atheists. It’s especially not a slur used to distance oneself from the unpleasantness within the movement (which is a real thing and I will not pretend that it is’t.) Many people who are outspoken allies of the feminist and anti-racist movement identify as antitheist: PZ Myers for example.
If you want to separate atheists into groups, then there are already many internal divisions to use. For example, you can separate atheism into its socially progressive wing and its neo-reactionary wing, or its New Atheist and NOMA wings, or into its politically active and politically complacent wings. However if you do that then each group will contain a mix of people: for example the social progressives number many people who are feminist allies but also includes Hemand Mehta and Aron Ra, one of whom is a condescending sexist and the other of whom is a colossal islamophobe.
3) I appreciate that you do not want to feel that “your group” carried out any of the world’s great atrocities. Nobody does. But saying that “Anti-theist regimes have racked up a vast record of atrocities in the twentieth century alone” is a little wide of the mark. One cannot accuse the Nazis of being atheists, let alone antitheists (though they were unquestionably anti-semites); and while the Soviets unquestionably had a party line of atheism, they were first and foremost a national government: laying the Holodomor at the feet of antitheism is like laying the Australian aboriginal genocide at the feet of the Church of England.
To sum up:
0) You are not required to participate in the movement merely because you decline to worship any deity.
1) Please do not make false distinctions or say “You’re one of the good ones.”
2) Please do not appropriate existing terms for this purpose. Words mean things.
3) Please do not lay the greatest crimes in history at our feet.
Thank you.
What a dickbag that fool was. I’m sure in his mind Civil Rights would have been vastly better if Rational White Men had run it. After all, they know the lived experiences of black people far better than black people do, right?
If the murderer had been brown/Muslim, he would have been declared an anti-Christian, anti-American, Islamic terrorist; but since he’s a golden-haired White Nationalist, he’s just a ‘disturbed individual’.
Of course, this had nothing to do with attacking Christians; he was a racist who simply knew that he was likely to find a group of black people in a black church at a prayer meeting. When Dr. George Tiller was assassinated at his Lutheran church in 2009 by an anti-abortion terrorist, nobody suggested it had anything to do with his being Lutheran.
Religiosity in many cases is a cultural artefact. I came from a family of by and large very smart, tolerant, literate, curious folk – who were EXTREMELY religious and belonged to a Protestant sub-branch that was literalist in interpretation. (Although they wouldn’t have liked me saying interpretation). Meanwhile I married into a family that were very smart, but atheist. I can’t say they are intolerant of religion (my in-laws go to church more than I do, but not much more though I’m also an atheist), but they sure have some friends who are having been active in the Humanist movement in London in the 70s. I still value my church experience and it is an incredibly powerful and usually beneficial social hub in many communities in the South (where I grew up).
@autosoma – those friends of Dylann will feel guilt for the rest of their lives, but I’m not sure what they were supposed to do. Go to the police? He hadn’t done anything (yet). His friend that took the gun was on probation and was worried about violating it so gave it back. He’ll regret that for the rest of his life. Were they supposed to talk to Dylann’s parents? The dad gave him the gun in the first place. Talk to the non-existent social services? Underfunded mental health services? I don’t know. Walk away altogether? That would have been best for their own sensibilities, but probably wouldn’t have made a difference. My brother’s friends had a similar experience with a roommate and they were absolutely clueless as to what to do. That guy “only” ended up killing himself in their shared house.
Dylann Roof may not have been an MRA, but he’s absorbed some of the PUA/ redpill hostility. That whole ‘rape our women’ thing is a clear sense of resentment at both the racist trope and resentment that these “other” men who are “less neotonous” and therefore “more alpha” are taking “their” women. (I know this shit because I’ve heard it from my nasty spouse.) It’s an intersectionality of hate.
If you’re both using “Antitheist” to mean what it usually means, the fundamentalist types who think “SKY WIZARD LOL” is a cutting-edge theological mic-drop… I’m on PPT’s side here, sorry. It’s hypocritical and bigoted. (Apologies if either of you are using other definitions, but that is the most common one.)
@M:
That’s just an asshole. A antitheist is one who believes that the concept of a deity is inherently a harmful one to humanity. Sadly a lot of assholes are also antitheists, and their use of the term to self-justify abusiveness is as indefensible as the rest of their behaviour.
@EJ I said (twice) that I don’t like the intolerant strands of antitheism, not that all antitheism is intolerant. That seems like a fairly boring position, actually, disliking intolerance and supporting tolerance? I didn’t use the progressive/reactionary divide for precisely the reasons you mentioned–some purportedly progressive atheists are in fact raging bigots, and there may also be tolerant people among reactionary atheists.
The reason I didn’t bring atheists into the discussion is not because of some arbitrary divide between “good” atheists who are not anti-theists and the “bad” atheists who are, but because it’s impossible to discuss atheism in any unitary way due to the fact that it’s not a belief system. Anti-theism OTOH is a belief system, as in “active opposition to theism,” so it is possible to discuss it as a whole even if it, too, is very diverse.
As I have said, repression and violence are not confined to any religion or lack thereof. It is also true that regimes with atheist and anti-theistic views were in fact responsible for widespread atrocities, as many religious regimes were and are. Hitler was not only an anti-Semite but also anti-Christianity, and while most Nazis were Christian because most Germans were Christian, their rate of religiosity was lower than in the general population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Adolf_Hitler Stalin was also an atheist who repressed churches, though like Hitler he knew to use religion when it suited his political ends. http://hollowverse.com/joseph-stalin/ See also the discussion on state atheism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism
@autosoma Agreed, yet like rugbyyogi I’m at a loss as to how this atrocity could have been prevented. Even if someone had reported him and the police had gotten a warrant (unlikely) or gotten voluntary cooperation to look around, what would they have found? Legal firearms, maybe some white supremacist literature that he has a constitutional right to own and read. No bomb materials or maps of secure installations–this plan involved little more than driving over to a church with a gun. I feel so helpless that things like this can evidently just happen and all it takes is some dickhead deciding it’s a good idea.
@sn0rkmaiden I guess the killer didn’t see the disconnect between his fevered miscegenation fantasy and his killing of six black women. I don’t think he even saw them, except as targets that were there existing while black and therefore deserved to be hurt.
@rugbiyogi… I think you actually nailed what I was trying to say… I feel that we have no guidance in society as to how to preempt or deal with this prior to any occurrence. I don’t want a police state, I don’t;t want to falsely accused someone, but when I have a concern that someone may be going down a dangerous path, how do I raise a concern?
From my own perspective, I feel I could have gone down the MRA redpill route, I accidentally found here and it changed the way I thought about things. Using that experience I’m sort if wondering aloud about what measure are in place to prevent this IR us thus a sad occurance if somebody slipping through all the cracks and then surfacing in this terrible way.
I guess I’ve just given myself an answer really. Your pretty much right I’m as clueless about what to do in those circumstances as Roof friends. Although I think I would have taken the gun to the coppers.
rugbyyogi
They were supposed to be good citizens, good members of a society. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. All they had to do was to reply to Roof’s statements with a laugh or a reproof or a “steady on there, that’s a bit much” or a “cool it, you don’t want to do that”. And do it every time. How else was he to get the message that these statements were unacceptable?
If they didn’t want to do that, they could have contacted his family and warned them he seemed to be going off the rails. They could have put messages on their own Twitter or FB pages to the effect that they were all up for real (funny) jokes but they didn’t think talking about massacres or civil war was in the least bit amusing, let alone funny. Sort of talking around him without directly tackling him but frequently mentioning as I said on ….
Of course this completely avoids the issue. His friends were as racist as he was in these interactions. They did think this sort of thing was fairly routine conversational racism. If he hadn’t done this awful thing they’d have continued on, comfortably or otherwise, participating in such conversations with him forever.