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.
@PPT
Again, that was not me. That time it was WWTH.
I do think this particular black church makes the point regardless. Charleston is after all referred to as “The Holy City” because it’s crammed to the gunwales with churches.
And the nasty little fuck didn’t live next door to this church. How many churches did he need to drive past to get to this one? How far did he drive to get to this church? How much of a coincidence is it that the pastor at this church was also a senator in the state government? Was it also a coincidence that that man was a leading figure in the protests against a police shooting and was the instigator of legislation to require police to wear body cameras?
It’s entirely possible that this was all coincidence (though I don’t know how far he had to drive), though the coincidences stacking up like this start to look less and less like coincidences.
These guys are insane, have a listen to this discussion.
But isn’t there a social factor here that makes it a self-fulfilling thing? People expect a church to be sacred ground where this sort of thing doesn’t happen. Even if that’s a totally arbitrary, meaningless belief, it exists, and Roof deliberately chose a church because that belief exists in order to send the message that nothing is off limits and nowhere is safe. Which does, IMO, make this worse than if it happened at a bowling alley.
According to MSNBC (Chris Hayes’ show, I think, if not it was Rachel Maddow) he had to drive around a hundred miles to get to that particular church.
Thanks, Dwight.
I’ve stepped in it a time or ten myself. It’s a process.
Anyway, have a welcome package.
https://artistryforfeminismandkittens.wordpress.com/the-official-man-boobz-complimentary-welcome-package/
mildlymagnificent beat me to the “he drove past dozens of churches, so fuck the “war on religion” idiots.
and for the record, I’m a gnu atheist… “We’re open source”
POM, true on all points. It was the content, not the way it was presented that was the problem. Still, an internet apology is such a rare beast that I’m inclined to take it until such time as the commenter shows out again in the same manner. I’m just glad he stopped digging.
I’m feeling hopeful today because our neighbor’s grandson just took home the kitten. I’m clinging to little things. That does not mean you have to or should. It’s just me today.
No, but religion is privileged and nontheist voices are unheard in any mainstream media or political setting, It would help if we stopped silencing atheists. If we’re allowed to talk about how whites, men, the wealthy etc. are not just the privileged classes but the oppressor classes, why aren’t we talking about Christian supremacy the same way? All I’m saying is that we should be able to discuss these issues and atheists should be welcome at the table.
The social justice oriented atheists are so eager to distance themselves from the Dawkins/Harris fanboys that they all too frequently try to prove their progressive creds by throwing atheists in general under the bus and going out of their way to never, ever talk about how religion as a system can do harm. Anyone who dares bring it up is either met with #notallChristians or assumptions that we think religion is the sole root cause of evil and the world would be a utopia without it.
This concedes the moral high ground to the religious right because it reinforces the notion that their voices matter and their voices are the default and questioning Christian privilege is always wrong (and soooo mean). I don’t understand why Christians specifically or people of faith in general get a free pass, even from many atheists and agnostics and don’t have to hear anything that makes them uncomfortable or challenges their privilege.
If we can speak freely without be assuming to be hateful of religious people unless we actually say something hateful, it the mainstream media started inviting atheists to be part of the conversation and if American politicians stopped constantly saying “God bless America*” in every speech, it would go a long way towards challenging Christian supremacy without stepping on the rights of individual Christians to practice their faith. It’s not about outlawing proselytizing, it’s about stigmatizing proselytizing in inappropriate settings (like the government).
I don’t know if politicians do this in other countries, but they do here all the time and it absolutely drives me up the wall. Even Democrats are always doing it, even though they know perfectly well that not all their supporters believe in God and atheists/agnostics/spiritual but not religious people make a significant percentage of their base. One of the only politicians here who even acknowledges nontheists when discussing the diversity of viewpoints on religion in the US is Keith Ellison who is awesome and I’m proud to say is my congressperson.
At my last encounter with Twisty, she adhered to the doctrine that all heterosexual intercourse is rape, on the grounds that no woman can meaningfully consent to sex in Western culture any more than enslaved black women could meaningfully consent to sex with their white masters.
This argument has many flaws, and is often held up as an example of what typical feminists believe (although I rarely see Twisty’s name attached to it, usually it’s Dworkin). I wouldn’t say that it would invalidate feminism even if it were mainstream, but it is really far outside the mainstream and offensive on many levels.
@EJ
Doesn’t that entail interfering in the family relationship, not to mention religious liberty? I had my differences with my parents on religion, but somehow I don’t think intervention by a well-meaning third party (including government) would have Improved things.
Also I’ve seen a study saying religious groups are often important sources of community and support for disadvantaged groups. I know I would have serious concerns about any effort to undermine the teaching of religion in, say, black communities, since that would almost certainly lessen community cohesion and reduce social resources including political mobilization capacity.
Also, thanks for the clarification of the New Atheist scene and the blog rec!
@PoM Thanks, sorry for the confusion.
@ policy,
By not using the abelist words at all. That wasn’t even my point at all. [I said it was stupid].
I’m a recovered alcoholic with PTSD from severe abuse in childhood, I understand mental illness from an extremely personal viewpoint. [Look, I did say it was stupid]
By saying: I wish we could figure out what makes him [the shooter] different. There are lots of people out there who wear racist clothing, make racist jokes, who have guns, even have fantasies about murder. While those are certainly less than ideal behaviors, it’s a giant step from that to actually carrying out those fantasies.
What makes them different? What makes them take that step? Can we figure it out and stop the shootings? I know the ideal is a society where the racism doesn’t exist, but that’s not where we live today. We could save so many lives if we knew.
Yeah, that has very little to do with my first post. The first post should have been a rough draft that I looked at and went ” That’s not going to fly” and re-written. I didn’t do that and I am sorry.
@PussyPowerTantrum:
1) Yes it does, but many things entail interfering in familial relationships. If someone brings their children up to hate black people then we would think nothing of interfering; similarly, if someone brings up their children to believe in a deity who says you must hate gays and women, we would think nothing of interfering.
2) Children have religious liberty too. They are not the property of their parents, and have the right to choose their own religion. Since a child cannot truly make choices independently of their parents, it means that having a parent teach them religion as they grow up is an abuse of parental authority to privilege a particular religion over all others. As such, a child should not be taught religion by their parents.
On the other hand, when that child grows up, they may choose to join their parents’ religion or any other, and that’s fine.
3) Nobody has a religious liberty to proselytise. They have the liberty to teach those who come to them freely, and they have the responsibility to represent themselves truthfully and impartially to those shopping around in the marketplace of ideas, but that’s as far as it goes. If you’re a Christian, you have no more right to spread that belief than I have the right to spread my belief in Keynesianism or that South Africa will win the rugby.
@WWTH Those all seem like reasonable positions to me. But are atheists really so gagged in the States? It seems to me just about every shenanigan from the religious right (and there are legion) is met by pushback, including from atheists. Or maybe that’s just a function of the blogs I hang out on.
Politicians in my country don’t throw the big G around, though they do the usual pandering to religious groups. I also see plenty of hostility toward and much criticism of religion alongside lots of religious fervor, so I guess I’ve never felt particularly marginalized for being atheist / agnostic.
Congressperson envy! Well, Eleanor Norton Holmes (from my last address in the States) is plenty awesome, too, but she doesn’t get to vote. 🙁
EJ: You are pushing a really profoundly creepy type of social engineering here, and I say that not so much as a religious person but as a student of history. Seriously, you sound like Stalin right now. I mean, a lot like Stalin.
Dwight,
Don’t start digging. The answer you don’t want to hear is that he is not unlike us. Nothing makes him different. He made a choice just like the people he told about his plan made a choice. Just like you have the choice to stop trying to other him. A culture of violence and bigotry produces violent bigots. Excuse the metaphor coming from an atheist, but there but for the grace of God go we.
TRIGGER WARNING LYNCHING AND UTTERLY FUCKED UP RACISM
When my grandfather was 5 his mama packed the family a picnic lunch and took all the kids off to see the last lynching of a black man in Daviess Co. Kentucky. It was a celebratory, family affair, much like a church homecoming. It was held in broad daylight and was not actually done in secret at all, though it was illegal. None of those people we anything other than Bible believing, flag waving, fine upstanding members of society.
When MLK Jr. was assassinated my father ran to tell his dad and do you know what my grandfather said in reply? “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer man.”
My grandfather gives money to charity. He goes to church every Sunday. He goes bowling and plays golf with my uncle. Sure, he’s a sexist and was a woman beater back in the day, but he doesn’t see that as wrong. He loved his wife and he loves me. He has black friends that he respects. He just doesn’t think they are ‘N” words like Oprah who “hate white people”. When I ask him if he’d vote for Bill Clinton in the 90’s, even though my grandfather is or was a conservative Democrat he responded, “I’d rather be a hare-lipped n*gger than vote Republican”. I never asked him if he voted for President Obama.
I guarantee you that all over the US today there are white people commiserating with this murderer and telling each other that black folks somehow brought this on themselves. They are telling their children that. They are saying it in schools, churches and workplaces.
Shit, yesterday at the DMV I heard people talking about voting for Trump. What’s wrong with those people? They all choose to watch Fox. Why? They live in a fucked up culture where racism and violence are good and equality and tolerance are scary and bad. They like to have those values validated and strengthened.
He’s just one of them who decided to act instead of talk.
Yes.
re: Anna K: That’s what it was! Tolstoy.
I remembered that something Russian said something about unhappy families being X and happy families being Y was around somewhere, but I couldn’t remember where…or, er, which were supposed to be all alike and which were all different.
All of my knowledge of Russian lit has been, I’ll admit, absorbed through cultural osmosis.
And back on the misogyny tip, apparently now women are supposed to please their therapist’s boners too.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com//2015/06/12/the-dowdy-patient/
For fuck’s sake.
@EJ
What would that interference look like? Are the parents given a gag order? Should the children be taken away? And what if the religious teaching is not bigoted, just religious? Should parents be forbidden from discussing something that matters deeply to them with their children, or including them in community activities–and if so, why stop with religion? Why not, say, libertarianism–or atheism for that matter? It seems to me if children should not be brainwashed to make up their minds about religion, they also shouldn’t be taught religion is inherently harmful so they can make up their own minds later.
Also I notice you didn’t address my other point about disadvantaged groups and religious community. Would you be okay with, say, Mother Emanuel church being forced to discontinue Sunday school?
@berdache
Nothing makes them “different.” They aren’t different.
Believe me, I know how different brain states can produce different mind states. I have bipolar, and I’ve been on around a dozen different medication regimens. I’ve had ADD from medication. I’ve had depression from medication. I’ve been haunted by ghosts brought on by medication. I’ve had amazing bursts of creativity and energy from bipolar. I’ve had suicidal ideation from bipolar. I’ve had episodes where I literally could not tolerate the sound of a human voice and all spoken words felt like someone was playing the violin on raw nerves.
None of these things made me a racist or a murderer. None of them changed my core personality. I can be snippy and short-tempered when I’m in certain phases, but I know it’s wrong to take that out on other people and I know that it’s my responsibility to take steps so that doesn’t happen.
The reason I know it’s wrong is because I live in a culture that doesn’t tolerate that shit. The reason most white people know racism is wrong is because we live in a culture that (officially) doesn’t tolerate it. Back in the 1800s, when all of white society thought racism was fine, the majority of white people went along with that and thought racism was fine. Back during Jim Crow, when all of Southern white society thought lynching was fine, the majority of white Southerners went along with that and didn’t think twice about lynching.
Those people weren’t mentally ill. They weren’t reacting to brain states. They were reacting to a culture that told them that racism and violence and racist violence were A-OK. Nothing made them different from you, except that you don’t live in that culture.
Re: the issue of the church in this shooting, it is a huge deal to the black community that this happened in a church, and in THAT church. The history is deep and very meaningful even now. It is also the center of many black families social lives, I think it’s fair to say that is especially true in the south. Susie Jackson was 87 and still sang in the choir.
I am not a person of faith myself, I claim no allegiance. But in this case the cultural and historic truth of these victims is very important to their community and they are who matter.
What I always found funny about Faux News’ “War on Christmas”, is that 99.9% of their cherished Christmas traditions are rooted in Pagan traditions.
Everything from Santa Claus to the day itself was assimilated from a pagan religion of some kind, which I think is mostly due to the mass conversions of pagans during Christianity’s infancy.
So if Faux News and their fellow Right-Wingers want to put the “Christ back in Christmas”, they should celebrate it in the fall, and sit around praying with no presents, no tree, no mistletoe, no Santa (Who was based off a Turkish saint, and thus isn’t white, so take that Meghan Kelly!), nothing.
And then the rest of us can enjoy our holidays without privileged Christian white folk whining every goddamned year about how society is eroding because someone on the street told them “Happy Holidays” as a way to acknowledge that there’s more than one holiday that happens around their precious Christmas, and that person on the street doesn’t know what holiday they celebrate.
Because accepting that cishet Christian white folks aren’t the only people in the world (let alone in the United States) is heralding Armageddon apparently.
Pussypowertantrum,
Yes, the pushback against atheists can be that bad. Though it depends on where you live. The US is very different from state to state and even county to county.
I agree with EJ. Telling kids they’ll only go to heaven instead of hell if they believe in a magical being isn’t fair to those kids. To my mind the only difference between God and the Easter Bunny is that the kids won’t grow up trained carefully from the cradle onward to be afraid of losing faith in the magical bunny for fear of damnation. There is a great deal of emotional manipulation that goes into raising kids to be theists. Some of it is cruel.
I also don’t think it is fair for missionaries to go disrupt established cultures and push their beliefs on indigenous people. It’s usually done with fear-mongering and things like food, education, medicine and other badly needed aid being used to “persuade” people. The effects can be devastating. Look what missionaries did to Uganda.
Calling me “like Stalin” is incorrect and just plain mean. Stalin also wore shoes, as do I. That doesn’t make me anything like a mass murdering shithead.
Yes. Denying a group representation is effectively gagging them.
When there’s a public discussion of moral and values atheist voices are not allowed at the table in the mainstream media or politics.
There are very few politicians who are openly atheist and if you don’t say “God bless America” in a political speech, you might as well be a terrorist.
There are communities in which it is extremely difficult to come out as an atheist. Some never do. This might explain why atheists are so often strident on the internet. Not everyone can be safely open in their meatspace communities so the internet is the only safe space for them.
In movies and TV atheists are either depicted as broken men who lost their faith because of a tragedy (Nicholas Cage in The Knowing, Mel Gibson in Signs, Shemar Moore in Criminal Minds) or socially inept people who don’t experience the normal full range of human emotion (Emily Deschanel in Bones, Jim Parsons in Big Bang Theory). I’m using the actors instead of the characters because I don’t remember the names of Nick Cage and Mel Gibson’s characters. They’re never well adjusted people who just happen to not believe in any supernatural deities.
Representation matters.
I live in a progressive city and neither of my parents are all that religious so I haven’t experienced anything worse than the usual negative stereotyping of atheists either. But other people have. Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.