Proxy Wars: Buddy, Can I Borrow Some Guilt?

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Because white privilege.

It’s that time of the year when young cisgendered heteronormative oppressors’ thoughts turn to football. And that means that BIPOC folk will again experience the cruel oppression of the name Washington Redskins. Washington offends because the first president was a slave holder, and Redskins because it tokenizes and minoritizes the native peoples of North America. Or something. Hey, new coach Ron Rivera, who’s not indigenous, thinks there will be a new name by September.

Actually, 99 percent of Americans are cool with George (in spite of the wooden teeth), and an alarming number of native Americans (90 percent) are good with the name Redskins, too. The largest response in a 2019 Washington Post poll said that the word “proud” comes to mind first when hearing the supposedly toxic handle for the NFL club representing the nation’s capital. So who’s feeling outraged?

We described this cognitive dissonance back in October of 2016  (Whose Harm? Whose Foul? The Confusing War Against Native Indian Sports Nicknames). Guilt-ridden white liberals feeling more outrage than those directly affected by the name. Then things calmed down.

Till Donald Trump. The current White House place holder has suggested he sees nothing wrong with the name Redskins. As if to reinforce his hegemonic reification Trump made an incrementalist speech on July 3 in front of Mount Rushmore, which everyone knows is a sacred place that was cruelly colonized after thousands of years of peaceful habitation by the Sioux.

(Historical digression: In the revolutionary year of 1776, in bloody conflict, the Lakota Sioux defeated the Cheyenne— who had earlier taken the Black Hills from the Kiowa after a lengthy war. From around 1100 AD, the Black Hills was held by Arikara, Crow, Pawnee, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Lakota, and then the U.S.)

Cue #TDS outrage. Under Trump, a hobby farm of intellectual torment known as critical race theory has sprung up to explain just how awful he, America, white people and white culture are. For his part Trump happily gives his pursuers more than enough material for them to problematize— ie. interpret in the worst possible light.

As such, problematizing has become the fashion. As our Twitter guide (and new hero), Holly Queen of Python @hollymathnerd puckishly explains, “problematizing language is a skill White people can easily learn and use to show themselves as understanding SocJus issues and giving them a comfortable way to perform allyship, preventing them from the real work of anti-racism.”

Now anything can be problematized. A few examples from Holly. Problematize Cocoa Puffs:

“Ableist, racist, homophobic. ‘Cuckoo’ is an ableist slur against the mentally ill, paired with a breakfast food that is dark and turns the milk dark, stoking White people's implicit fears of being tainted by the presence of POC. "Puff" reminiscent of "pouf," evoking homophobia.”

See? Now do ice cream:

“Regarded as a desirable treat and a "sweet" thing, yet it's cold. You know where it isn't cold? Africa, that's where. The reification of implicit bias and racism speaks for itself.”

Let’s do dust:

“Spoken like someone who has never watched a child allergic to dust struggle and gasp for breath. You probably have a POC (person of colour) come and clear your house of dust twice a week so you don’t have to think about it, don’t you? Check your privilege.”

One more. Do Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar:

“Of course you would name that book. So few men can name even one woman writer, so of course it’s the one who is completely fucking miserable and unhappy all her life. That’s what society does to women. Erases and only remembers the misery. Do better, misogynist.”

You get the idea. The torrent of this psycho babble refined in colleges and #antifa branch plants hasn’t cowed Trump yet but has helped intimidate the corporate jellyfish who pretend that playing along against reactionary TrumpWorld will buy them some peace. Instead they’re now undergoing fun internal sessions on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.”

Occasionally, problematizing strays from Trump to Leftish internecine skirmishes within the movement. Currently, ardent feminist J.K. Rowling is being hoist by her own petard for suggesting— brace yourself— that men cannot have babies. Heresy. This is seen as aggression agains the trans community which, when not fighting binary labels, is re-casting the genome to suit its own specs.

Rowling’s point is self serving— if gender has no meaning then there are no women and, therefore, no feminism, and therefore no one to protect its own interests in aborting babies (which, ironically, trans people want). It’s been a mean, custard-throwing #cancelculture meltdown of the knowledge industry (pop. Not You). 

With Rowling getting pilloried by the Wokeness, she and 150 other lit luminaries have signed a letter to The Atlantic magazine decrying, in the salad-tossing words of activist Yasha Mounck, "The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.”

Well okay, it’s a free society. Or used to be. Then a few of the signatories caught heat for supporting the transphobic author of Harry Potter. Sooner than you could say Hogwarts, the bailing began. “@JennyBoylan I did not know who else had signed that letter.  I thought I was endorsing a well meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming.  I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company.” 

On Tuesday, another signatory, the historian Kerri K. Greenidge, tweeted “I do not endorse this @Harpers letter,” and said she was in touch with the magazine about a retraction. Buh-bye. Seems that anyone wearing a dress must be beyond criticism.

Uh, no, says Holly. Dresses are “Tools of patriarchy used to oppress transgender people. Transboys are traumatized by parents who try to make them wear them; transwomen feel pressure to wear them to better pass; they are used in signs everywhere to reinforce the oppression of binary transphobic bathrooms. Sick!”

Feel free to let yourself and your privilege out the door. 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his next book Personal Account with Tony Comper will be available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca this fall.