I figured out how to sum up the Edward Schlosser thing…

…for the people who are trying to comment on it right now.

(That’s this post: http://www.alexandraerin.com/2015/06/edward-schlosser-is-a-liberal-professor-and-his-students-terrify-him/, for reference.)

The short version of what’s wrong is that Schlosser wants to talk about the toxic call-out culture that he says affects his teaching career. To do it, he held up a woman on Twitter who was saying nothing about him in particular or any single specific identifiable human being and said that she, identified by name and linked to, is the problem.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Why is it an example of toxic call-out culture that creates an aura of silence and fear for her to call out the presence of white patriarchal bias in a lot of what gets labeled”scientific thought”, but it’s not an example of toxic call-out culture for him to hold her up, call her specifically by name, and say, specifically, that she’s causing this problem?

There’s a serious double-standard at work here, and I am not going to be entertaining comments on this or the previous post from people who refuse to acknowledge it. You want your comment to be approved instead of deleted, you need to explain why you think what he did was cool and in no way hypocritical, and it needs to make sense.

Also, if anyone else wants to say that I’m playing identity politics, then you need to articulate a cogent reason why this disparity exists. Because I didn’t even say that it’s racism or sexism! I didn’t! I just pointed out what happened.

So if you’re looking at that and are jumping straight to “YOU ARE JUST PLAYING IDENTITY POLITICS! EVERYTHING IS SEXISM AND RACISM WITH YOU PEOPLE!”… ask yourself why. Ask yourself how you got there, because I didn’t lead you there. You found yourself there on your own.

You looked at what was happening, and you saw something that made you think about sexism and racism… right before you went foaming at the mouth to scream that it wasn’t.

How’d that happen, do you think?