Thread by @wesyang

The publication of Nazi-like ideas in respectable academic publication is a necessary but not sufficient condition for actual genocide.

Still worth nothing the former when it happens....

Ideally neither condition is ever met. The meeting of the necessary condition should be regarded with due alarm and should raise questions about the antecedent moral and intellectual failures that enabled it

The attitude of indulgence toward dehumanizing rhetoric toward some categories of person, and the hesitancy to condemn such rhetoric forthrightly for fear of being seen to be on the “wrong side” of what is in fact a clear cut question both expose deep pathologies

This unbalanced approach is actual policy on many platforms — but with regard to academic speech, where the relevant standard is actual merit rather than mere avoidance of harm, the indulgence of dehumanization and the hesitancy to call it out is perhaps even stronger

https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1277706052054716417

"A malignant, parasite-like condition" "Parasitic Whiteness readers its hosts' appetites, voracious, insatiable and perverse..." "these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate..." "There is not yet a permanent cure..." journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

There does seem to be a jauntiness to its invocation of Nazi-like tropes; you'll also note that the condition is one which "white" people have a particular susceptibility" -- meaning its not a biologically grounded condition, which serves as his rhetorical escape hatch

And also leaves open the possibility of accusing non-white people who disagreeing with him of exhibiting the condition.

The right response to this is not "lol another Sokal Hoax"; nor is it "this won't make things better for the fight against racism"; nor is it "this is a gift to the far right."

No indulgence of Nazi-like rhetoric in academic journals; it is intellectually and morally unworthy

"Permanent cure" is for sure deliberately, self-consciously a reference to a predecessor term that could in fact be another way of rendering the original German into English

It's not so much that there's one (white, male) loon out there who thinks its clever and funny to traffic in Nazi-like ideas about whites. It's that the article survived peer review and the whole complex of assumptions that enable to it appear.

https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1403343686075834376?s=20

Hitlerian rhetoric: not even once, not for any reason, no matter whom it targets, or who is doing the target, is an easy rule that all institutions should be able to follow

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