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PostPosted: Fri Mar 04, 2016 6:23 pm 
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Racism and sexism are alive and well, just ask Scaachi Koul

Koul, a rising voice on racism and sexism and a once-formidable Twitter presence, was ridiculed for her tone (“ugh, men” she tweeted).

There is a limit to last wishes beyond the grave.
Which is too bad for Dr. Victor Priebe of Windsor, Ont., a radiologist who loved photography and public libraries, but apparently didn’t care for non-white people or lesbians.
Priebe, who died Jan. 1 at 83, set up two science bursaries in his will, which is replete with blatant hatred and which an Ontario judge has struck down because it is “white supremacist, homophobic and misogynistic.”
The will stipulated one bursary for “Caucasian (white), male, single, heterosexual students” who are “not afraid of hard manual work in their selection of summer employment,” and another one to benefit a “hard-working, single Caucasian white girl who is not feminist or lesbian.”
In her ruling, the National Post reported, the judge relied on a 1938 Supreme Court decision, which allowed the overturning of wills that are offensive to public standards (in this case, the Ontario Human Rights Code).
Priebe’s will is certainly offensive, and absurdly, laughably, quaintly out of date.
Yet we still needed, upon Harper Lee’s death last Friday, to celebrate her novel To Kill A Mockingbird as a perpetually relevant tool to grapple with persistent discrimination, a map for “how to go forward after a moment of blatant injustice,” in the words of one New York Times commenter.
White supremacy and sexism may be legally out of date, but whiteness, maleness, power and privilege are still deeply entwined in the West. And while it’s easy to laugh at an old man’s will (what’s with all the “hard-working” stuff?), some are not so keen to actively rebalance the inequality with which it’s imbued.
Take the crowd that attacked Buzzfeed’s Scaachi Koul — and forced her off Twitter — after she sent a call out for freelancers who were non-white and non-male. Koul, a rising voice on racism and sexism and a once-formidable Twitter presence, was ridiculed for her tone (“ugh, men” she tweeted). Maclean’s Scott Gilmore charged her, ridiculously, with labour-rights violations. She got the predictable rape threats. She made the obvious counter-argument: “Giving ignored voices preferential treatment is not racism against white people. It is an attempt to fix all of history,” she tweeted before suspending her account.
This is where we are: An imagined meritocracy blankets our lopsided press, business elite and politics, and pointing that out gets you harassed. Priebe might not be getting what he wanted, but his would-be beneficiaries continue to do just fine without him.

Mon Feb 22, 2016, Metro news, Rosemary Westwood

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... “White supremacy and sexism may be legally out of date, but whiteness, maleness, power and privilege are still deeply entwined in the West … Take the crowd that attacked Buzzfeed’s Scaachi Koul — and forced her off Twitter — after she sent a call out for freelancers who were non-white and non-male … ‘Giving ignored voices preferential treatment is not racism against white people. It is an attempt to fix all of history,’ she tweeted before suspending her account.” ...

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MY VIEW:

Not that long ago my nephew and the other boys in his Grade 5 class experienced contemporary fisogynism through their female teacher. Without a single exception she was only interested in the raised arms of female students who she’d always duly select to answer her lessons-related questions to the ‘entire class’. “I don’t know why she did it, [but] she just did,” he sincerely related to me (I say ‘sincerely’ because of his total lack of interest in and familiarity with gender politics). As for why apparently no formal complaint was made by the parents of his fellow male students regarding that teacher’s blatant unethical gender bias, my nephew’s reply was a shrug — and an apathetic one at that; a shrug that gave me concern as to how much truly equal treatment, if any, to which he and his young male peers in that class had grown to actually feel they had a legitimate human right. Without doubt, the ideological pendulum involving the likely many feminist female teachers’ distorted sense of gender social justice had/has but swung from one de-constructive extreme to the other.
“[T]o fix all of history” at the expense of young boys who didn’t even exist during the centuries of white-male privilege, is immoral at best.


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