I just discovered that a tenured professor at Mt. Alison University in Sackville, New Brunswick has been suspended without pay after student protests caused by her saying on her personal web site that Black Lives Matter was a radical movement. Never mind that in her mind that was not pejorative, the students objected and the university suspended her.
No matter the source of external or internal funding, no matter any guilt feeling we may have for the sins of earlier generations (in Canada or elsewhere), no matter the apparent beauty of the cause… the whole BLM movement is not as innocent as you may want to think.
Thus, Dearest New Brunswick along with all its esteemed politicians, PLEASE be mindful of the following:
Bambi urges you not to fall into the trap of caving in to BLM ‘s demands, as they will keep asking for more and more (e.g., see what happened in other cities in Canada). Indeed, this movement seems to function like any other radical group, including Islamism (Bambi did not say the Muslim religion, mind you, and she knows what she is talking about here). Groups like BLM usually intimidate to get what they want. They infiltrate existing entities/organizations, and… brains! They do not stop. They just push and push. Even if at times they may deceive you by hiding their real agenda, they do not hesitate to use means that you and Bambi would never resort to.
This is why, please do not let Black Lives Matter (BLM) do to NB what Islamists have done to Bambi’s birth country and to its neighbourhood… or what they do to us in the Western’s world, including Canada.
So she not only uses the word ‘radical’ pejoratively, she is clearly strongly opposed to the whole BLM movement itself.
I went ahead and typed “radical” into the search to try and find the article on her site. And if the top article I found is the one in question, your characterization of it is not accurate.
The title alone makes it clear she is using the term “radicalized” in a negative sense, but that’s not the issue I have with it.
No, it is an article about how the alt-right isn’t actually white supremacist, and pushes the idea that calling it such is the same as racism. It is ignoring the actual history of the alt-right movement, which was in fact founded by white supremacists who chose a more palatable label.
She flat out says the people who label the alt-right in this way are part of a cult. She refers to the information above as propaganda and delusion. She says it’s a form of fundamentalism in the name of “justice or anti-fascism or anti ’ colonialism’”, which she views as an “intellectual tragedy.” And she compares the whole thing to how people will overgeneralize Islam to be violent because of its radicals.
She also acts as if talking about colonialism and the alt-right condemns all New Brunswick politicians, when it would only do so for, you know, the ones who identify as alt-right or ignore the harms of colonialism.
As a professor, she seems rather uninformed about why people see colonialism as a bad thing these days—that we see it as people from one country subjugating another country and its people.
This whole thing where you try to equate fighting bigotry with being bigots is just an utterly common type of pro-bigotry apologia that I’m not remotely surprised by the reaction. It’s not like her article isn’t quite disparaging in its tone.
Edit: I see @GreenWyvern searched the other way, for BLM, and found a lot more.
Yes, as a matter of fact I do. Originally a refusenik was someone the state refused to allow to emigrate. Usually ‘undesirables’ like Jews, but could be any other persecuted group or individual.
Later, it became used to describe people who generally didn’t go along with the Soviet plan (or plans in other states sometimes). The state would claim they were lawbreakers, but many ‘refuseniks’ were just people who resisted following the State’s orders and plans. Failure to comply or follow the group can get you labeled a ‘refusenik’, whether you are Jewish or not.
The colloquial use of the word doesn’t have much to do with its original meaning.
My only comment is that for a tenured professor she does a terrible job of explaining what her point is. Having read her piece, I really have no idea what she thinks is the parallel between BLM and Islamist extremism, or what she imagines BLM’s ultimate nefarious agenda to be.
She’s clearly a dumbass, based both on the content of her diatribe and her failure to see the results of publishing it. This school has a real problem if she is representative of it’s faculty.
Given its history as it applies to soviet Jews, and some articles written about Jews not supporting BLM (a group that is generally extremely supportive, but stereotyped to not be) I think it’s an unfortunate use in this example, but I’ll move on.
Indeed. Even if there are theoretical principles of academic freedom of expression that might in principle be relevant here, it would be challenging for anyone to make a stand behind someone who doesn’t appear to have the intellectual qualifications to be in the job in the first place.
So… she should have known that airing a bad opinion would get her in trouble, so speaking out shows she’s dumb and therefore dhouldn’t be employed?
Why not go a step further? In the Soviet Union, failure to agree with the precepts of Communism could get you thrown into a mental hospital on the grounds that Communism is so obviously correct that anyone who disagrees with it must have mental issues.
Or maybe she should just be made to walk the streets in shame with a dunce cap on her head while people in colorful uniforms march behind and heap scorn on her. That’s probably closer to where we are at, except we do the shaming online now.
Like I’ve said before, anti-woke is the new witch or the new blasphemer. It doesn’t matter what she believes. What matters is she challenged the tool that folks are using to manipulate the masses and that’s heresy.