A number of “conservative” pundits, including Candace Owens, have commented on the Sept. 21 screed of Brittney Cooper, a Black tenured professor of Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Given the ugliness of her rant, the title of her 2018 book “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers her Superpower” is highly ironic. But then the very concept of “irony” would seem to be lost on a political class claiming to occupy the intellectual highroad while graphically displaying its intellectual bankruptcy seven days a week.
Cooper engages in a number of gross generalizations about White people that are the very definition of “racism.” Claiming we are all “villains,” asserting that our lust for power quite naturally led to the scourge of Colonialism to which we alone throughout history have been addicted, she concludes “We gotta take these mother f…ers out.” Suggesting that the Non-White world was historically devoid of tyrannical, oppressive, racist regimes, she is naturally a staunch supporter of Critical Race Theory.
But quite aside from the psychopathic hatred by which she seems to be motivated, her version of History is factually, demonstrably, egregiously, indeed criminally dishonest! Candace Owens did a piece a few weeks ago, no doubt still available, outlining the history of Slavery, a practice which frequently involved Black Africans selling their own people into servitude. It was the British in the early 19th Century who were the first on the planet to make a concerted effort to end the practice. And of course the Americans would ultimately fight a devastating Civil War to the same end. I am not idealizing either the Brits or the Americans or indeed Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous, but the version of the past promulgated by Brittney Cooper which is but a latter day version Marcuse’s narrative that White Western Man is the greatest villain of all time, is a brazen lie. Throughout history, amongst the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Indigenous of the Americas, tyranny, conquest, slavery, etc. are self-evident facts, frequently, I must point out, practiced with far greater savagery than that typically exhibited by Western European Man.
The truths of History, i.e., the truths of human behavior, are complex and generally defy simplistic explanation. But for Leftist Ideologues such as Brittney Cooper, all complexity disappears, submitted to the tyranny of their personal biases. It is unconscionable that a Western education should expose our young to ranting demagogues such as she.