The person, one Mr Cuntis Yarvin, at the centre of the #lamdaconf debacle performed an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. One of his defenders on Twitter referenced this response from the AMA as proof that he was not racist.
I appreciate that giving more commentary space to this situation provides the oxygen that our protagonist craves. On the other hand I feel like this is sufficiently important to our community to stand up and defend those people that this person seeks to diminish and damage.
So, with that and a deep breath, let's take this response bit by bit and see whether it works out as a defence by the protagonist as evidence of his lack of racism.
Amusingly, my "one offensive comment" was actually me repeating something my wife (not at all a 'shitlady') learned in her MFA program at SF State (not at all a Hitler Youth academy). (This is the observation that the conquistadors began the slave trade with Africa because Native Americans didn't thrive as slaves, which is not at all controversial history.) I figured that this wasn't exactly the sort of thing I'd say, but coming from her it was probably okay.
So we start with him throwing his wife under the bus. I cannot judge whether or not she's not a "shitlady" but wedlock to this guy has some degree of shit attached to it.
The central claim, repeated here, is that the slave trade began with Africa because Native Americans didn't thrive as slaves.
Are we sure that this is not controversial history? On whose authority is that made other than perhaps his own?
The controversy is clear: by inference Africans did thrive as slaves. The word thrive is explosive in this context. Thrive, according to Merriam Webster means "to grow or develop successfully : to flourish or succeed". How can any race thrive as slaves. Slavery sets deliberate and harsh limits on growth and success.
On this evidence his wife in fact does come over as a 'shitlady'. Likewise he, both for throwing her under the bus and worse, for not being able or willing to make the smallest change to the wording - despite his ever so slight distancing - is most certainly a 'shitman'.
Perhaps oddly, if anything I thought of this as a negative observation about Native Americans (I probably wouldn't do super well in the sugarcane fields either).
He goes on. Now he's not going to do so well in the sugarcane fields. So he's much more like the Native Americans than the Africans. The self-deprecation is meant to be endearing and detract from his central racist observation: that he, as an individual can represent his race. But individuals - like himself, no matter how kitten-weak - do not represent an entire race. Obversely an entire race cannot be summed up so glibly.
Similarly, if I said that Greek Jews were more likely to survive in Auschwitz than Western European Jews (which is also true), this would strike me as a positive comment on the toughness of Greek Jews, not an opinion that they should be sent to the ovens first.
What a context - the Nazi gas ovens! It's breathtaking in itself that he's prepared to go there but then comes the segmentation: He claims as true that one group of Jews was more likely to survive than another. This self-evidently racist assertion is tossed in so casually. I wonder if the 'truth' of this comes from holocaust survivors or a narrow, revisionist statistician. Either way, to divide Jews into who is most and least likely to survive the gas ovens is generally offensive. I cannot imagine the context in which it would be taken as a compliment by a Greek Jew survivor.
Somehow, which shouldn't have surprised me, this commonplace historical observation metamorphosed into "everyone of African descent is best suited to cutting sugarcane for the Noble White Man." I don't have a problem with "rescinding" that, since I never said it.
This is not an apology. He retains his assertion that the observation is commonplace. He only "rescinds" a mocking version of the metamorphosis. Conversely, the fabric of his defence is made of racist and offensive presuppositions woven into attempts at polite and reasonable claims and assertions.
This case needed some clear evidence that the racist as the centre of this controversy remains stoical and unrepentant. I am glad that he has produced it himself.
Hey @adonaac, you were right: I don't care for your unpersuasive defence. I took him at his words rather than a simpering reinterpretation.