Shelly Garland affair & white male privilege

[LadyJuno]

I’m originally South African (and a poc) and have been following this very interesting ‘shelley garland’ affair back in SA. I don’t know if anyone else has heard of it here?

Basically a few weeks back Huffington Post SA chose to publish an opinion blog by someone called Shelley Garland, suggesting that for the sake of social progress, white men should be banned from voting or holding public office. Not forever, just for 20-30 years so the huge gender gap could be dealt with in a more radical manner.

As suspected, the piece got attacked by white male trolls, desperate to cling on to their white male privilege. The editor, a very talented young Indian woman called Verashni Pillay, vigorously defended the piece, and pointed out that much of the blog was standard feminist theory.

It turns out Shelley Garland did not exist but was a white man who wrote the piece under the name and sent it to HuffPost for consideration. He says his aim was to show that HuffPost would print a discriminatory piece so long as that discrimination was targeted at white men.

The ombudsman (a white male) forced HuffPost to apologise and deemed the article calling for white male disenfranchisement ‘hate speech.’ Verashni sadly resigned. A great loss, she’s very talented and a strong feminist advocate.

Many in South Africa have suggested that to call this ‘hate speech’ was entirely wrong and potentially damaging to press freedom. That to call for white male disenfranchisement may by unpalatable to some or even most, but it is not hateful and should not be a censored topic.

What do you all think?

Off the cuff reaction: systematically disenfranchising any group is morally wrong, but an op-ed piece inviting us to think through the consequences of something which is obviously never going to happen in real life could be a way of shifting the overton window in a useful sense, so in no way counts as hate speech.

There's also the whole issue of punching up versus punching down - realistically white men are never really going to be disenfranchised, have no history of being disenfranchised simply and solely because of being white and male (as opposed to, say, a subset of them being disenfranchised because they weren't property owners).

Having said that, given that this sort of stunt has been pulled before (the Sokal affair in sociology of science, for instance), you'd think that the editors of Huff post would do some elementary checking to see if there was such a person as Shelley Garland... people leave massive social media footprints these days, it shouldn't be that hard to check someone's bonafides.

I don't think it's hate speech for the reasons M0stlyBowlingHedgehog gives, but I'm not surprised the editor lost her job. As a former editor I would say checking the credentials of writers is pretty basic stuff.

As suspected, the piece got attacked by white male trolls, desperate to cling on to their white male privilege

Or as suspected it was attacked for suggesting the arbitrary disenfranchisement of 1 particular group.

It was stupid even as an op ed discussion piece and even more stupid to take it at face value. It's not hate speech but it's remarkably dim journalism.