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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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To my awareness, there is no racist meme in which you list someone's name and just say "oh". If we are really reaching, I suppose this falls into the general paradigm of "Noticing" (that would be a dogwhistle, since it's just a normal word that has a secret related meaning that was arbitrarily assigned to it to allow for people to make controversial statements that sound innocuous to someone unaware)

I'm Noticing (and I have read the book) that a piece of information which lacked significance to myself and others was 1) intended to be interpreted in a specific way and 2) interpreted that way by certain readers, who then responded as though the significance were clear.

There probably is a way that a linguist could deduce much more than just him being Black from the name alone, and there's probably also some jargon that could help precisely describe what about the name "sounds SSA". (If I think about it a bit, I suppose the consecutive consonants "Nt" in particular sound SSA)

I guessed the wrong gender, and the given and family name, separately, don't sound SSA to me, though the syllabic flow of them together gives a SSA vibe, after re-reading it. My first impression was that was from an unfamiliar Asian language, however.

As I said, I don't think this is really the reaction any of you had to the comment. Charitably, I think that you feel this way consciously, because you dislike racism, and so you avoided letting your mind make this hard-to-explicitly-articulate, but obvious inference.

Well, perhaps you'll update, based on my above statement.

I guess I'm also being a little obtuse here though. I think what you guys are getting at, is that it is unfair to make an inference based on the professor's race, as opposed to his work, because he has no control over the former. If he doesn't want people to assume he hates White people on the basis of his work, he can try and address this by softening the tone, or even reconsidering the substance - but if someone assumes things about him because of his race... what is he to do? It's not like he can stop being Black.

Most people don't change their names. If the original comment had been "The author's given name was [Boring American Name], but they changed it to 'Tatishe Nteta,' which means [Pretentious Thing] in [SSA language]," the stereotype might have had some credence.