Now, I'm not a genius, but based on my IQ scores, I don't miss the mark by that much. I also work with the English language to support my family. All of this is to say that there shouldn't be much written in this language I should struggle with nearly as much as I do with academia-speak.
It doesn't matter that I may know a topic pretty well, either. So what happens when someone uses it to push for gun control?
I can't say that I'm shocked, of course, because since so few people truly understand academia-speak--yes, that includes actual PhDs in these subjects, sometimes--it's a way to try and present an argument, defend the argument, and stave off any criticism, all with foundational principles that don't really exist.
For example, we have a Duke professor using "whiteness-based 'necropolitics'" to push for gun control.
Wellesley College recently hosted a Duke University professor of gender, sexuality & feminist studies to discuss the “biopolitical paradox” of whiteness and gun violence.
Given the department in which she works and (according to her faculty page) her specializations in feminist science and technology studies, Catherine Clune-Taylor’s advocacy for the topic includes a lot of polysyllablic and critical theory-created terms which may cause an unneeded consternation in comprehension.
This isn’t a surprise considering that as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton, Clune-Taylor taught the course “Science After Feminism” which “investigated how feminism” challenges the notion that science “is commonly held to be the objective, empirical pursuit of natural facts.”
In her Wellesley lecture “The Necropolitics of American Childhood: Whiteness and the Biopolitical Paradox of Child Gun Death,” Clune-Taylor noted how the French-based concepts “biopolitics” and “necropolitics” relate to American gun violence, The Wellesley News reports.
Clune-Taylor took the former term, coined by (French) philosopher Michel Foucault and defined as the “political rationality which takes the administration of life and populations as its subject” (essentially how a colonizer uses its political power to control the colonized), and added a specific whiteness component to what Foucault later dubbed “biopower.”
Biopolitics, she said, often “bring about the exact opposite, increasing risks of harm and death, including for those same populations [white] they aim to protect.”
Developed by Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe (a “major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory”), “necropolitics” is defined (by his book of the same name) as “the power to decide who can live and who must die, effectively turning people into ‘corpses’ or ‘living-dead’ through the creation of ‘death-worlds.'”
Now, the concept of "necropolitics" seems like something that's probably worthy of study. Especially in light of what we've seen in recent weeks and months out of Iran, where tens of thousands of pro-democracy protestors were reportedly killed. That sounds like "necropolitics" to some degree.
Of course, then we get to the whole "death-worlds" thing, and now we're talking about science fiction.
Or Reddit.
Regardless, Clune-Taylor seems to believe that gun rights exist because white people need a way to kill black people, that the government intentionally set up this system for this purpose, and that guns have absolutely no utility beyond this.
I mean, regarding that last point, not her actual words here:
Clune-Taylor concluded by saying “I do think that we kind of have to do both here in terms of highlighting the problems associated with school shootings, but also that guns are actually not safe anywhere,” and she encouraged students “to actively engage with organizations and services that aim to end violence, as ‘we can change the world we live in.’”
Guns, however, actually are safe in a ton of places, including schools.
In fact, the demonization of firearms has probably led to more gun-related deaths than gun control has actually prevented in its best-case scenarios. Why? Because a gun is only unsafe if misused. Its dangerousness is part of its design, as with any weapon, but as many people will misuse any tool that can be pressed into service as a weapon, a gun allows those who haven't fallen for the mischaracterization of it as "not safe anywhere" to protect themselves.
However, what Clune-Taylor has done here isn't just the typical anti-gunner demonizing firearms. She's framing all of it in a matrix of gobblety-gook that most people can't truly decipher well enough to truly address her arguments. Plus, in her case, she's also framing it with the brain-dead idea that our Founding Fathers, many of whom were not slave owners nor had any use for the institution of slavery, would agree to preserve the right to keep and bear arms as a means to keep slaves in check.
With all these layers of bull, she can throw up all sorts of arguments that no one is prepared for because they can't understand exactly what she's trying to say, thanks to academic jargon that is only recognizable to those in her field, all of whom were long ago indoctrinated to think the same thing.
Is it any wonder that faith in academia is as low as faith in the media?
