#adichie

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.

People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’

People who do not recognise that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy.

People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponise’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. (How ironic, speaking of violence, that it is one of these two who encouraged Twitter followers to pick up machetes and attack me.)

And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.

I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.

- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Imagine having Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, one of the most talented and influential authors of the modern age, deliver talk at your university and deciding to instead host a talk with a white man because Adichie, a black Nigerian woman, is too ~problematic~

bonus: here's Dr Anastacia Tomson

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the famed Nigerian author behind Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Americanah (2013), and other works has once again expressed her support for transphobia. In a November 14 Guardian interview on the occasion of winning a Women’s Prize for Fiction award (a book prize regarded as transphobic after asking nonbinary shortlist nominee, Akwaeke Emezi, for information on their sex as “defined by law”), Adichie defended J.K. Rowling’s notoriously transphobic June 2020 essay as “a perfectly reasonable piece.” It’s perhaps unsurprising that Adichie had no quarrel with Rowling’s stance: She herself once answered an interviewer’s question about whether trans women are women by saying “trans women are trans women.” In the recent Guardian interview, Adichie brushed off the backlash to her previous transphobic comments as evidence of “the American liberal orthodoxy,” suggesting  that both she and Rowling are victims of a “cruel and sad” cancel culture.

Adichie has been heralded as groundbreaking and revolutionary by the likes of Beyoncé, but going to bat for Rowling serves to further highlight that her work, when compared to the inclusive feminist canon she aims to be a part of, is often itself trans-exclusionary. Take, for instance, Adichie’s epistolary 2017 book, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, which uses letters to a friend to articulate her thoughts on feminist politics, raising daughters, and teaching independence. The book’s goal is ultimately undermined by the static, violent way in which she regards trans women. In the book, Adichie’s call to consider and question your own and others’ language (“Teach her to question language…. But to teach her that, you will have to question your own language”) comes across as ironic given her unwillingness to even engage in critique of her own words; instead, in response to criticism, she uses the tired argument of being martyred by “cancel culture,” sentiments shared by problematic people everywhere.

Furthermore, Adichie’s suggestion to “question our culture’s selective use of biology as ‘reasons’ for social norms” feels willfully ignorant when considered alongside her transphobia. She asserts that men are often considered innately superior based on biological features of strength and size— why wouldn’t this argument apply to trans folks being able to self-identify? Adichie’s argument that gender is socially defined via biological sex is a reinforcement of exclusionary social norms of who gets to be a woman. Trans women aren’t “real” women as justified by our society’s narrow application of biology, Adichie argues via historical distinctions between “women born female” versus “women born male.” And despite trans women who have shown exceptional grace in educating Adichie and and “calling her in,” when speaking about trans women, the author continues to subjectively apply biology (“A trans woman is a person born male and a person who…experienced the privileges that the world accords men”) over the lived testimony of trans women like Laverne Cox who are forced to constantly defend their identity and testify about their suffering in the face of this violence.

In this week's FFR we have a pipin' hot entertainment roundup! 🎥🟣☝🏽

Who's being tragically transphobic this week? What's the latest in video game labor? What brave artist can tackle the dreaded menace of cancel culture?