I maintain that those who are surprised that one doesn’t take the side of the “poor, immigrant woman” as a matter of principle against the “rich and arrogant white man” who supposedly has raped her are reinventing a kind of class justice in reverse. It’s no longer, as before, “poor bastards, the rich are always right” but “rich bastards, the word of the poor is sacred.”
Bernard-Henri Levy: Stop the Attack Dogs on Strauss-Kahn and Protect the Indicted – The Daily Beast
He goes on to talk about how this attitude is “disgusting”, etc.
I must confess, I have troubles writing any coherent, thought out response to this piece by BHL. I am taken over by righteous indignation, which you know, it’s something I try (sometimes unsuccessfully) to leave out of my posts. And it is not because of the subject at hand (rape), but mostly because of its intersections, which hit too close to home: an immigrant woman, a defense of White privilege by a very well known academic, the misogyny that oozes in the piece… en fin, that I am not well equipped to maintain my usual level headed responses in this case. Because all of the above is too close, plus the poverty. And the IMF (of which I wrote yesterday and I am currently writing more). It’s like a roller coaster of WTF, followed by anger and just the realization that we might never win these battles. At least not during my lifetime.
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