Dean Esmay: Considers himself qualified to judge your blackness
Dean Esmay — Men’s Rights Activist, AIDS “skeptic,” big old white dude — has added another skill to his resume: Arbiter of Blackness.
If you haven’t been following the activities of Mr. Esmay of late, the A Voice for Men “chief operations officer” has been having a rather extended Twitter meltdown, posting endless puzzling yet impassioned Tweets to his own #SpankAFeminist hashtag, addressing an assortment of imaginary feminist enemies.
Some of the more puzzling have involved race, like his repeated charge that feminists are a bunch of white racists because, well, let’s let Esmay explain:
(Archived here.)
In Esmay’s mind, apparently, the fact that feminists recognize that rapists and abusers come in all colors is … a racist attack on black men.
(Esmay also seems to think that black men own “their women,” a belief that has a more than a little in common with the fears of white racists — like one Dylann Roof — who worry endlessly about black men raping “our” — that is, white — women.)
But, one might wonder, if feminism is fundamentally racist, why do many black women embrace the movement, even with reservations?
Esmay has now provided what he evidently sees as the definitive answer to that question:
(Archived here.)
You can tell how well-versed Esmay is in black history by the fact that he has misspelled the name of Aunt Jemima, the famous racist stereotype and pancake pitchwoman.
Esmay is even more contemptuous towards black feminist men.
(Archived here, here and here.)
It’s certainly true, as no sensible feminist would deny, that white feminists, even those with the best of intentions, have said and done a lot of racist shit over the years. Pretty much all white people have. (That’s not an excuse, just a sad fact.)
I’m just not sure that Esmay is really the best person to determine who is and who isn’t an “Uncle Tom.”
In addition to being a patronizing white dude, Esmay is the “chief operating officer” of a website that has repeatedly published the work of a Holocaust denier; has enthusiastically promoted the videos of white “nationalist” RamZPaul; and has been waging a long if somewhat ludicrous battle against the Southern Poverty Law Center, an influential and effective opponent of far-right racists; indeed, Esmay has himself declared the SPLC a “a multimillion $$ fraud organization” and “America’s #1 Hate Group.”
In 2013, Esmay’s boss at AVFM, Paul Elam, after glomming onto bogus information first spread by 4chan trolls and white supremacists at Stormfront, helped to lead an abortive hate campaign against a young woman falsely accused of discriminating against white male applicants to Georgetown university
Dean Esmay: apologist for racists, arbiter of blackness?
EDIT: I removed a paragraph in which I got the Sad Puppies and Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies mixed up. In my defense, it’s very early in the morning.
