You have to hand it to the blog for creating a perfect storm: 1. a black 2. woman 3. who suddenly earns a position of authority 4. makes arguably callous statements about white people 5. on Twitter, the actual worst place to make any argument that desperately needs precision.

The SoCawlege writer, after clumsily trying to draw false equivalences between American slavery and Muslim/African/Native American/Hispanic/etc.-initiated slavery, lampoons Grundy for calling out white males as a problem population, as if they weren’t the ones responsible for perpetuating a historically racist sociopolitical atmosphere in the United States. As if that weren’t completely true. Hats off for trying.

Of course, most of Grundy’s critics come off as reactionary rather than introspective. You can expect indictments of racism shouted from every rooftop and instances of (lol incorrect) pedantry used to mark her arguments as wrong and unreasonable.

The fact stands. You never see the same feverish defensiveness coming from whites when you hear: that the University flippantly ducked out of a diversity hearing without proper notice and grumbled when they were subpoenaed; that the University had NAACP President and CEO Cornell Williams Brooks deliver a baccalaureate address notwithstanding its lack of diversity compared to 14 out of 15 of its peers (what is this, some kinda olive branch?); that the University was complacent with the shutdown of its African Presidential Center after years of bleeding it into oblivion.

We can’t rule out the pro-Grundy crowd either, particularly when we’re giving her license to be a bona fide jerk. Apparently the structurally-perpetuated challenges faced by women of color (wrt pay racial pay gaps, resources for sexual abuse victims, hell, resources in general) give Grundy carte blanche to bear down on a white rape victim on Facebook for derailing and for making the discussion “about her.”

I don’t remember when this turned into a sick form of Oppression Olympics, but apparently Grundy was justified in sinking her claws in; barely anyone, white or otherwise stood up for the rape victim.

Naturally, this is perfect FOX fodder: simply strip the conversation of nearly all of its context and now you can smear Grundy. She’s now white America’s comical Anti-Christ: as a callous academic whose claim to fame is now “I have a degree and I get off on being able to put a white rape victim in her place where I need to.”

But what they ignored was that there’s a reason why Grundy might want to be cruel about it. Niceness is politicized:

It’s cruel and ridiculous to expect a person to be calm and polite in response to an act of oppression. Marginalized people often do not have the luxury of emotionally distancing themselves from discussions on their rights and experiences. Tone policing is the ultimate derailing tactic. When you tone police, you automatically shift the focus of the conversation away from what you or someone else did that was wrong, and onto the other person and their reaction. Tone policing is a way of not taking responsibility for fucking up, and it dismisses the other person’s position by framing it as being emotional and therefore irrational. But being emotional does not make one’s points any less valid. It’s also important to note that, by tone policing, you not only refuse to examine your own oppressive behavior, but you also can blame that on the other person, because they were not “nice enough” to be listened to or taken seriously.

Still, it feels wrong. Putting down white rape victims? Rape victims of any kind, even?

We’re bound to these facts: women of color consistently have less access to resources compared to white women. They’re more frequently subject to discouraging racial assumptions that further blockade legal action, as if it weren’t hard enough for white victims. Even if it’s gotten better over the years, the media still manages to perpetuate racial stereotypes about ethnic rape victims in small ways, if not overtly.

They’re consistently excluded from larger feminist discussions or shamelessly swept under the same banner as white women. Their unique challenges are glossed over by white feminists to further their cause (whose cause exactly?). That problem was exactly what commenters in the Facebook discussion were talking about and what the white rape victim was indirectly railing against.

Given how Grundy brusquely handled the Facebook debacle, calling her out for playing Oppression Olympics isn’t out of the question. But her argument does have grains of truth: all other things constant, victims aren’t equal. Some victims take the spotlight and inadvertently toss the others under the bus.