I frequently interact with Rutgers Professor Lee Jussim @psychrabble on Twitter. He likes to have stimulating exchanges about how we can do better in our Twitter conversations and at what point we should just give up. We talk about good faith vs. bad faith actors and arguments, about tactics for dealing with spurious accusations, and about how to effectively get our points across in a rational manner through evidence-based reasoning.

I have noted that a lot of people believe serious Twitter conversations for the most part fail. I have recently migrated to Letter.wiki, a site offering a platform for longform discussion written to another person in the form of a letter. I find I am better able to communicate my ideas in this way, although threading on Twitter is also an effective way to communicate. Lee loves to thread and some of us encouraged him to move to Letter.wiki as well, but he wasn’t so sure he wanted to give up the threading aspect of his work.

One of the biggest problems I see with Twitter is the potential to be misunderstood, particularly if someone isolates just one of your tweets and circulates it in an out-of-context way that misconstrues a comment. There are also trollish types who are apt to jump on a thread and completely derail the topic at hand. So–Twitter is not ideal. It has benefits and risks.

On July 17, 2019, Lee was asking for opinions anyone might have on a newly coined term he recently encountered called “bropenscience (bro-plus-open science).” He solicited opinions, mind you, opinions on a very narrow topic. Please remember that as you hear the rest of my story.

Immediately the attachment of “bro” sent off alarm bells to me (me only–these are just my thoughts, mind you) of the trendiness of “male bashing.” I’m not much of an anything-basher. I’m pretty open-minded and like to have challenging interactions. I also value and try to model mutual respect. I don’t do name calling and I think I’ve only said “shit” maybe once or twice on Twitter. I’m fairly tame.

But, since Lee was asking for input, I made two tweets in response to the question he posed. (If I had expanded on my opinion, I could have given evidentiary examples of how “bro” is used in a sexist or disparaging fashion, but I wasn’t that invested in the topic at the time as it was just a friendly exchange of opinions.)

My first response was this: “I have an awfully hard time seeing the point of being so antagonistic toward men. I felt like we conquered women’s acceptance in the workplace long ago. It seems to play into victimhood, attention seeking, playing the woman card & isn’t what I call dignified or dignity culture.”

In a second tweet I continued this line of thinking:

“I’m quite sure there are plenty of women doing excellent work without resorting to these made up words and whininess. If you walk in a workplace or academia, act like an equal, show confidence, do the work, and don’t ask to be coddled. It sets women back. That ship has sailed.”

Within five minutes, a Twitter user who was not on the thread and who I have never encountered in any way, shape or form, retweeted (subtweeted I think is the correct term) my second tweet.

Above it she had simply typed “white women white womening in action.”

Hmm. Well, I looked at that for a moment, and then I thought to myself, that’s just pure mockery. There’s no attempt to engage me–no constructive criticism. No request for me to explain what I meant by my opinion or to reconsider my opinion in some wider context. No counter argument or rebuttal.

I’m not a public figure–but I am a human being. I do in fact have white skin and I can’t really do much about that. Since that seemed to be the focus of what one might term a “hot take” or a “call-out,” I wanted to address the ethics or the fairness of mocking me based solely on my skin color. I looked and noticed she had 9000 followers–so, I decided to reply.

I didn’t particularly think it out too much. I just had a deep feeling that it deserved a response. I wanted to express my individuality and my own humanity. I wanted to point out that the color of my skin seemed to be central to her mockery, and that I didn’t appreciate being reduced to no more than the color of my skin. I will say that it is not out of character for me to remind others on Twitter that there are real humans behind the keyboard–especially if I see a particularly mean-spirited and personal attack against another. So… I posted this in a four-part mini-thread replying directly to her:

“Smart, educated, hard working woman standing up for my place in the world. Why does my color offend you? It’s nothing I can change, so it seems unfair to slur me for my accident of birth. I was educated through merit based scholarships and jobs. No one paid my way.

I earned my masters degree while receiving an assistantship, raising a child, pregnant with a second (10 pounds 11 ounces) and working two part time jobs. You insult me.

You judge me and retweet me to your 9000 followers reducing me to a stereotype white woman doing white womaning? Shame on you. I hope you build a better character and moral sense of individuals in the future instead of reducing them to the color of their skin and mocking them.

You display nothing but arrogance.”

I then subtweeted her “white women white womening in action” tweet with this caveat:



“My comments are heart felt. Her mockery of me for being white to her 9000 followers is unacceptable. I will not stand for it without pushing back.”



A few responses trickled in, both pro and con, but I felt the whole thing largely went unnoticed. It didn’t seem to be any big deal, but the next day my retweeter friend announced she woke up “to find white people losing their shit for being asked to check their privileges calling me racist, sexist and threatening to report me to my university.”

She then added, “I say (insert GIF with someone giving you the finger.) Astounding the length people go to punch down. I dare you to fucking punch up and scrutinise how damaging the white prof’s attitude is to women in academia.

Also, I represent myself and I speak for myself only, bitch.”

She also shared a report from Twitter that someone had reported her and of course, Twitter let it pass. That is no big deal. I didn’t find her to be violating Twitter rules anyway. I never even thought about reporting it and I would never contact anyone’s employer or university over a Twitter disagreement.

(Fact check: I am not a professor. I’m not sure that would qualify me as punching down even if I accepted the punching framework to begin with, which I do not. I’m also not fond of women using the term bitch toward each other, but I just overlooked that for the sake of de-escalating the situation. I’m not that thin-skinned, or should I say, that thin white-skinned.)

My retweeter friend’s announcement that white people were coming after her brought in the troops. Interestingly enough, they seemed to be primarily other whites and were very often professors who started giving me everything from threats, to additional mockery, to the check my privilege admonition, to what I call explainers. The explainers really went through all kinds of hoops as they tried to tell me, “well, what she was really trying to say to you was… blah, blah, blah.” They would then give me sometimes quite polite, sometimes not so polite, lessons on white privilege, white fragility and suggested reading, assuming I was not familiar with these topics. But I wasn’t there to debate the theory of white privilege or the theory of Intersectional Feminism. I was simply requesting that she see my humanity and kindly not hold me up as the face of “white women white womening in action.”

Eventually, I started to say things like “your explanation is very nice but that’s not what she said” (I used the old adage of putting lipstick on a pig). “Telling me what you think she was trying to say doesn’t make it so and it doesn’t make it respectful and it doesn’t make it constructive.”

It became quite apparent that professors were rallying around her to protect her with no inkling that perhaps I deserved the slightest bit of common courtesy or humanization. It seemed to be the very coddling I had referenced. One professor tried so hard to get me to agree with him that I finally said, “look you are hobbling young women by telling them they are facing near insurmountable odds.”

From where I sat, these professors were cultivating angry and adversarial women who were easily offended and saw opinions as personal attacks. It wasn’t long before my mere opinion on a very specific topic (was the use of “bro” or “bros” a productive term to use professionally?) was condemned as “harmful,” “damaging” or “threatening” to a certain subset of women. Those disagreeing with my retweeter friend were declared by her to be a “vile white toxic mob.” The tweet below was really over top. The Twitter bio says she is a “Phd in Psych at Cambridge University.”

I have to say that Maria’s “rest assured” warning did little more than amuse me. In fact, I told her I’d love to see an open letter with a rational argument as to how I am making Abeba’s life worse for having called ME out, or as to how my little old insignificant attitude could be harmful to women in science. I marveled at the idea that I was being given so much power. Again, trying to de-escalate through a bit of humor, I suggested to Maria that in addition to an open letter, she also circulate an online petition to have me cancelled and then a Go Fund Me to compensate herself and others for the harm I have inflicted upon them.

Oh, and this was a real gem–a professor in Canada sent me this little diddy.

Yes, Professor Sampert agrees Abeba was indeed mocking me, but it was deserved mockery because I am “tone deaf” and “in a bubble” that has skewed my view. The suggestion that I fire my imaginary housekeeper and my imaginary nanny was delicious. The replies to that one ranged from ironic, to angry, to comical. Dr. Sampert did continue to argue with others about her astute assessment of this situation, but I wouldn’t say she scored many points in the proverbial “marketplace of ideas.”

After literally days of this nonsense, poor old Professor Lee Jussim was drawn back into the discussion by a request from Sarah Braasch, someone who has also been the subject of a mobbing. I have written about Sarah many times and you can read more about her in the following links:

https://skepticreview.com/2019/02/01/sarah-braasch-portrayed-as-racist-cop-caller-at-yale-debuts-youtube-channel/

https://skepticreview.com/2019/02/09/thought-experiment-can-you-be-part-of-a-mob-profess-social-justice/

https://skepticreview.com/2019/05/17/yale-university-public-statements-in-reply-to-sarah-braasch-incident/

I suspect Sarah became fearful for me because her mobbing went international and spiraled completely out of control. My situation doesn’t even remotely compare to hers, but once someone like Sarah has been “cancelled,” she feels an affinity for others and a need to do what she can to intervene before it escalates any further. I find that is true among many of the cancelled–they tend to show up to support one another because they truly understand the progression.

Long story short (and this all played out on Twitter and it is mostly all still there for anyone to see), calls for Lee Jussim to resign initiated by Abeba began to be shared widely. Once the calls for Lee to resign started up, I decided it was best to stop this madness. I shared apologies with Abeba and declared a truce. I did not want to be part of a scenario where Lee’s livelihood or reputation was put on the table.

Unfortunately, that didn’t end the attacks on Lee. Lee went private with his Twitter account for a bit which was a wise decision. Otherwise, I am sure Tweet mining would have been part of the smear campaign.

As I said to some folks who were disappointed that I apologized, my best argument failed. I would ask here and there in various iterations, “you do know Intersectional Feminism and White Fragility are theoretical frameworks, right?” The insistence that I accept the privilege hierarchy and the punching up and punching down ideologies as evidence-based truth was confounding.

I’ll end this by paraphrasing a thread I tweeted to summarize my thoughts on this whole tragicomedy (better known to some as a clusterf@ck).

“White Women White Womening” is dehumanizing, a point I tried to make back on July 17th and yet, as more than a week has passed, this still seems to be a point of contention. I, and many others who have entered into this debate, find it to be prejudicial (as in prejudging) and counterproductive; an act of stereotyping, tokenizing and mocking. (One professor tried to soften me up by saying I was using the word token improperly–Abeba came back with, “your tweet IS the perfect token of white womenism.”)

I often quote from Helen Pluckrose’s article, Why I No Longer Identify as a Feminist: “The intersectional feminists not only exhibit great prejudice against men but also turn on each other at the slightest imagined infraction of the rules. Having not the slightest regard for reason or evidence, they vilify and harass those imagined to have transgressed.”

I personally have no interest in publicly humiliating, degrading, mocking, judging, dehumanizing or calling out another woman (or man) as a tactic for effecting human progress.

In my teaching experience, I empowered children. I did not endorse name-calling or victimhood. I taught anti-bullying, empathy and tolerance. My students learned problem solving and conflict resolution and wanted to resolve differences peacefully.

Academics have contacted me to defend the labeling of me as #WhiteWomenWhiteWomening because of a single out-of-context tweet not directed at anyone or any group in response to a request for an opinion on a very specific topic.

These academics have offered ‘splainers to me that were akin to, “well what she really meant to say…” in order to justify this ever so popular call-out and mockery strategy which can lead to full on #CancelCulture.

These same academics have offered me reading assignments, as though I am not aware of the theories or theoretical framework of white privilege, white fragility, white supremacy, punching up and down, intersectionality, systemic racism, etc. I am fully aware of these THEORIES. Theories are not fact.

As I said above, professors and others justifying and/or defending mockery to sugarcoat the “message” is like the old adage of putting lipstick on a pig.

Would professors serve their students better by teaching them more sophisticated forms of constructive criticism? Is it a productive tactic? Or is it antagonistic? Does it build bridges? Does it cross the divide? Does it demonstrate empathy and respect?

Is it truly healthy for academics to teach that language, even in the form of an opinion, is violent, harmful & damaging? To rally fellow academics to write open letters or articles because it is causing damage for me to express an opinion never directed at any individual or any group?

Is it healthy to teach that mutual respect doesn’t apply in certain situations? Is it healthy to condone the message that I as a fellow human don’t deserve equal respect? That my opinion has less validity? Why do you elevate her lived experience over mine?

Is it healthy to endorse the idea that some students will be faced with almost insurmountable obstacles? Or will this encourage victimhood, fear, anger, resentment and a tendency to see “others” as adversarial oppressors?

Will these teachings help the student to interact effectively in the workplace? In social situations? In personal relationships?

Are you coddling? Granting special treatment to certain humans over other humans? Are you empowering entitlement? Should mockery be endorsed and condoned? Did I deserve any recognition of my humanity? Any respect? You know, I could go on, but first another question for the academics who support this ideology and behavior:

Should this “Twitter spat” lead to condemnation and calls for resignation of a fellow professor? Why do you not stand with your fellow professor? Do you uphold academic freedom? Or do you uphold “Cancel Culture” and “Bullying”?

Or, in the end, are you just afraid it might happen to you?