In higher education, there is a virtual cottage industry of academics declaring everything from math to meritocracy to be forms of white supremacy and racism. Now, it appears romance will be added to the list. University of California Santa Barbara Black Studies Professor Sabrina Strings has written how romance promotes white supremacy and “global pigmentocracy.” In The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance, Strings recounts having “endured” her own bad relationships and maintains that “Romance is an old white cultural institution that began in the Middle Ages.” In an interview with The Current, Strings explains that “I am only one of the millions of Gen X-to-Gen Z women who have endured a seemingly endless array of miserable relationships with men.”
In viewing romance through her own lens, Strings comes up with distinctly different views of literature and famous relationships. For example, many people have read the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, a story of forbidden love that introduced disharmony and disaster to King Arthur’s Round Table. It is a story of love and eventual betrayal. It is both irresistible and irrational. Many accounts show Lancelot rescuing Guinevere and, torn by their mutual loyalty to King Arthur, the couple finally succumbs to the inexorable pull of love to each other. It is a tragedy of love and loyalty that leaves everyone in ruin. Arthur would die of wounds in the later battles, Guinevere would die in a convent, and Lancelot would, according to some accounts, die as a hermit. It is a powerful tale of how love can overwhelm all other considerations and shatter every other bond.
That is not exactly how Professor Strings sees it. She says that the tale is really about how a man of lower status is trying to secure greater power and prestige by seducing a higher class European Christian woman: “Love is very much about generosity but romance is very much about what you can get from somebody, especially if you’re a man who is social climbing.”
Professor Strings zeros in on the beauty and whiteness of Guinevere. She notes that the queen was viewed as irresistibly attractive and pale in complexion:
“We can easily recognize these features today as those representing the apex of whiteness, even though race did not exist at the time of Troyes’s writing. Nevertheless, to the extent that some of these representations occurred before the seventeenth century dawn of race science, they have what historians have called a ‘proto-racist’ bent. Indeed, scholars have shown that the preference for light skin, hair, and eyes existed prior to the advent of racism, and that these characteristics were co-opted by it and enlisted for the purpose of installing a global pigmentocracy.”
The “whitenesss” could also simply reflect the racial makeup of the historical characters as opposed to any “global pigmentocracy.” Yet, according to Professor Strings, romance is about “women who are not peak white or are ‘insufficiently white’ are subject deservedly to deceit, manipulation, assault and rape.”
Professor Strings previously wrote a 2019 book about how “fatphobia” is rooted in racism.
In today’s academic environment, there often seems a rush to racialize common practices, customs, or terminology. Publications clamor for such articles and discovering another hidden racist element in society can bring academic accolades. However, others have already staked out many areas such as mathematics, astrophysics, statistics, meritocracy, climate change, dieting, tipping, skiing, chess, and organized pantries. Most recently, the American Psychological Association declared that merit-based hiring may be racist. Even robots are now declared to be part of the supremacist menace because they are often made of white plastic.
Very disturbing.
She has a point, How likely is a Woman of; color, or weight challenged, or ethnically diverse, going to get Peacocked by the opposite Sex. It’s a discrimination determined by personal preferences, that may be shaped by the immersion of social norms saturated into the fabric of the environment (White/Black Culture).
White Men, Black Men, Hispanic Men, Chinese Men, Indian Men, … all Peacock in their own way.
As well do the Females – Sexuality is Sexuality.
So what’s new about her argument? The Attraction-Conflict has stood throughout the Ages.
She’s saying that, We need to abandon the primal urges of Sexuality and find indiscriminate relations to achieve Equality.
(IMO: The Reality – It’s not going to happen)
Harrison Butker and Bill Maher made a clarifing point about the balance of the Left’s nature,
of which puts Professor Sabrina Strings missives into the neutralized perspective.
Bill Maher Scolds Pearl-Clutching Lefties Over Harrison Butker Tradwife Speech
By: Tyler Durden ~ Saturday, May 18, 2024
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/bill-maher-scolds-pearl-clutching-lefties-over-harrison-butker-tradwife-speech
I find it difficult to contemplate such a barron existence. Life is beautiful if you gaze in the right direction.
I think Professor String is one of those people who have to blame their personal failures on others or issues beyond her control – in this case race. Her comment about her previous romantic disappointments reminds me of the old adage, “The common thread in all your failed relationships is you.” If one of them had worked out, would she still feel this way or just point her racial animus in a different direction?
Jeff: “If one of [her relations] had worked out, would she still feel this way or just point her racial animus in a different direction?”
+++
Her racial animus would simply take a different direction. Her animus is the constant.
Racial hostility and calls for segregation are increasingly seen among the African origin population in the US and much of the rest of the world. It is aimed most prominently against whites but it is also aimed at Asians and, less visibly, at Hispanics who seem almost at war with them in some areas.
They contribute comparatively little benefit to society and yet are responsible for at least 54% of all murders in the US. Endless random attacks against others by blacks on the streets of cities like New York tend to be under reported by media so we won’t get the ‘wrong idea’. But it is increasingly hard to hide.
They say they want segregated events and facilities and that idea is becoming more popular with others as we have seen recently with cartoonist Scott Adams’ remarks.
Soon we may be quoting Cromwell when faced with their demands for black dorms, black national anthems, black graduations, and the segregationist rest:
You have been too long at these demands “for any good you have been doing . Depart I say and let us have done with you. In the name of God go!”
They may wake up some day to discover that the rest of humanity doesn’t like them any more than they like the rest of us.
Dangerous trends.
Perhaps Strings should study her own culture, which is based on the men from one village raiding the next village over and killing off the men and taking the women and girls, that is they did until they found out they could sell the men into slavery and started keeping them alive. This woman is a classic example of the results of affirmative action. Black Studies, Women’s Studies, etc. are superfluous “fields” invented by greedy college administrators to get VA, student loan and Pell Grant money from young blacks who then learned the only market for their “knowledge” was on college campuses. Thank 1960s leftists for people like her.
What the Holy Hell is “cishetallopatriarchy”? Is it contagious?
Anonymous said: “What the Holy Hell is “cishetallopatriarchy”?”
I thought it was the study of the variation in the average height of women from one male-dominated culture to another…
Just as it takes ;two to tango’, it takes two to develop a romantic relationship and it takes a level of work.
A string of bad relationships seems to indicate that Professor Strings is the problem.
A professor with a degree in black studies, are there professors with degrees in White studies or do they just make up degrees as we go along?
Yes, but they are called Physicists, Engineers, and MDs.
Romance is an old white cultural institution that began in the Middle Ages.
Yet another example of how black studies = stupidity, laziness, bereft of intellectual effort. Setting aside ancient classical writings that discuss Cupid / Eros, this employee from UC Santa Barbara makes as much sense as a rapper …like P. Diddy
the above is my comment
Black dating practices? It’s contagious I’ve heard.
My wife and I have incorporated her twirking on the hood of our car in our effort to be more inclusive in our romance. So far nothing. But I will keep you posted.
I told my own daughter once when she was griping about bad relationships that if that is happening many times maybe you need to look at what you are doing.
I define “racism” today as, seeing everything through the glasses of race. You see anything and skin tone is first on your mind, you are a racist.
Given her relationship history, another bitter, fat, reactionary.
Sure. Being an insufferable and entitled harpy played *no* part in her experiences. 🙄🙄 People of this ilk are allergic to self-awareness and/or accountability. Narcissists, all of them; I would honestly love to know what parents think their children are gleaning from their ministrations.
Messages like this treatment of romance have nothing in the bucket that speaks to hope for something better. What audience wants a product where always Hooch dies at the end of the movie?
Well, I guess professor Strings really did not like “Excalibur”, as probably one of the best films I’ve seen of the Arthurian Legend. She really sounds more like a boneheaded movie critic in some very small town paper. And she has her examples totally backward. Until the last 100-200 years it was women who were in effect traded off and up to the very powerful men of the day. This was desired because the powerful could exert that power and they also wanted young, healthy wives to bear them heirs. The first night “tradition” was also a means of showing the lower classes the hopelessness of their case as their women, on their marriage night, had to spend it with the lord of the Manor. So the powerful got the ladies and everyone else had to just make do.
Having said that, this professor shows that her own shortcomings and failures at love are seen as a systemic problem rather than a failure of herself. Rather than write a book or column she should have spent more time in counseling and reassessing her life and why she had such failures.
Love can be blind as well as deaf and dumb. I have spent untold hours over the decades counseling men and women because of failed marriages or love. People repeatedly do not learn and keep doing the same selection process and it keeps failing them. The best you can do is try to look at things a little different. Too many feel that love is all that matters and that is sometimes a fatal flaw. Professor Strings should have stepped back and allowed for some pragmatic assessment about why and how she failed then make adjustments before making another big leap. The danger signals are often there but you have to look.
Love is precious and can make all the difference in the world to your life if you find it. And there can be no bleaker life than one without love.
It does not look like this particular professor is good at self re-assessment.
The rest of her conclusions are just so much trash.
This ABFL projects her obviously perceived inadequacy on to the screen of a European cultural institution rather than admitting to her own lack of appeal as the consequence of failed interpersonal relationships. Islam was a cultural institution which rose to dominance during the same period of time and then ultimately fell into decline. due to the internal prohibitions which permitted it to evolve. Had it been otherwise, rather than eclipsing the roots of Western Civilization by subsuming all of the then known world in the brutal fashion history had documented, her lot could be expected to be far more dismal than her life in the wretched safe space of academia in which she has opted to hide, save only for the times she chooses to emerge as annoyance, much like a whining mosquito at dusk. Likewise, in the African cultures which are certainly her roots, her lot would have certainly been no better and she might have even found herself battered and bound by the hands of her own, loaded into a ship by Islamic slavers and sent off to the New World to toil in bondage perhaps, even, to be forcibly impregnated by a slave owner, the results of which are well known. In her, Like so many others of her ilk, who grow like a fungus in the dark, damp, corners of ivory towers, the Peter Principle has been satisfied.
ZZDoc: You nailed it! 👍
Professor Strings has given fat Black women something to blame for their inadequacies. Hopefully the Woke mob will not start banning European Romantic literature. Ah, no. They wouldn’t dare. Hands off “Wuthering Heights”!
Heathcliff and Cathy better leave town. ❤️💋
All of this silly posturing has a wear-out date that they don’t even guess is coming. Absurd self-indulgent “theories” like this have come and gone throughout history. I don’t fault her for cashing in on the current foolishness. Let the sucker(s) beware. It will wind up in the bargain bin soon enough. Nothing is so entertaining as the follies and stupidity of the so-called intelligentsia.
Professor String is a knothead (ahem).
We have a black, female Supreme Court justice who doesn’t know what a woman is. Then there is that silly, black lesbian that remains the Whitehouse spokes-them. Finally, we have the bagman of Silicon Valley–Kamala Harris (I say “bagman,” because “bagwoman” means something else entirely). The Biden Administration is saturated with women of extinction.
It’s not helping black women to parade the most insane black women possible through our national awareness, but Joe found a way. There are better black women but not in the Democrat Party.
Diogenes—-Excellent comment.
Why is it these people seem like the most miserable people on the planet? They seem to be obsessed with their own misery. They relish it. Roll around in it.
Ever occur to her, her poor relations with men might just be her bad choices in men? I have known more than a few women who have the same problem. Rather than date the “nice” guy, they date the wanker, get hurt and then wonder why.
Fatphobia? Do we have to point out all the health issues with the obesity epidemic in American society? The costs both physical and financial.