More Toxic Books

Citation injustice—and a Congressional toilet coda

In my last report I offered you some useful categories into which we can sort different forms of hate publications: books with Nazi colors on their covers, other inherently racist books, and books by white women who don’t transition their kids. The remaining titles I’m recommending you never read are unfortunately so harmful they defy classification.

They do however have one thing in common: citation injustice. This is one of the most rampant forms of Nazi praxis on earth yet somehow rarely seems to come up in the conversation about how we fight fascism. The University of Maryland’s library research guide identifies citation justice as “the act of citing authors based on identity to uplift marginalized voices with the knowledge that citation is a form of power in a patriarchal society based on white supremacy.”

Therefore, to cite someone not on behalf of their marginalized credentials, or to quote them based on their ideas rather than their immutable characteristics, is injustice. It boggles the mind that you can still scour someone’s endnotes and bibliography and find zero evidence of each entry’s race, gender identity, or whether they’re part of the underserved kink community. It goes without saying that academic inquiries into medicine, history, and art should no longer be funded if they do not explicitly center our political priorities of diversity and inclusion. But until we end the material harm that arises from overlooking, say, indigenous knowledge of engineering or POC interpretations of the Parthenon frieze, there will be no research equity. In order to correct the imbalance and redistribute the power, we’re not going to mention the names of any of the corrupt wordsmiths that follow.

Citation justice comes up in the phallocentric critique of the fallacy known as Cancel Culture, The Canceling of the American Mind (2023). Written by a First Amendment lawyer and a Gen Z traitor, this manifesto against deplatforming claims that emotional reasoning, dodging arguments, and never admitting you might be wrong are somehow bad. It would have us believe that journalism should be objective rather than ideologically pure and that there is anything wrong with Harvard’s Democrat-to-Republican ratio being eight-eight to one. I hope my own alma mater matches that but have never been more proud to see it rank 187 out of 203 in terms of free speech. Allowing open discussion after all invalidates our experiences. Dream on if you expect us to aspire to psychologically mature ideals like self-regulation. The locus of control is always external! Threaten us with incorrect words, and we will cut you.

Imagine being so violent as to write a book called Liberal Bullies: Inside the Mind of the Authoritarian Left (2024). This one’s by a social psychologist with some theory that the original studies proving right-wingers were more authoritarian than us were unintentionally skewed. Apparently if you change “Do you believe in police force to subdue riots” to “Do you believe in police force to subdue anti-vaxxers”, liberals turn out to be heavier-handed than libertarians. Well duh. The mighty state always knows best if We the Degreed are in charge of identifying who’s extremist. And when it comes to making sure the party seizes the means of cultural, political, and economic production, it’s especially important to eliminate the dissenters in your ranks. Listen, RFKJ might be into regenerative agriculture and getting the tartrazine we love out of our food, but criticizing our Democratic selection process and our allyship with big pharma leaves us no option but to keep you off the ballot and smear you to death with soundbites.

Speaking of police force, while it can be useful for crushing the uneducated and those posting TERF content, there is no excuse for sharing disagreeable data on crime. Enter one of those unconscionable Latinos who wouldn’t last ten minutes on Bluesky. He tries to use “facts” to show that poverty and homicide rates do not run in parallel. Criminal (In)justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most (2022) could not be more bloated with such misinformation if he tried. How can he not call 0.03% of arrests resulting in gunfire an epidemic? How can he cite Roland Fryer’s study on the lack of racial bias in police shootings—or the 2016-19 NYPD homicide reports that show 86.2% of victims and 89.7% of perpetrators were Black or Hispanic? The answer to all of these questions is the author’s racism. Those of us who have skimmed the findings of Critical Race Theory know that people in high-crime neighborhoods would never want more cops, because “high-crime neighborhood” itself is racist. End of.

It is a form of murder to mention cis white conservative women but sometimes resistance must win. Heather MacDonald, like the aforementioned unnamed author, weaponizes statistics in order to distract us from white supremacy’s responsibility for every aggressive act. She contrasts America’s twelve (mostly black) student deaths (mostly by black perpetrators) in 2021 to the twenty-seven who died in drive-by shootings (among the 100 shot) in Chicago alone the same year. She uses racist math to find, “A police officer is about 400 times as likely to be killed by a black suspect as an unarmed black is to be killed by a police officer.” And she devotes an entire chapter to the “grim and ignored body count” of black homicide victims, as if gang members who pull the trigger are at fault. Then there’s the lie in When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives (2023) about MCATs having anything to do with medical aptitude. And the absurd notion that the docents at the Art Institute of Chicago offered visitors anything valuable before they were all fired to achieve equity. When the role of art is to make the viewer feel seen, what is the point of eighty retired Karens who studied for a year to pass a volunteers’ exam when all they do is project whiteness? Oh, and just because the drama department at Julliard is 50% black does not mean anything has changed since slavery.

All these toxic books. I had about five more I was going to share with you—vicious attacks on groupthink, narcissism, and our glorious apocalyptic climate cult—but I am exhausted from carrying the burden of having to explain the writings of fascists. And I don’t think any of you can handle hearing “lifelong environmentalist” Michael Shellenberger mansplain the difference between nuclear energy and nuclear bombs. If one more person tries to say Extinction Rebellion aren’t totally accurate with their science, I swear to God…

Time to hold space for myself.

But one last thing, given the latest conflagration in Congress: bathrooms are constructs. Why does a random floor plan have to determine what a bathroom is? It may have a toilet in it, but when you take a selfie in the same room it becomes a photography studio. Has Nancy Mace never heard of an apartment conversion where a bathroom became a hallway? I once had a roommate who took so long in the shower I had to pee in the kitchen sink. No amount of bleach meant the kitchen hadn’t fully transitioned.

Plus, politicians verbally defecate all the time, which isn’t necessarily problematic since so do queer theorists. If you think about it, feces of all consistencies are queer because they disrupt systemic assumptions about solid mass. Universal scatology rights to abolish plumbing normativities. End potty-training and encourage children to share their stories of their compostable matter.

Let the educated relieve themselves anywhere and everywhere—and wipe themselves, if they must, with the pages of toxic books. You can cite me on that.