U. North Georgia Student Says Textbook Claims That Christianity is a ‘White Supremacist Group’
“I think American academia needs a definite reevaluation, especially in our textbooks, as we can see from my prime example.”
This will be news to the millions upon millions of black Americans who are faithful Christians.
The College Fix reports:
Christian student pays $100 for textbook that says she’s a ‘white supremacist’
A Christian student at the University of North Georgia says she paid about $100 for an assigned textbook that teaches Christianity is a “white supremacist group.”
However, the university contends she misinterpreted the passage.
In an interview Thursday with Fox News, senior Kelbie Murphy said what she read in the book upset her.
“I don’t want people who don’t know who Jesus is or who don’t know what Christianity is to take this and run with this and see Christians as a U.S.-based white supremacist group,” she said.
The textbook is “International Public Relations: Negotiating Culture, Identity, and Power,” published in 2007 by authors Thomas Gaither of Elon University and Patricia Curtin of the University of Oregon.
Murphy read the section that upset her in a TikTok video she posted in September. The beginning of Chapter 8 states: “An internet search produces the following modifier for identity: corporate, sexual, digital, public, racial, national, brand, and even Christian (a U.S.-based white supremacist group).”
“The way it was worded, it listed several marginalized groups, but then only called Christians to be white supremacists,” Murphy told Fox News. “But the scariest thing is that the book was written in 2007.”
That means students have been reading the passage for almost two decades – yet “it was never questioned,” she said. “I think American academia needs a definite reevaluation, especially in our textbooks, as we can see from my prime example.”
In her TikTok video, Murphy says she “might get canceled” for complaining online about the textbook. Addressing non-Christian college students, she says emphatically that she is “not a white supremacist.”
“Can we cancel these authors?” she asks in the video. “Are we going to cancel me?”
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Comments
No one here is surprised in any manner to learn of this. Most current academics have accepted Leftism as their Lord and Savior.
OMG.
What an incredible coincidence, I just yesterday looked up “zeugma,” after not having encountered it since high school 60 years ago… and this article today trips over one.
“An internet search produces the following modifier for identity: corporate, sexual, digital, public, racial, national, brand, and even Christian (a U.S.-based white supremacist group).”
The zeugma word here is “identity.” It has to be distributed among all the following terms.
The sentence is saying that if you search for the compound term “X identity,” you find “corporate identity,” “sexual identity,” and so on, and the last example is “Christian Identity.” This is indeed the name of a white supremacist group.
This is another case of “niggardly” — and this time, a white Christian (and apparently Fox News) are the niggards,
That makes perfect sense. But what percentage of the population has any idea what zeugma means and how it would be constructed in a sentence? I have never heard of that word, and I don’t know that I’ve ever read and understood what that construct is. Maybe it’s an educational failing.
I read that list as each of those being different types of identities (a sexual identity, a Christian identity, not sexual identity, Christian Identity). It would be helpful to see a picture of that passage and its context. I also wonder if it said modifiers instead of modifier. I think the plural would help.
The more you know.
Count me as one who has not previously heard of the word “zeugma.” And I thought I was well-educated. 🙂
Had a HS Freshman English teacher who for some reason felt it was worthwhile to drill us on a large number of obscure rhetorical forms and their meanings. Ellipsis, paralepsis, syllepsis… At 14, we found terms like zeugma and oxymoron hilarious.
The point is to recognize the grammar of the sentence and parse it correctly. One can do that without knowing what weird thing it’s called. In fact, I had to do exactly that myself, first, before I THEN recognized it as being a zeugma. If I had read this sentence last week, I still would have understood it properly, I just wouldn’t have known it had a funny name.
Plus, I will admit, it helped a lot that I happened to be familiar with Christian Identity, which most people would not be.
Have some madeira, m’dear.
Except even if valid, it’s conflating Christian identity with Christian Identity. The latter are those who believe (amongst other things) that God’s Chosen People are the descendants of the ancient Israelites, specifically only Celtic and Germanic peoples. It’s thought that somewhere between 2,000 to 50,000 believe this nonsense.
By contrast those whose identity is Christian, who have a Christian identity, ranges somewhere from 2.3 billion down to tens of millions.
While the Identity (uppercase) version is more common in search results, identity (lowercase) results also appear. Perhaps it’s just me, but it seems odd that a group compromising perhaps only a couple thousand are far far more dominant in results than those who at a minimum comprise tens of millions!
Given racial identity can be supremacist, and sexual identity can be supremacist, the qualification seems unnecessarily inflammatory.
It’s not conflating anything. It’s pointing out that the word “identity” has a confusing multitude of possible meanings, including that of a white supremacist group.
Here is the passage, at the beginning of Chapter 8 :
So they did use the plural.
So the passage is perfectly clear to anyone who is capable of reading English. This student is either illiterate or deliberately inciting hatred where it doesn’t exist, for fun and profit.
The student is an idiot, and anyone promoting her idiocy is a liar. The textbook CORRECTLY says that “Christian Identity” is a white-supremacist neo-nazi group. That is a fact. The book does not say, or in any way imply, anything at all about Christians or Christianity.
In fact the members of Christian Identity aren’t even Christians, since they would have thrown Jesus and all his disciples into a gas chamber.
The passage just says those whose identity is Christian are members of “a U.S.-based white supremacist group”. Now maybe further in the textbook clarifies that Christian Identity =/= Christian identity, but it’s not clear.
Note I’m saying this as someone whose identity is Christian, and as someone who’s known a number of Yellow and Brown folk whose identity has been Christian. Whiteness is not a requirement to have a Christian identity, but not enough to meet the requirements for Christian Identity!