The professor at Rutgers University who thinks time is a white construct advanced a new theory this week: Trump voters caused the Chinese Virus pandemic.
Brittney Cooper, whose research interests include “Hip Hop Feminisms” and “Hip Hop Studies,” unbosomed herself of the opinion in a lengthy Twitter thread.
Whites are depraved, she tweeted recently, a sentiment she followed a week later with a tweetstorm that included multiple F-bombs and offered the charitable sentiment: “F*** each and every Trump supporter. You absolutely did this.”
The Tweets
Why Cooper doesn’t think the Chinese did it, given that the virus originated in China and spread from there, is anyone’s guess, but she offered a somewhat dismal diagnosis of President Trump and his supporters.
They are stupid.
They are evil.
They hate blacks.
Blacks are terrified.
Cooper’s latest rampage began on or about April 23 when she tweeted something particularly nasty or idiotic, then deleted it.
“I have thought better of it and deleted that last tweet because my anger shouldnt jeopardize my loved ones,” she wrote. “But the depths of white depravity — the adamant refusal to be swayed by facts, reason or the value of life itself, especially when those lives are Black — it staggers me.”
A week later, she unleashed a torrent of invective that would have ended in deplatforming for a white conservative.
“I feel like most Black people are clear that this utterly absurd to push to re-open the country is all about a gross necropolitical calculation that it is Black people who are dying disproportionately from COVID,” she tweeted to open her attack on whites and conservatives.
Not only do white conservatives not care about Black life, but my most cynical negative read of the white supremacists among them is that they welcome this massive winnowing of Black folks in order to slow demographic shifts and shore up political power.
Earlier this week I watched a white high school classmate defending Trump on the disinfectant BS. And I realized again that for his supporters, realizing just how wrong they were about this man, and the depths of his idiocy and depravity, is akin to an existential crisis for them
They are literally willing to die from this clusterf*cked COVID response rather than admit that absolutely anybody other than him would have been a better president. And when whiteness has a death wish, we are all in for a serious problem.
How serious is the problem? “Now we all live in daily fear.”
Cooper does not, apparently, live in enough daily fear to stop targeting people she clearly thinks are dangerous, but anyway, then came the attack on Trump supporters. Most, of course, are white:
I am saying some obvious things this morning because as a country we are too good at skipping over the audience and we might as well say this to people as often as we can. F*** each and every Trump supporter. You all absolutely did this. You are to blame.
Black Lives Matter. Black Lives with hypertension, diabetes, and asthma matter. Fat Black Lives matter. All Black Lives matter.
When conservative media publicized the deranged rant, Cooper stood her ground.
“One of the ways patriarchy works is by harassing and threatening women who speak in public into silence, she fired back. “Clearly my inbox and various social media forums are a mess, since right wing media called out their goons yesterday to chastise me for saying ‘f*** Trump supporters.’”
The thing is: I said what I meant. Trump has botched the handling of COVID. Tens of thousands of people had died, a risk that could have been mitigated if he had taken intelligence briefings seriously. Responsibility falls on him. And those who put him in office.
So I said what I meant. And I curse cuz I’m grown. I disdain every person who thought and thinks he’s a good leader, because that thinking has had material consequences for far too many of us.
Cooper warned those displeased with her take on the pandemic that she reports “threats to law enforcement,” and that she is a tenured professor. “Rutgers won’t be firing me for tweets.”
“Law enforcement” is likely quite busy answering Cooper’s complaints given that she lives in “daily fear.”
Time People
Last spring, Cooper’s hang-up was time. Punctuality, she opined, was a white dude’s thing.
“If time had a race, it would be white,” she wrote. “White people own time” because “time comes out of histories of European and Western thought.”
The “white, male European philosophers [who] first thought to conceptualize time and history” declared that blacks were “outside of history.”
Time, she declared, was “stolen from people of color.”
Trump supporters hope Cooper doesn’t find out they use watches and clocks.
Image: screenshot from Twitter feed
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
