* Zach Nold: "3 fatties bout to break a Honda civic… Mexicans everywhere are crying". UNL haters points out that this tweet is racist, but it fails to point out some hate towards the overweight as well. That's two-for-one.
* Zach Nold: "The Japanese class in the room that's before my French class doesn't have 1 normal human in it. . . #Asianlanguages". Yes, because speaking English is what defines us as human.
* Zach Nold: "@J_Leach33 your a gay" and "@brestewart21 I can't go to the reading tonight I have been called into work! #gay". I'm sure Nold didn't want the LGBT community to feel left out from the hate.
* Zach Nold: "@JakeNold what's with the gay tweets lately. Are you in a poetry class or something?. He continues.
The original source for all of his tweets would be his Twitter account, located here.
Zach Nold is known at UNL for writing inflammatory columns at the Daily Nebraskan. This year, for instance, he's written columns on the subject of everything from restricting the right to vote to "those who contribute to society," which in practice would exclude marginalized populations, particularly persons of color or persons in poverty, from the vote. His most recent article is an argument against feminism in which he responds to feminism's arguments without quoting a single feminist author or viewpoint. Click here to read the article.
The best article, though, is one in which he advocates that some women should avoid wearing leggings. Here's Nold's analysis on that particular question:
"When I see a girl with leggings, it's like I am seeing her naked. I can see every curve, from the slope of the calf muscle, to the rise in the hump that we like to call the lovely lady lump. Now being a ‘leg man' myself, I must say for those who have some of the finest legs I've ever seen, I don't mind looking. You are, after all, kind of bringing it on yourself. However, for the ladies whose strong point may not be their legs, please, don't wear leggings. Which leads me to my second problem.
To the unfortunate ladies who haven't been blessed with beautiful legs: lose the leggings." (Nold, 2011)
You'll notice that I used the author's full name, Zachary Nold (or Zach Nold) quite often in this entry. The reason for that is that I want this post, when it is picked up by search engines, to associate his name with racism, sexism and homophobia when future employers consider hiring him. This is the true value of the UNL Haters blog as well: people generally have no problem saying racist or sexist things when they won't be exposed, but in a world where a Google search of a name can bring up thousands of racist, sexist, homophobic little skeletons in your digital closet, people have the actual incentive to, at the very least, reconsider what they say.
And given the power of words, isn't that the point?
Works Cited
Martin, J. N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2012). Intercultural communication in contexts (6th ed). Boston, MA: McGraw Hill.
Nold, Zach (2011). "NOLD: Women might need to reconsider how to wear leggings." Retrieved from http://admin.collegepublisher.com/preview/mobile/2.3308/2.3912/1.2433629.
(2012). UNL Haters. Retrieved from http://unl-haters.tumblr.com/.
You bring up a good point about stereotypes on weight. It's so common to focus on race that we often overlook weight discrimination. That will be an increasingly important issue in the United States as we deal with multifaceted issue of obesity.
ReplyDeleteYes! Great point with your final paragraph as well. Resistance is not just about face-to-face confrontation and speaking up and out about hate. That's certainly a part of it, but resistance can be more subtle and more covert, such as your suggestion of using Zach Nold's name throughout the blog to create connections between the digital skeletons of hate. Definitely gave me a lot to think about in terms of conceptualizing resistance and responses to hate.
ReplyDelete