If old white men feel maligned, they should take their own advice to minorities, Alyssa Rosenberg, Washington Post, June 2, 2014

If older white men feel maligned, they might try taking some of the recommendations that they routinely offer to people of color and women who want to better their lot. These suggestions are often presented as radically simple solutions to centuries of structural inequality. In reality, they function mostly as an attempt to make people with legitimate grievances less irritating to the powerful figures who might be expected to respond to their demands.

Africa Is Not a Derailment Tactic: Why Belittling ‘First World Problems’ Is Oppressive, Sian Ferguson, Everyday Feminism, July 11, 2014

Sometimes people will say that feminists should focus on women’s rights violations in the Middle East instead of tackling the pay gap. When Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson made homoantagonistic remarks, the comment section on a number of US-based news pages echoed a similar sentiment: “Well, at least you’re not in Uganda right now.”

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Although the wording changes, the central message is the same: The issue you’re discussing isn’t important because others – usually people in developing countries­ – are suffering.

These comments might be well-intended, but ultimately they perpetuate different forms of oppression.

Not only do comments like this derail important conversations – they appropriate suffering in developing countries to avoid being introspective about one’s own culture. [Emphasis in original.]

Feynman is not my hero, Saramoira Shields, Mathematigal, July 14, 2014

There has been some discussion going around about the character of physics heavyweight Richard Feynman, and whether we should really be treating him as an idol when he has such a well-documented history of terrible behavior towards women.

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[E]very time I hear someone in my department or in one of my classes go on about how Feynman was so awesome I mean he was kind of a jerk to women but whatever, I file him (and it is almost always always a him) away as someone who would have sided against me in every single one of the situations I’ve mentioned. Every time I see a joking tweet or post about how Feynman’s second wife divorced him because she didn’t like that he was always doing calculus in his head, while totally ignoring the fact that the divorce papers indicate that he would fly into a rage, attack her, and break furniture whenever she interrupted said mental calculus, my world gets a little bit smaller.