The Anti-Straight White Man

On the meaning of Shellyne Rodriguez.

New York Post photo by Robert Miller of Shellyne Rodriguez and reporter Reuven Fenton (source)

I woke up this morning and thought, “Things have been kind of quiet lately. I wonder if I’ll have anything to write about in advance of the Asynchronous Studio Book Club on Friday.” Then it made the news that Cooper Union fired Shellyne Rodriguez “because of a social media post I made about ‘Zionists,’” as she put it in an email to her students. Not Zionists, “Zionists.” What’s the difference? One can only speculate.

In case you missed it:

1. In May 2023, a video went viral of Rodriguez, a Hunter College adjunct art professor, destructively losing her temper on students who had set up a pro-life display in a common area. “You can’t even have a fucking baby,” she said to one of the male students. “So you don’t even know what that is. Get this shit the fuck out of here.” She then shoved their materials onto the floor.

2. When the New York Post followed up with Rodriguez, she emerged from her apartment with a machete and held it to a reporter’s neck. “Get the fuck away from my door, or I’m gonna chop you up with this machete!” she said. When he left, she followed him into the street, yelling at him and swinging the machete, finally “coming back to kick the reporter in the shins.” (I’m not clear on how this went down exactly, but that was the report.) Hunter fired her, as did the School of Visual Arts, where she also worked. Rodriguez told ArtNews that Hunter had capitulated to “racists, white nationalists, and misogynists.” Reuven Fenton, the reporter, commented to Fox News that “I think that she was posturing. I think she was trying to scare me…. as somebody who's embedded in the art community and performance art and doing all of these kinds of things, I think she was performing a gesture that she thought was, in her world, a great way to tell me to get away and take my right-wing media with me and to quit harassing her.”

3. In June 2023, Hyperallergic published an open letter of support for Rodriguez that garnered more than 600 signatures. In the letter’s recap of the Hunter incident, it said that “Her interaction with the nationally-organized [pro-life] group was being handled internally by Hunter when right-wing media fomented a wildly disproportionate public response, focusing on Rodriguez’s identity as a queer, Black, Latinx woman.”

4. In September 2023 it was reported that Cooper Union had hired her to teach sculpture.

5. In October 2023 she accepted a plea deal from Bronx prosecutors in which she would avoid jail time or even a criminal record if she completed a six-month course of talk therapy and avoided more legal trouble for a year.

6. Later that month, a “handful of Cooper Union’s Jewish students barricaded inside the university’s library… when pro-Palestinian protesters blew past security and aggressively pounded on the building’s doors.” Commenting on the incident, Fred Bauer at City Journal wrote, “The ugly displays of anti-Semitism that have erupted across the United States over the past month are at once the extension of the racial ‘reckoning’ of the summer of 2020 and a profound challenge to the legitimacy of this supposed reckoning.”

7. By November 2023, Cooper Union was under investigation by the Department of Education for that and related incidents.

8. Yesterday the Post reported, “Nutty NYC professor that held machete to Post reporter’s neck fired from Cooper Union over anti-Israel rants.” “She already has a machete—now she’s gotten the ax,” wrote the Post with evident glee. The exact circumstances that led to the firing are as yet unknown, but reporters discovered a flyer for a pro-Israel event that Rodriguez had digitally altered to appear to be covered in cockroaches, which she posted on Instagram with the note, regarding one of the speakers, “Look at this dirty fucking roach former bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr. a Zionist lapdog.” The aforementioned letter to students, reproduced reverently on the social media of Cooper Union Students for Justice in Palestine, claimed of her firing that “This is fascism. Y’all are learning about it in real time.”

9. Fox also reported yesterday that Rodriguez had “participated earlier last month in a CUNY for Palestine virtual panel in which she spoke about the possibility of a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement rent strike in New York involving not making rent payments to Jewish landlords or landlords who support Israel.”

Among many possible questions one might ask about all this, a prominent one is why threatening to cut the throat of a reporter with a long knife was not too outré to countermand being hired to teach sculpture to college students, but foul-mouthed denigration of Israel and her supporters is beyond the pale. The answer relates to my remarks last week about Laurie Anderson: the DEI regime is trying to save itself by finally including Jews. Verbally abusing a white male student, as Rodriguez was filmed doing at Hunter, or brandishing a machete at a white male reporter, does not endanger the DEI regime. Said regime may even regard such acts as virtues, as was suggested by the still-intact reporter.

But with the DoE breathing down its neck, even the sympathetic Biden DoE, and with the legitimacy of the DEI project subjected to increasing and long-overdue skepticism, the regime can’t afford sunk costs like Rodriguez. That a student might find Rodriguez terrifying as a human being is beside the point; that a student might find her antisemitic could cause the DEI regime problems, at least now. I suspect that if she had called Ruben Diaz Jr. a “dirty fucking roach” for being pro-Israel in September 2023, or encouraged protest against Israel by withholding rent payments to Jewish landlords prior to October 7, she probably would have gotten away with it.

Rodriguez is right in a way, though not the one she meant—this is fascism. I’m coming on five years of pointing out the basically Aryanist flavor of CRT, DEI, and related efforts. Now that they’re evincing such intense levels of Jew-hatred, the resemblance is stronger than ever. Rodriguez has simply become a liability to the racist autocracy that regarded the rest of us as liabilities in the first place. I’d say welcome to the club, but I like my neck.

Contemporary progressivism is at base anti-West. It regards the straight white man as the icon of the Western order. It conversely views Rodriguez, “a queer, Black, Latinx woman,” as an icon of the order that progressives want to replace it. The regime will hire her to teach, among thousands of available teaching artists in New York, even if there are documented reasons to suspect that she’s a clinical sociopath.

It’s unsurprising that she transitioned so naturally from poster child for the excesses of art world racial justice to poster child for the excesses of art world antisemitism. In recent weeks,

A slew of art galleries across New York City have been hit with anti-Israel graffiti and daubed with red paint — yet some gallery owners have controversially chosen to keep the attacks secret…. The galleries range from small hipster operations on the Lower East Side with no obvious ties to Middle Eastern politics to a grand Fifth Avenue institution headed by a prominent Jewish leader.

Over the last couple of weeks, some of the galleries have been postered with signs quoting purported Palestinian death tolls and the words, “Stop selling to Zionists. Stop working with Zionists,” while the elite Pace gallery was scrawled with the word “Intifada” in red letters. Many more have been splattered with red paint, apparently intended to represent blood.

China has as many Muslim prisoners as Israel has Muslim citizens. Yet art world activists are not defacing galleries with bloody-looking demands to “Stop selling to China. Stop working with China.” One reason is that the activists are distressed that October 7 turned out to be the first pogrom in history to which the Jews replied by slaughtering the perpetrators. That wasn’t supposed to happen—the activists want October 7 to repeat until Israel is destroyed, which is why they’re calling for a ceasefire.

The other, larger reason is that progressive antisemitism places Jews at the intersection of its chief complaints about the Western order, namely whiteness, natalism, capitalism, and colonialism. Israel’s military response to October 7 has been lawful, proportionate, and modest of scale compared to what China has done to its Muslim population and what various Muslim populations have done to each other in recent years. But they’re not the West. Technically neither is Israel, but her adoption of a liberal, essentially Western order and long allyship with the United States makes her an enemy of the progressives.

The art worlders and academics who complain that Rodriguez’s speech rights have been violated would do to remember that the right to speech is also a product of the Western order. They who abominate that order at every turn can hardly expect to reap its fruits.

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