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I hope everyone is really clear that if you are a supervisor in a workplace and serious harassment happens under your supervision and you knew about it and did nothing: you are part of the problem.
Homophobia on your watch and with your knowledge is your homophobia.
Homophobia on your watch and with your knowledge is your homophobia.
Also: bringing up someone’s progressive stance on race issues to downplay their participation in homophobia is anti-Black. It uses hetcis Black people as a shield and it erases queer Black people.
So let me be really clear: a lot of astronomers believe that new evidence has been uncovered that James Webb has been unfairly maligned as a homophobe. The evidence actually shows:
- he wasn’t the first homophobe (shock)
- after 1950 he knew about it, was in charge, did nothing
- he wasn’t the first homophobe (shock)
- after 1950 he knew about it, was in charge, did nothing
I hope what we are NOT seeing as his Wiki page gets “cleansed” is a bunch of non-Black, hetcis astronomers informing us that they believe that as long as a manager didn’t initiate the homophobia or was nice to Black people, they aren’t responsible for homophobia on their watch
That would be a tremendously terrible message to send to students, especially queer Black students, about your values and/or reading comprehension.
It’s also documented that Webb had regular close contact with Truman, the President who oversaw both the red scare and the lavender scare, so the suggestion that he was a little admin who wasn’t in the thick of the political mix is actually a joke
I want to make a comment here also about doing history: it is an interpretive process. The fact that we have a memo from 1950 that indicates Webb’s knowledge of the program means he knew *at least* as early as 1950. That’s actually not a proven record of him finding out!
As an insider to the Truman administration it is completely reasonable to entertain the possibility and even believe it is likely that Webb was aware of the administration’s specific targeting of gay people across multiple federal agencies
Anyway, keep your hetcis reading goggles if you want, I guess
So what are the useful things we learned from that blog post? What is provable is that Webb’s harm to gay people happened at the state department, not NASA, so definitely this tweet of mine requires some correction. But that doesn’t reduce the actual homophobia ... https://twitter.com/ibjiyongi/status/1332774234368733195
It is also the case that Webb was in the government during the time when these policies, like that at state, were being tested before being implemented federal government wide policy under Eisenhower soon after he took office.
As in, staying silent helped usher in the spread.
As in, staying silent helped usher in the spread.
I also haven’t gotten to the part where I mention that separately, Webb was one of the driving forces behind the development of psychological warfare as a weapon during the Cold War. From historian Audra Wolfe’s Freedom’s Laboratory: https://bookshop.org/books/freedom-s-laboratory-the-cold-war-struggle-for-the-soul-of-science/9781421439082
tl;dr in three screenshots
Ok I admit to being curious about whether the Eisenhower policy was still in place when Webb became NASA admin in 1961 because then it would mean he actually *was* responsible for this policy at NASA. Historians of science feel free to weigh in!
Ok so @MrProfChanda who has a policy background says: technically legal until *Obama* repealed it in 2017 with firings ushered out by a court case in early 1970s and security clearance rights restored in 1980: https://time.com/5922679/lavender-scare-history/
Nice archival work here from @adrianlucy https://twitter.com/adrianlucy/status/1353553104151732224
I am running out of angle for my side eye https://twitter.com/mrprofchanda/status/1353556707482468353
More evidence that the blog entry is flat out *wrong* and I am angry that queer students had to spend their time dealing with this (although Adrian’s undergrad degree in hist of sci is clearly paying off!) https://twitter.com/adrianlucy/status/1353584770593263616
