To Whom
Let’s workshop this university letter (which comes from the story "Mario Mangione") that details why it is a matter of equity that Mario's sexual writings be seen a oppressive lane violations
scent of the day: Salvador Dali Pour Homme, by Salvador Dali.—Salvador Dalí Pour Homme—an anisic riff on the animalic and mossy and honied powerhouses from the 80s (Think: Lapidus Pour Homme)—opens with an aromatic blast of mentholated herbs (lavender, tarragon, anise, basil) and bright citruses (bergamot, tangerine, lemon) supported by a soil-dominant amber base (think: Figment Man) of moldering underbrush (rooty vetiver, forest-floor moss, Zino-Davidoff-style patchouli) and sensual woodiness (smokey cedarwood, creamy sandalwood) from which a variety of flowers sprout (almondy heliotrope, civety-pissy jasmine, ferny-rosey geranium, dewy-grassy lily of the valley)—the full polarizing package, a testament to an anti-pussy era, bringing to my mind for some reason blue porta-potty water.
To Whom
Mario Mangione is not a victim of a double standard. The university operates within a framework of equitable discrimination. The distinction between fair and unfair discrimination is crucial, one that Mario fails to grasp. Is it appropriate to cast only Black actors as Malcolm X, even though that means excluding white participants from auditions? Surely it is. That is fair discrimination. The crucial point is that Malcolm X is Black. Now, what about Mario’s participation in sex culture? What about all the sexual writings that precipitated his termination? Was it fair for the university to discriminate against him here? Yes. Mario holds, and will continue to hold (however his luck might fluctuate), all the power. How could he not in a white supremacist nation? That is the crucial point here. We do not chastise Black students and Black faculty members for using the n-word. But we do chastise white students and white faculty members. Graphic content is no different. Graphic content, coming from someone with Mario’s identity, only serves to demoralize. Privilege disqualifies certain expressions for the protection of the most vulnerable! Mario’s writings, evaluated in relation to his problematic optics, are downright hair-raising. It does not matter if the poems were done, as he often likes to repeat, “off the clock.” They amount to a predatory form of punching down, pure and simple.
Mario laments, to quote his “Letter of Grievance,” a “dystopian world where we censor and punish even comedians for their jokes.” Clearly Mario has not reflected on the difference between punching up and punching down, a difference fundamental to any understanding of equity. His own whiteness blocks him from making the effort to try. That same whiteness does not allow him to see that there is no inconsistency, no unfairness, when “the same university that reprimands [him] for the sexual themes in [his] artwork at the same time sends out mass-emails promoting drag performances.” Yes, these are Mario’s own words from his letter. They are telling words. They give us quite a stark glimpse into a mind of alt-right bigotry hiding behind academic degrees and publishing accolades. Just so everyone is clear, the university does promote drag shows and other diversity celebrations. These enrich our community. Mario’s contributions, in contrast, threaten it.
The hole Mario digs for himself only gets deeper. “Why does my writing create a climate of hysterical concern when Cardi B can say the same thing, throwing in a whole bunch of rump-shaking visuals, and everything is hunky-dory?” Push aside Mario’s mention of twerking here (a healing form of dance that goes back before whiteness itself), and how that reflects his disposition to indulge in a fetishizing gaze that underscores his inability to speak responsibly. Push aside as well Mario’s mention of “baby oil” and “flapping” in the very next sentence (which we refuse to quote here), and how that reflects his disposition to r*pe the Black body. Frankly, it boggles the mind how out to lunch an actual professor can be. The difference is between expressions of liberation and expressions of oppression.
There are no double standards. The reason why is simple. Mario’s identity, despite all his defensive entitlement, affords him no moral currency. His identity actually carries negative moral currency. One night of reflection upon the horrors of the Middle Passage, not to mention all the terror and exploitation perpetrated upon beautiful Black bodies (up until the subway chokeholds of the present), should suffice for anyone who calls himself an “educator” to realize this. Or perhaps Mario does realize and just does not care. Who can know for sure? All we know is that Mario continues to pen his predations, each poem accruing interest on his inherited debt.
The anti-equity ideology of 17th century white men, a self-serving ethos that fueled the most violent penetrations into the Mother Africa, has blinded Mario to seeing just how deep in the red his moral currency is. He is a Locke scholar, and it shows! Much like his “Enlightenment” idol, Mario remains mired in the delusion of neutrality even as structural supremacy shows itself a every turn. What can ever wake him up to see that he punches down, that he punches down just by going about his day—just by living as any white identity short of what critical race scholars call “white abolitionist,” the only white identity that gets white people out of the red? He denies that he has all the power. There is a term for it: “White Denial.”
Mario knows this term. Only two semesters prior to his termination Mario completed a week-long virtual course centered on the remarkable rise of just that defensive pathology. Clearly he saw that course as just a mandatory hoop to jump through. For he continually shows us who he really is, he expresses patriarchal whiteness, each move he makes to defend himself instead of listening to BIPOC voices and their allies. He wonders, for example, how white males have all the power when, as he whitesplains in his letter, “white males, despite making up around 30% of the population, account for around only 5% of new hires in the largest and most stable companies in the US over the last years.” But neither this fact, nor any other of his points, refute the antiracist thesis that whiteness exerts an indelible supremacy over the western world. Weather is not to be confused with climate, which is why a few cold summers here and there do not negate the global-warming crisis. Likewise, an array of setbacks for white males do not negate the reality of white domination.
Mario has been victimized, like the rest of the world has, by his own identity. Born into a white supremacist nation, it is hard to say how much of this is his personal fault. The department and the whole college of Liberal Arts has shown leniency for this very reason. We allowed him to finish out the semester under supervision so that he could get his affairs in order. And well before that we provided him many opportunities for growth. Even now, despite Mario turning down our offers to link him with antiracist workshops and education retreats, we wish him luck in the future. We remain sober, however. Mario has too many strikes against him for any future in this university.
Time and again, Mario has proven resistant to training. Gone are the days when whiteness guaranteed unfettered access to all spaces and narratives. Lane boundaries are to be respected now. Violators will be prosecuted! So no, Mario cannot write a black character (something he has repeatedly done, despite departmental warning). He cannot write out the n-word (something he has repeatedly done, despite departmental warning). And he definitely must cease and desist from his objectifying focus on the visual dimension of women. He cannot seem to grasp this. He continues to deny the gravity of his offenses. That leaves us no choice but to part ways for good. All we can do is wish him increased awareness, wish that he Do Better.
“To Whom” operates as a sharp satire of institutional speech surrounding identity politics, artistic expression, and the contemporary academic regime of “equity.” It adopts the form of an official university letter — complete with the sterile, bureaucratic diction of diversity departments — but imbues that form with ideological extremity, exposing the contradictions and authoritarian tendencies that arise when institutions attempt to enforce moral hierarchies via identity-based frameworks.
At its heart, the text interrogates and explodes the logic of **standpoint epistemology**, wherein truth is no longer evaluated by criteria of coherence, evidence, or argumentative rigor, but rather by the social identity of the speaker. In this framework, Mario’s racial and gendered identity (white, male, cisgender) functions not merely as a context for his work, but as a *disqualification* from the right to produce certain types of artistic content. His personhood becomes, by bureaucratic fiat, inherently oppressive, such that even when his art mirrors the tropes celebrated elsewhere — particularly in drag performance or hypersexual female rap — it is reinterpreted as “predatory,” “punching down,” or “r*ping the Black body.”
The satire’s rhetorical strategy is subtle in its mimicry: it does not adopt an obviously exaggerated voice, but rather inhabits the **real tone and idioms** of academic DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) bureaucracies. Terms like “moral currency,” “resistant to training,” and “problematic optics” are not invented caricatures but lifted directly from the language of institutional governance, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. The reference to “fair discrimination” — itself a profound oxymoron — reflects how the equity framework redefines justice as proportional reallocation of speech rights, visibility, and opportunity according to identity markers rather than behavior or merit. The claim that Mario’s writings “demoralize” by their very existence is not justified with reference to content, only to authorship — an inversion of liberal humanist values of universality, dialogue, and content-based critique.
The deeper irony is that Mario is *not*, in fact, violating norms by being transgressive. He is being punished for violating a **new orthodoxy** — one which permits transgression only by sanctioned identities. The university's support for drag shows and sexually explicit performances by marginalized artists is held up as “community enrichment,” whereas similar content from Mario is treated as “hair-raising,” “predatory,” and requiring removal. The text thus maps out a **double-bind** in which the very ethos of expressive freedom is hollowed out, re-inscribed within a framework that makes freedom conditional on background.
Equally notable is the document’s use of **racialized moral accounting**: Mario is said to possess “negative moral currency” due to historical white supremacy, slavery, and structural injustice. The invocation of “the horrors of the Middle Passage” as moral ballast against any defense he might raise illustrates how historical trauma is mobilized to override all considerations of artistic intention or the internal diversity of experience even within categories like “white male.” No acknowledgment is made that Mario may come from poverty, abuse, or marginalization of other sorts — his identity renders such possibilities invisible. This **flattening of complexity**, wherein power is treated as an ontological constant rather than a shifting and situational phenomenon, mirrors the zero-sum frameworks of Maoist cultural revolution and other ideological purges throughout history.
Furthermore, the language of therapeutic intervention (“training,” “retreats,” “resistant to growth”) casts Mario as a sort of moral defective in need of correction — a familiar pattern in totalizing ideological systems. The desire for him to “Do Better” — capitalized, as if a religious commandment — mirrors the evangelical imperative to confess and repent. But in this case, the standard of repentance is unclear and ever-shifting: Mario is punished for content that resembles, and even quotes, widely accepted mainstream culture. This marks the **Kafkaesque quality** of the satire: Mario is accused, tried, and sentenced without clear charges or criteria, except that his very identity disqualifies him from innocence.
This disciplinary logic is not only oppressive, but also reveals the **contradictions of progressive ideology** when removed from universality and placed in a purely identitarian register. The piece does not call for a return to conservative moralism; rather, it points out that the *same* puritanical logic — with its suspicion of artistic expression, its redefinition of harm in ever-expanding ways, and its obsessive boundary-policing — now animates sectors of the Left, particularly within academic and cultural institutions. The moral panic about Mario’s writing mirrors older fears about pornography and obscenity, except that now the concern is not about sexual content per se, but about who is allowed to create and disseminate it.
By adopting the format of an institutional document, the text drives home the fact that these are not fringe opinions but **mainstream positions** in today’s cultural gatekeeping apparatus. Its power lies in its mimicry of language — in the way it dramatizes how administrative culture can weaponize moralizing jargon to silence dissent and flatten art into mere propaganda. Ultimately, *“To Whom”* forces the reader to confront the question: **Can a culture survive that no longer judges expression by meaning, only by authorship?**
This piece is a dramatized exposé of how expressive license is now distributed along identitarian lines rather than artistic or moral substance. It functions as a brutal lampoon of how the equity-based reorientation of institutions permits — even demands — discrimination, but frames it as justice. The paradoxes it surfaces are not abstract but lived: who gets to say what? Who is protected, and who is punished, for the same utterance? The piece lays bare the failure of procedural liberalism to withstand the institutional capture by ideologies that reject neutrality and universality, replacing them with a theological structure of inherited guilt and selective expiation. In effect, it offers a contemporary Book of Job — except that God is an HR director, and Job is a white male artist told that suffering is his birthright and repentance alone is not enough.
standpoint epistemology, DEI critique, institutional capture, expressive asymmetry, equity dogma, moral currency, identity-based censorship, artistic silencing, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, ideological purging, race and authorship, liberalism vs progressivism, weaponized empathy, retributive equity, epistemic closure, drag vs objectification, satire of academia, totalitarian moralism, historical guilt, critical race discourse, moral absolutism.