I find this article to be partially convincing. I say partially for two reasons:
1) Not knowing Judith Butler and not being an academic myself, I don’t have knowledge that Butler’s anti-racist beliefs are definitively false and that she is definitively appropriating the position of the person of color. This article is not able to give me that knowledge.
2) I can’t claim from reading this piece that Butler’s speech is indicative of Butler’s positioning of normalizing White dominance in all fields of scholarship.

I do acknowledge that refusing an award for the reason of racism would call for the ally action of exposing one’s racial privilege in academia though. When one does not reject privilege in speaking at an award ceremony, complimenting organizations that represent the marginalized does not cut it and comes off as namedropping.

Now I do think Judith Butler is brave to a certain extent. I think she may potentially be awarded for her identification with “a Judaism that is not associated with state violence” as a scholar hired by an American public university institution.
If she had centred her refusal of the award with an anti-Zionist speech and talked about her racial privilege of being a Jewish American, she would have been off the hook for showing up at the award ceremony to normalize her white privilege in academia.

Ideally, I would have really wanted to see her demanding universities to deal with the lack of faculty members who are critical race theorists of colour, demanding the expansion of critical race theory programs and demanding the inclusion of geopolitics and imperialism into Gender and Sexualities curriculum. Making all three demands would require her to deconstruct some of her privileges. Perhaps she can even go as far as to critique some of the unethical investments of faculty pension plans.

Once again, thank you Pauline! I am glad you wrote this piece! If you are writing along a similar theme, I think it would be very effective to see if Judith Butler has, in another instance, talked about a particular oppression that she doesn’t experience and commended the specific oppressed peoples in their struggles, when she could have exposed her particular privilege(s) that the specific oppressed people do not have, in a system that produces various forms of oppression.

Though Butler et al. have been quite successful in doing away with the very concept of fact – which leaves them well-nigh unimpeachable.

Mark Isola’s point about the increasing irrelevance of the Academy is spot-on, at least in the Humanities. Thanks for pointing me to his work.