(np) When Racism Is Fit to Print

Tue Aug 7 18:52:48 CDT 2018

Ah yes. The ever reliable Andrew "Give Phrenology a Chance" Sullivan,
pretending not to know that Jeong was engaging in a game of racist
tit-for-tat, throwing a mutated form of the racism daily hurled her
way by the angry, frustrated meat-whites right back in their puffy,
squinched up faces, in order to make them see how THEY like it,
especially when coming from an intelligent and creative young woman
with a playful mean streak a mile wide.

I mean,is he seriously suggesting that there might be some insight to
be gleaned by "replacing the word white" in Jeong's tweets "with any
other racial group"?! As if precisely this variety of honking
racialist cant doesn't already make up a full third of all online
communication? and as if that wasn't precisely what Jeong was/is
reacting to in the first fucking place?!

And finally, I think it is also worth noting that despite reading
dozens of "think" pieces on the Jeong "scandal", I have yet to
encounter anything that even comes within shooting distance of the
strawman constructs Sullivan conjures up here ("Asians CAN'T be racist
claim lefties!"), nor have i noticed anyone IRL making such claims
(and I know a LOT of very gabby, opinionated lefties).

J.

On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 5:59 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> * ... Another indicator that these statements might be racist comes from replacing the word “white” with any other racial group. #cancelblackpeople probably wouldn’t fly at the New York Times, would it? Or imagine someone tweeting that Jews were only “fit to live underground like groveling goblins” or that she enjoyed “being cruel to old Latina women,” and then being welcomed and celebrated by a liberal newsroom. Not exactly in the cards.
>
> But the alternative view — that of today’s political left — is that Jeong definitionally cannot be racist, because she’s both a woman and a racial minority. Racism against whites, in this neo-Marxist view, just “isn’t a thing” — just as misandry literally cannot exist at all. And this is because, in this paradigm, racism has nothing to do with a person’s willingness to pre-judge people by the color of their skin, or to make broad, ugly generalizations about whole groups of people, based on hoary stereotypes. Rather, racism is entirely institutional and systemic, a function of power, and therefore it can only be expressed by the powerful — i.e., primarily white, straight men. For a nonwhite female, like Sarah Jeong, it is simply impossible. In the religion of social constructionism, Jeong, by virtue of being an Asian woman, is one of the elect, incapable of the sin of racism or group prejudice. All she is doing is resisting whiteness and maleness, which indeed require resistance every second of the day.
>
> That’s why Jeong hasn’t apologized to the white people she denigrated or conceded that her tweets were racist. Nor has she taken responsibility for them. Her statement<https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/1025050118989332480> actually blames her ugly tweets on trolls whose online harassment of her prompted her to respond in turn. She was merely “counter-trolling.” She says her tweets, which were not responses to any individual, were also “not aimed at a general audience,” and now understands that these tweets were “hurtful” and won’t do them again. The New York Times also buys this argument<https://twitter.com/NYTimesPR/status/1025048766825549830>: “her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time, she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.”
>
> Let me explain why I think this is the purest of bullshit. If you want to respond to trolls by trolling them, you respond to them directly. You don’t post slurs about an entire race of people (the overwhelming majority of whom are not trolls) on an open-forum website like Twitter. And these racist tweets were not just a function of one sudden exasperated vent at a harasser; they continued for two years. Another tweet from 2016 has her exclaiming<https://twitter.com/realsarahjeong/status/1025154748452757504>: “fuck white women lol.”
>
> None of this excuses the behavior of the online hordes that are seeking her head. When media companies give in to those mobs, they are just feeding a voracious beast. It’s worth noting, however, that Jeong has a long record<https://www.dailywire.com/news/33976/irony-social-media-mob-comes-sarah-jeong-who-ben-shapiro> of cheering online mobs when they target people she dislikes. “Is there anything more tedious than media navel-gazing over ‘outrage mobs’?” she tweeted <https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/964948224300609536?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E964948224300609536&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailywire.com%2Fnews%2F33976%2Firony-social-media-mob-comes-sarah-jeong-who-ben-shapiro> earlier this year.
>
> And I don’t think the New York Times should fire her — in part because they largely share her views on race, gender, and oppression. Their entire hiring and editorial process is based on them. In their mind, Jeong was merely caught defending herself. As Vox writer Zack Beauchamp put it: “A lot of people on the internet today [are] confusing the expressive way antiracists and minorities talk about ‘white people’ with actual race-based hatred, for some unfathomable reason.” I have to say that word “expressive” made me chuckle out loud. (But would Beauchamp, I wonder, feel the same way if anti-racists talked about Jews in the same manner Jeong talks about whites? Aren’t Jews included<https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/are-jews-white/509453/> in the category of whites?)
>
> The editors of the Verge, where Jeong still works, described any assertion of racism in Jeong’s tweets as “dishonest and outrageous<https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/2/17644878/the-verge-new-york-times-sarah-jeong>,” a function of bad faith and an attack on journalism itself. Scroll through left-Twitter and you find utter incredulity that demonizing white people could in any way be offensive. That’s the extent to which loathing of and contempt for “white people” is now background noise on the left. What many don’t seem to understand is that their view of racism isn’t shared by the public at large, and that the defense of it by institutions like the New York Times will only serve to deepen the kind of resentment that gave us Trump. Last night, for instance, Fox News made the most of the Times’ excuses<https://www.mediaite.com/print/tucker-calson-rips-nyt-defense-of-angry-bigot-sarah-jeong-its-all-so-ugly-and-awful/> for race-baiting.
>
> Yes, we all live on campus now. The neo-Marxist analysis of society, in which we are all mere appendages of various groups of oppressors and oppressed, and in which the oppressed definitionally cannot be at fault, is now the governing philosophy of almost all liberal media. That’s how the Washington Post can provide a platform for raw misandry<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men/2018/06/08/f1a3a8e0-6451-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html?utm_term=.accd23eef0b2>, and the New York Times can hire and defend someone who expresses racial hatred. The great thing about being in the social justice movement is how liberating it can feel to give voice to incendiary, satisfying bigotry — and know that you’re still on the right side of history ... *
>
> https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/sarah-jeong-new-york-times-anti-white-racism.html
>
> --
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