(np) When Racism Is Fit to Print

Tue Aug 7 19:14:21 CDT 2018

Thanks Mark!

Andrew Sullivan is a veneered over asshole whom I avoid wherever possible.
He has always been given much more attention than he deserves.

David Morris

On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 6:53 PM Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
> >
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>