(np) When Racism Is Fit to Print

Tue Aug 7 20:43:17 CDT 2018

Plus, you deliver a great smack down of his bullshit column

David Morris

On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 7:14 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>