Sarah Jeong, the New York Times, and hatred indulged
Has anyone not yet figured out that professional "non-racists" can be among the most insidious racists of all?
They don't burn crosses or shoot at the homes of unwanted neighbors. But they can have far greater effect, on a far greater number of people.
They don't march, armed, through city parks. Instead, they creep in on newspaper pages and cable television broadcasts. They unspool rhetorical streams of hate in the guise of "wokeness" and "satire."
But their mission, one at which they are often successful, is corrupting public attitudes and vocabulary. As a result, while bigotry is rightly despised in some cases, it is positively celebrated as enlightened and noble when the targets are white, heterosexual, Christian men.
Former Verge writer Sarah Jeong was recently hired by the New York Times. Her history of racist tweets became a topic of debate, with some condemning them but others hailing her words as cleverly satirical.
A few loathsome citations from Jeong's tweets:
"Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on a fire hydrant."
"Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?"
Jeong also tweeted a crudely penciled graph that indicated "whiteness" being linked to "weird dog smell when it rains." She included the message: "The science is indisputable."
"Oh man. it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men."
"@RepDanMode White people have stopped breeding. You'll go extinct soon. This was my plan all along."
A couple of her tweets do seem plays on right wing messages. Reversals. perhaps to make a point. But there are others, many, that simply aren't even near satire. They stage-whisper an undergirding faith in racial bigotry.
In a New York Magazine essay, Andrew Sullivan noted that, to today's left:
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'... [I]n 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.
Later in the piece, Sullivan added:
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.
(When a Jeong-defending Mary Jane writer pontificated "Never mind that racism doesn't apply to a majority group that hasn't experienced systemic inequality and discrimination..." I was reminded of how glad I am to have never attended college.)
In a release, The Times said, in part:
We had candid conversations with Sarah as part of our thorough vetting process, which included a review of her social media history. She understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times [except it is -- they hired her] and we are confident she will be an important voice for the editorial board moving forward.
The New York Times should not fire Sarah Jeong because of the rancid racist persuasion to which she gave giggly utterance. I've argued before that no one should suffer professional sanction for statements they've made on their own time, and not related to professional status.
That holds equally true whether they are feverishly typing out tripe on a laptop or swinging a tiki torch in Charlottesville. (Besides, if The Times fired writers for anti-white racism, Charles Blow would be standing in an unemployment line.)
It's worth remark that just last week, The Times' publisher A.G. Sulzberger met with President Trump to assure him his paper really isn't biased. And now this.
Has anyone not yet figured out that professional "non-racists" can be among the most insidious racists of all?
They don't burn crosses or shoot at the homes of unwanted neighbors. But they can have far greater effect, on a far greater number of people.
They don't march, armed, through city parks. Instead, they creep in on newspaper pages and cable television broadcasts. They unspool rhetorical streams of hate in the guise of "wokeness" and "satire."
But their mission, one at which they are often successful, is corrupting public attitudes and vocabulary. As a result, while bigotry is rightly despised in some cases, it is positively celebrated as enlightened and noble when the targets are white, heterosexual, Christian men.
Former Verge writer Sarah Jeong was recently hired by the New York Times. Her history of racist tweets became a topic of debate, with some condemning them but others hailing her words as cleverly satirical.
A few loathsome citations from Jeong's tweets:
"Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on a fire hydrant."
"Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?"
Jeong also tweeted a crudely penciled graph that indicated "whiteness" being linked to "weird dog smell when it rains." She included the message: "The science is indisputable."
"Oh man. it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men."
"@RepDanMode White people have stopped breeding. You'll go extinct soon. This was my plan all along."
A couple of her tweets do seem plays on right wing messages. Reversals. perhaps to make a point. But there are others, many, that simply aren't even near satire. They stage-whisper an undergirding faith in racial bigotry.
In a New York Magazine essay, Andrew Sullivan noted that, to today's left:
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'... [I]n 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.
Later in the piece, Sullivan added:
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.
(When a Jeong-defending Mary Jane writer pontificated "Never mind that racism doesn't apply to a majority group that hasn't experienced systemic inequality and discrimination..." I was reminded of how glad I am to have never attended college.)
In a release, The Times said, in part:
We had candid conversations with Sarah as part of our thorough vetting process, which included a review of her social media history. She understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times [except it is -- they hired her] and we are confident she will be an important voice for the editorial board moving forward.
The New York Times should not fire Sarah Jeong because of the rancid racist persuasion to which she gave giggly utterance. I've argued before that no one should suffer professional sanction for statements they've made on their own time, and not related to professional status.
That holds equally true whether they are feverishly typing out tripe on a laptop or swinging a tiki torch in Charlottesville. (Besides, if The Times fired writers for anti-white racism, Charles Blow would be standing in an unemployment line.)
It's worth remark that just last week, The Times' publisher A.G. Sulzberger met with President Trump to assure him his paper really isn't biased. And now this.
posted by DC Larson at
August 03, 2018
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home