That *Vox *article has one fabulous expression that I have to remember to yoink in the future : “performative outrage”. Which is very much the MO of 4chan/the alt-right when they try, usually with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, to judo political correctness or accusations of racism and so on.
Thankfully, because these chucklefucks don’t actually have the values they ostensibly profess to embrace and don’t understand them in the least, it typically ends in self-pwnage to the point of unwitting parody.
I’m not outraged but there does appear to be a double standard in play.
Jeong claims her tweets (and there is an exhaustive supply) were in the name of satire and she was firing right back at the trolls who have targeted her with their racist bile. But she never meant a word of any of it.
Viewing the tweets through that lens, I’m actually inclined to believe her.
That being said, I could see how someone can take umbrage to her statements -not due to the nature of being a delicate snowflake- but because of the apparent hypocrisy of the situation.
Trevor Noah can take heat from a joke from years ago despite his claim that it doesn’t reflect how he feels and that the joke was done in the name of comedy. Similarly Roseanne Barr loses her sitcom gig though she claimed -amongst other excuses- that her thought process was clouded due to a recent dose of Ambien.
I’m not calling for Jeong’s head and had never heard of her prior to the current uproar-du-jour. As to whether the Times wishes to keep her in their employ is their call and I care nary a whit.
All the same, this strikes me as a double standard in that when someone from our side does it, it can be easily brushed aside but when someone on the other side does the same, they are vile mother fuckers.
Of course there’s a fucking double standard at play. It this particular case, the two standards are:
The one owned by shitstains like Sully, aggro asshole trolls, and terrified fragile white people, particularly men…
…and the one owned by slightly-built women of color who experience astoundingly vile racist and misogynist bigotry on the daily.
This whole teapot-tempest is yet another attempt to silence a woman, to marginalize a POC, to desperately stab a finger in the dike holding back social equity before white men are no longer able to call every fucking shot in this country. Along the way, it’s a fun way to continue to disparage and dismantle the press, the Left, and democracy. It’s part and parcel of the rise of (White) authoritarianism in the US, and it’s deeply saddening.
.
This doesn’t seem to be an isolated case of her merely blowing off steam in frustration… that could be forgiven, if not condoned. These hateful tweets happened over a period of two years.
It seems to me that attacking the messengers as alt-right is a weak defense, unless the facts (albeit not the supporting narrative) are actually false. Better to just address the situation on its merits.
Her own words from the Vox article:
Twitter’s a medium where comments are in a superposition of direct interaction and public statement. And in any written medium it can be difficult to recognize sarcasm or satire. Given the racist and misogynist baiting that she has certainly been exposed to, I can see how this happened. If she had refused to apologize I think it would be troubling. But she has apologized and acknowledged that it’s really a poor idea to respond to baiting with generalizations that would constitute racial hate speech if directed toward any other race. I think that settles it for me. I think the idea that non-whites cannot be racist is wrong, but the harm is obviously asymmetric. It’s not hypocritical that tolerance and standards are asymmetric.
The only hypocrisy I do see here is in the fact that context matters. That isn’t a principle that I have seen consistently applied.
I haven’t checked it out, but these days, your thoughts on this are well worth keeping in mind.
They’re not hateful; they’re satirical. Sullivan has carefully cherrypicked them to make it look like she’s just randomly spouting off racism. In reality, she was replying sarcastically to people (including Sullivan) who were unironically making racist arguments, such as the age-old canard about black people being less intelligent.
You’d think a long-time member of this board would know sarcasm when he sees it, but that’s conservatives for you.
And there it is. She was being insulted and trolled and it pissed her off.
End of story.
“Angry” != “hateful.”
She’s sometimes angry. She has every right to be. She’s not hateful. To portray her as such–to say that her words are unforgivable, forsooth!–is to dismiss and marginalize her, and that’s far more contributory to harm than any of her tweets.
And it sounds to me like Jeong herself might agree, based on some of her own words in the article BigT and Jackmannii linked to and Riemann quoted.
No doubt OP didn’t realize at the time, but it’s worth noting that the title of this thread is factually incorrect, since she has sincerely apologized.
Butbutbut…not for being a RACIST!!!11!
…which she also patently is not. So that’s two out of four claims in the thread title alone. At least she is a writer, and has been hired by the NYT. So, yanno, .500 is plenty enough to get into Cooperstown.
.
How much of this controversy is manufactured outrage and how much of it is typical rightie irony-impairment, that is, the inability of people to differentiate stupid stuff being said for effect to ridicule people who say stupid stuff for real and stupid stuff being said for real?
Look, I’ve passed on an example of a tweet of hers that, taken in isolation, looks racist as all get out.
And more to the point, it’s one of the tweets where Sully did exactly that: he took it in isolation, and used it as an example of her anti-white hatred.
But once you see the context, it’s quite the opposite. It’s calling him out on an ethic of ‘examine and debate anything’ that gave him rein to ‘debate’ the controversy of how blacks supposedly are dumber than whites, and take an active role in promoting racism passed off as science by giving it a far more visible platform than it deserved.
And she exposed that fallacy by effectively asking if he’d be up to debating the notion that whites, being genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, are only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.
Anti-white hatred? No: a demonstration of how Andrew Sullivan is full of shit.
That was in 2014. And here in 2018, Andrew Sullivan proves that he is still full of shit by claiming that quote is evidence of racism and anti-white hate.
So IMHO, if you’re still saying, look, there were whole bunches of these racist tweets, my answer is: name three. Then go back and find out what the conversation was that they were a part of. Once you’re satisfied that those three are the real McCoy that shows what a racist she is, we’ll look at 'em and see whether you did your due diligence or what. Because until recently, every tweet was 140 characters or less. They were rarely complete all by themselves, so they are incredibly easy to take out of context.
But Sully was full of shit then, and he’s full of shit now. He’s sloppy and can’t be trusted. Do your own checking, and tell us how it goes. But if you’re just going to take Sully at his word, it isn’t worth anything, and arguments based on that aren’t worth anything either.
Here’s where I differ from a lot of progressives (I am a Democrat, by the way). The mere recitation of statistics that show differences between groups is not, in and out itself, bigotry.
It would not be misandry to point out that Men are, on average, more violent than Women. It would be misandry to say “Fuck all men, they are only useful as sperm donors. I don’t give a shit about their suffering, I love to bathe in male tears.”
Dude. Context matters.
Racism and sexism are wrong. And hypocrisy is wrong. I have no problem with anyone who attacks any of these things.
But I would ask Andrew Sullivan the same thing I ask other people who take a position similar to his: Have you consistently opposed racism and sexism? Have you consistently opposed hypocrisy?
Because Sarah Jeong may be a racist and a sexist (Sullivan presents some good evidence of this) and her supporters may be hypocrites if they tolerate her actions while condemning the similar actions of others. But if Sullivan only attacks non-white people for their racism while looking the other way when white people are racist, then he’s also racist. If Sullivan only attacks women when they’re sexist while looking the other way when men are sexist, then he’s also a sexist. And if Sullivan only attacks his ideological opponents for their racism and sexism and hypocrisy while looking the other way when his ideological allies are racist or sexist or hypocritical, then he’s also a hypocrite.
The worst I can say about Sarah Jeong is that she let herself be played. She wrote some things that, taken out of context, could be used against her. This is always a risk when you parody your opposition, that those who are against you will quote your statements as if they represented your true beliefs rather than being an absurd version of your opponents’ beliefs.
In today’s world, all public figures are treated as if they were politicians. Everything you have ever said or written can be used against you, even if it means quoting things out of context, or worse, using selective editing to make it seem like you said something you really didn’t. A dishonest person could easily do the same to Andrew Sullivan. For instance, he used to give out “awards” to people whose positions he found obnoxious or ridiculous, including an award to Hugh Hewitt for his calling Barack Obama treasonous, and to John Derbyshire for hateful things he said about gays, women, and minorities. It would be easy to take these awards out of context to make it seem like Sullivan actually approved of the people he was criticizing.
I do find it ridiculous that Andrew Sullivan is criticizing anyone for supposed racism after his support of that masterpiece of pseudoscientific racism, The Bell Curve.
We’ve been assured by [del]reliable[/del] [del]credible[/del] loud sources that the New York Times is “fake”. Therefore we need to drop the thread title’s accuracy down to .400.