HuffPo, Slate, and Vox: “It’s okay when people of color are racists”

Let’s begin with the Oxford English Dictionary‘s definition of “racism”, which gives only a single meaning:

Note that it says nothing about which race can be guilty of bigotry; it just notes that racism is the belief in the superiority of one’s group, the idea that other groups threatens one’s “cultural identity or well being”, or that members of other races have specific defining traits. All of this leads to prejudice and antagonism. This means that all groups, regardless of who they are, can be guilty of racism.

As we know, the definition has been changed by the Control Left to mean “a belief that Caucasians are superior . . ” and so on. Other groups, such as blacks, Hispanics, or Asians, can’t be guilty of racism because the crime, which can be committed only by whites, is the exercise of “prejudice plus power”. Apparently only whites have that power.  It’s unclear whether there is a hierarchy of groups so that a group can never be racist towards those above them on the oppression scale (i.e., less oppressed), but can be racist towards all groups that are more oppressed.

I reject this definition tout court. Racism is racism—bigotry against those who belong to different “races”.  And it has the same effect: dividing people and leading to unjustified hatred and unequal treatment. The idea that no person should be treated differently simply because of their race or ethnicity is a Leftist and Enlightenment value, and for good reason: racism is wrong because it has an inimical effect on society and isn’t justifiable on any rational philosophical or moral grounds.

But this morning I’m disgusted by how the Leftist media has reacted to an incident I described yesterday, excusing someone for being a racist simply because she’s Asian. That media is saying that racism is okay if people of color do it. The three examples below represent some of the slimiest and most disgusting behavior I’ve seen from the liberal media. (As always, I consider myself a liberal, but can’t abide some of the Left’s odious behavior.)

So yesterday I pointed out how Sarah Jeong, the newly hired head tech writer for the New York Times, had a history of making racist tweets against white people, and how the Times excused it by saying that she was simply responding to trolls and using their language. The paper kept her on despite having fired another tech writer, Quinn Norton, for the identical transgression. Jeong is Asian, Norton white. The Times’s defense of Jeong is blatantly hypocritical, for if a white person said the same kind of things about blacks that she did about whites—justifying herself by saying that she was simply using the language of her harassers—the Times would have fired her instantly, as they did Norton. (I still don’t believe the excuse that Jeong was simply provoked to racism by racist trolling.)

I expected that if I looked at the liberal media this morning, they simply would have ignored this story. I did not expect that they would defend Jeong, justifying her racism because it was inspired by the racism of others, or even claiming that it was just a joke. Needless to say, these same people would take a very different view if the racist were white rather than Asian. Thus, to the hypocrisy of the New York Times we must add the hypocrisy of HuffPo, Slate, and an editor of Vox.

Let’s start with the most execrable of the three: HuffPost, long a bastion of extreme and unthinking Control-Leftism, and the Breitbart of the Left. Click on the screenshot below to see how they excuse Jeong.

Travis Waldron’s piece begins by saying that the tweets were “stripped of their context,” and flatly denying that an Asian woman could be anti-white: that is, there is no racism possible from such a person:

But ignore the trolls you must. This includes the gleeful, snickering chuds who strip old tweets of their context and send them back out into the world. And this also includes the establishment figures like Ari Fleischer and publications like the National Review, the folks wailing about an Asian woman’s “anti-white racism,” as if there were such a thing.

Needless to say, they wouldn’t be singing this tune if Jeong had been white. The article goes on to say

This “controversy” started when the trolls dug up old tweets in which Jeong had openly mocked white people. “It’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men,” she wrote in 2014. “White men are bullshit,” she said in another. There were several more in this vein. All of them were utterly harmless unless you’re the exact sort of constantly aggrieved white dude she was pillorying in the first place, or the exact sort of white dude who believes a few throwaway tweets are equivalent to the actual racism and abuse women and people of color face in this country and on that godforsaken social media platform every day.

The Times’ statement may look like a staunch defense of its new employee. But the paper got rolled, and it got rolled because it’s more committed to conveying the impression of a surpassing reasonableness than it is to any actual ideal.

The Times had nothing to disavow, and Jeong nothing to regret. There was no reason for the paper to apologize on her behalf, no reason for her to issue an apologetic statement of her own, no reason to acknowledge people who were transparently acting in bad faith other than to tell them to go to hell. And yet here they were, cornered into a pious renunciation that legitimized the trolly “outrage” ― the Times’ statement, for some reason, admonished Jeong for her role in feeding “the vitriol we too often see on social media” ― and will only exacerbate the larger problem at hand.

The HuffPost article ends with its own bit of racism, calling out “white dudes” and “trolls”. How dare they discredit journalists, says Waldron, trying to get them fired? Needless to say, the Left has been doing exactly that for several years. In fact, Bari Weiss, a moderate Leftist who regularly flaunts Control-Left standards of purity, has been a victim of the same campaign—once for accidentally calling an Asian-American an “immigrant”, even though Weiss was praising her. The odor of mendacity at HuffPost is strong:

There are legions of white dudes who believe they are the primary victims of American oppression. And, for some time now, their mobilized networks of trolls have been orchestrating outrage campaigns to harass, intimidate and discredit journalists and their work in the hopes of getting them fired. The Times, at least this time, didn’t go that far. But this will keep happening, there and beyond. Liberal institutions will be undermined by the tools of liberalism itself, all because nobody is a better friend to a right-wing berserker campaign than a terrified executive at a respectable news outlet who still doesn’t understand the modern internet.

Regardless of who commented against Leong, or why, her responses were openly racist and offensive, there is no excuse for them. She is a professional journalist and simply shouldn’t engage in demonizing races (go look at her tweets at the first link if you want to see them). Note the dark implication that “liberal institutions will be undermined by the tools of liberalism itself,” presumably those tools including free speech. As for the “campaign” against Jeong, it was conducted by those who called out the hypocrisy of the New York Times, not “right wing white dudes.” After all, although I’m a “white dude”, I’m not a right-winger desperate to discredit Asian women.

Were her tweets “utterly harmless”, as HuffPost author Travis Waldron avers? I thought words of racism were considered harm. But I forgot that they’re only harmful when leveled at people who aren’t white.

Slate, which isn’t as shark-jumpy as HuffPo, nevertheless has an equally ridiculous defense of Jeong (click on screenshot), blaming “trolls” for unearthing her tweets and the New York Times for even criticizing those tweets. The author, Inkoo Kang, is, like Leong, an Asian woman:

Excerpts:

The alt-right is on the hunt for journalists’ heads, and their latest tactic, it appears, is to take tweets out of context and weaponize them against liberal writers. This week, the target of organized conservative trolls is tech and legal reporter Sarah Jeong, a widely respected thinker set to join the New York Times’ editorial board next month.

. . . The Times’ bigotry-on-many-sides explanation is infuriating for a number of reasons. The first is that, as Splinter News’ Libby Watson notes, Jeong’s tweets were clearly jokes, not policy proposals. When people of color rail against white people, that’s often shorthand for speaking out against the existing racial structure that serves to keep white people in power. The jokes that people of color make at the expense of whites are furthermore not supported by past and present state and corporate institutions. A white American telling an Asian American to “go back to where you came from,” for instance, isn’t the same as an Asian American saying the same to a white American, even if neither individual can claim ancestral roots as America’s first residents. To claim otherwise is to be blind to the history and social dynamics of this country.

Yeah, Leong’s tweets were just jokes.  As far as I know—and I don’t believe they were jokes—racist jokes aren’t seen by people like Kang as funny when they come from white people, but are simply alternative forms of racism. Is what constitutes racism for a white simply a joke when it comes from an Asian?  And note that the racism isn’t seen as racism, but as speaking out against a “system of power”. Go back again and see what Leong wrote: it isn’t a criticism of endemic or structural racism, but of white people themselves.

As for the “go back to where you came from” trope, yes, that’s racism, and in fact one could level that against whites given that they’re all more recent immigrants than are native Americans. But that example is just a diversion. In the last sentence above Kang simply claims that Asians can’t be racists because of the “history and social dynamics of our country.” Yes, Asians were discriminated against horribly, and less than a hundred years ago when they were put in camps during World War II, but now they are in fact privileged. Why are Asian Americans considered an oppressed minority now? They aren’t. In some ways they are privileged (I believe their average income exceeds that of whites in America, as do their SAT scores), so they should be the group most culpable for racist statements. They’re at the very top of the “privilege” ladder.

At the end, Kang calls out the New York Times for even chiding Jeong, saying that the paper is protecting its white readers:

As for the Times’ editorial board, it’s difficult not to notice how protective they’re being of white feelings at a time of renewed and active discrimination against people of color. Earlier this summer, the board published a treatise on the intellectual sidelining of the Jordan Petersons of the world. The following week, they put forth, practically back to back, pieces about how liberals’ meanness and smugness were responsible for a newly insurgent movement toward racism and misogyny. And earlier this week, a contributing writer essentially advised progressives to stop calling a racist person racist, at least to their face. It’s tempting to see the Times’ approach to the Jeong kerfuffle as tactical, given its older white readership who enjoyed decades in which people of color’s jokes about white people were forced to stay underground or out of earshot. But now is not the time to accommodate the already privileged.

Well, here I’m saying that Jeong is a racist, and I’m calling her out as one. As even the Oxford English Dictionary recognizes, racism is bigotry based on race, and that definition doesn’t include anything about the “already privileged”—like Asians.

Finally, we have a tweet from a senior reporter for Vox. I don’t know if this represents something the magazine will adopt as its position, but the claim that Jeong’s racist and anti-white tweets are not racist, but merely “expressive ways anti-racists and minorities talk about ‘white people'” is pure cant. It’s odious dissimulation—the transparent squirming of a Leftist who wants to excuse racism espoused by people of color. It is, in fact, Orwellian in its doublespeak.

https://twitter.com/zackbeauchamp/status/1025034038472531969

The Left cannot afford this kind of hypocrisy. Not only is it inconsistent in application of our values, but it gives plenty of fuel to the Trumpian right. If racism is wrong when espoused by whites, and it is, then it’s wrong when espoused by anybody.

Finally, I sent these articles to Grania, who gave me her take, quoted with permission:

The “punching up” advocates are actually undermining the fight against racism by claiming that it is okay depending on the skin color of who is doing it. In addition, they would not be engaging in expressions of racial slurs and stereotyping if they didn’t know they were in a position of power to get away with it. Their claim of being in the marginalised / powerless position is bogus.

and

This is ye old “It’s okay when I do it” response.

What people who genuinely believe this newly-minted definition of racism don’t seem to realise is that they are basically making it impossible to discern why racism is wrong. If is okay when an upper middle-class university educated Asian woman does it, but bad when an elderly working-class uneducated hillbilly does it, the whole thing becomes absurd and no-one ought to take them seriously.