posted on August 03, 2018 03:47 PM by
u/Hailanathema
21
u/Chocoloctopus44 pointsat 1533321869.000000
I don’t understand how these people can be regulars in the culture
war thread and still think they’re contributing to valuable, rational
discussion by posting another variation of “Well if you switch ‘white’
with ‘black’ then it’s obviously racist.”
Do you disagree that her tweets are "racist"? Or just that pointing this out is really bottom shelf analysis, yet they are acting as though it is some profound revelation?
The second one. There's a good chance that they've seen other comments expressing the same idea in the very same thread. They know that this small, reoccurring group of commenters have discussed the same idea many times previously in older threads. But they still bravely say the same thing once again without bothering to add any extra thoughts or take any extra time to imagine what someone might argue in response.
I'm not saying every comment has to be high effort, but this kind of thing seems so obviously not constructive that I feel like they should have realized by now that they're just masturbating.
Makes sense. There is definitely a pattern of certain sentiments predictably getting a lot of upvotes even when the comments don't really add anything new.
It's technically "racist" in the conventional defintion of being anti-\[racial group\]. However, assuming that it's equally bad as someone being against an actual marginalised group is stupid, and requires ignoring decades of socio-economic context. (this is why a lot of academics switched to the "power+prejudice" definition)
I would agree. I would say it is racist, but that focusing too much on the semantics ignores the fundamentally important question of whether it is equivalently "harmful".
> Do you disagree that her tweets are "racist"?
It's worth noting that the tweets didn't express her personal beliefs; [she was ironically mimicking the language of people who harass her online](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/business/media/sarah-jeong-new-york-times.html).
"It's just a joak" is the same bad-faith excuse the Right always uses. People use these kinds of "jokes" to try on opinions that they don't hold explicitly yet still feel an affinity to.
This kind of "idpol" diasporic ethnochauvinism is a trojan horse that is indistinguishable from classical forms of fascism in both its basic theoretical premises and in its political function in breaking up the solidarity of the oppressed. It needs to be purged from progressive movements.
The actual enemy of oppressed PoCs isn't ordinary white people saying thoughtlessly prejudiced things, wearing dumb costumes, etc, it's elite nerd-psychopaths like Scott Alexander and the SCC crowd who *deliberately* advocate for Social-Darwinist systems that are incapable of redressing the historic injustices borne by PoCs as """objective rationality""", while being largely free of racial prejudice in their own personal conduct. Jeong's brand of nonsense obfuscates this essential truth and makes it more difficult for progressives to stay organized and focused as a result.
Oh come on, the elites never manage to get shit done without tacit approval from the majority. Ordinary prejudice is bad and it needs to be fought too.
Everyone already knows that ordinary prejudice is bad and there are already intense social norms against revealing it in polite society. There's simply no more useful emancipatory potential that can be squeezed out of combating individual prejudice.
It's time to focus completely on the actual root cause of the problem, which is systemic. When these systems are changed and PoCs actually gain material power and social prestige, prejudice against PoCs will cease to pose a serious problem for them, the same way prejudice against white people isn't really a problem for them today. Seriously, what is ethically worse, just thoughtlessly causing someone insult and pain, or actively and intentionally reproducing a social system designed to keep the dispossessed down, because you believe that Social Darwinism is a good thing? Scott Alexander and his ilk *are the real racists*.
I highly doubt that the polite society of a truly egalitarian, multi-racial, completely queer-friendly society would be comfortable with the social norms of current polite society. It's still socially acceptable in many parts of America to question whether women are genetically inferior at STEM. I work in tech, I've seen this firsthand. It's still a struggle to get sexual assault taken seriously. We're making progress on this, but it's only at the point where it's being acknowledged as a problem--none of the #metoo accused have faced nearly the consequences that they should.
Not only is ordinary prejudice everywhere, what counts as ordinary prejudice is not _nearly_ restrictive enough.
> Seriously, what is ethically worse, just thoughtlessly causing someone insult and pain
This is how you enforce social norms, though. Bad table manners, public nudity, etc., norms against these are enforced because potential offenders know we'd all point and laugh at them.
> There's simply no more useful emancipatory potential that can be squeezed out of combating individual prejudice.
Yeah I strongly disagree there. I view the current spate of shaming white people who call the cops on black people for doing nothing wrong as an extremely healthy and positive thing. That's fighting prejudice on an individual level with shaming, and it's _awesome._
You're basically saying that a female POC journalist should not be allowed to talk back at racist people shitting on her. That's fucked up, and frankly, any movement that demands that kind of superhuman restraint from its members is doomed to fail.
> It's still socially acceptable in many parts of America to question whether women are genetically inferior at STEM.
I was talking primarily about racism, gender issues have historically always lagged behind race issues. It is indeed still far more socially acceptable to spread misogynistic pseudoscience than racist pseudoscience.
>This is how you enforce social norms, though
I think you misunderstood me here. I was saying that intentional support of systemic racism is far morally worse, and ultimately far more damaging on the whole, than thoughtless interpersonal racism.
>I view the current spate of shaming white people who call the cops on black people for doing nothing wrong as an extremely healthy and positive thing.
Again this isn't motivated by simplistic racial animus, it is a result of systemic forces. When black people are kept out of rich neighborhoods, crowded into poor ones, and forced to take to crime to survive, an inevitable association is developed in white peoples' minds between "black" and "criminal", to the point that just seeing a black person in an unusual place becomes a cause for concern. You don't have to hate black people to get roped into this, it just naturally happens as a result of *systemic* racism. It doesn't address the root problem to tell white people to "check their privilege" or "examine themselves", systemic racism has to be abolished so that these prejudices never form in the first place.
>You're basically saying that a female POC journalist should not be allowed to talk back at racist people shitting on her.
No, the problem isn't with her back-talk, it's with the *content* of that back-talk. The enemy isn't white people, the enemy is right-wing defenders of racist systems (many of whom are themselves PoCs, or whites who know how to perform "woke" antiracism). Racializing the antagonism is fatal to successful left-wing coalition building.
I like a good materialist theory of everything, too, but there's a lot it doesn't explain. Loads of well-off, well-integrated Chinese immigrants have been moving into certain white, wealthy suburbs in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the result has been a new white flight. You can't blame bad materialistic conditions for anti-Chinese prejudice amongst white people there.
> I was saying that intentional support of systemic racism is far morally worse, and ultimately far more damaging on the whole, than thoughtless interpersonal racism.
I'm sure if you asked most racist people whether they thought they were racist, they would say no. Scooter probably doesn't think he's racist, just as he doesn't think he's sexist, even though he's so obviously both. So what's intentional support of racism, then? Nobody would claim that they are doing it.
> The enemy isn't white people, the enemy is right-wing defenders of racist systems (many of whom are themselves PoCs, or whites who know how to perform "woke" antiracism). Racializing the antagonism is fatal to successful left-wing coalition building.
If Sarah Jeong were making fun of white brocialists at a DSA meeting, I would agree with you. If she were making fun of a white labor organizer struggling with integrating POCs into his or her union, I would agree with you. She was not, however, making fun of potential white allies, she was making fun of the kind of racist troll who thought it'd be amusing to call her a dog-eating gook on Twitter. Have a little compassion, at least.
Also, it's really hard to not read your last sentence as pandering to white fragility.
>If Sarah Jeong were making fun of white brocialists at a DSA meeting, I would agree with you. If she were making fun of a white labor organizer struggling with integrating POCs into his or her union, I would agree with you. She was not, however, making fun of potential white allies ...
Turns out she totally was, though. Some screenshots ([source](https://twitter.com/i/moments/1025792822467801088)):
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjsiXBTUcAEBwXq.jpg:large
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjsrfQ2VsAAM9yV.jpg:large
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Djsu4oYUYAAIrv8.jpg:large
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Djs6fURU0AAdTdg.jpg:large
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjtXsVtVsAEG2HN.jpg:large
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjtcxIxVAAEyvI9.jpg:large
Also, notice how defensive she gets when people question her whole "It's okay because I'm punching up!" framing by bringing up her Harvard Law pedigree. She can dish it out, but she can't take it. Something about her whole attitude comes across as a little creepy to me, tbh ... It's as if she just intuitively grasped how Woke Twitter's tolerance for ripping on white, male, or otherwise privileged demographics was an exploitable loophole in the parameters of respectable left-wing discourse, that she could use to fan controversy, build her brand, and recruit a following of like-minded allies, all the while bemoaning (sincerely, I'm sure) what a burden it is to deal with all the nasty racist misogynist white dudes who flock to her mentions like flies to shit. She doesn't give the impression of someone who's seriously reflected on whether the notion of privilege has any implications that should make *her* the least bit uncomfortable, or whether the sort of rhetoric she traffics in could have any potential downsides.
> Loads of well-off, well-integrated Chinese immigrants have been moving into certain white, wealthy suburbs in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the result has been a new white flight.
Actually a materialist theory is the only thing that can explain this. Immigrants/minorities lower property values because of already-existing associations between immigrants/minorities and poorer neighborhoods (which exist because of state and capital), racial animus isn't necessary for it to happen.
Furthermore, I'm not an expert on this by any means, but I'm not sure how you have actually established that the "flight" is caused primarily by immigration as a push factor and not something else as a pull factor.
>So what's intentional support of racism, then?
I've already answered this several times: it is the intentional support of social systems with racist consequences, regardless of the reason for that support. Scooter is literally the paradigm case of a full-throated systemic racist.
>Also, it's really hard to not read your last sentence as pandering to white fragility.
I don't even know what the hell this is supposed to mean. Unless you actually want some kind of ethnic war, it's important to keep the identities, divisions, and conflicts focused on rival conceptions of the social good (pro- or anti- racially discriminatory systems) and not on racial identity itself.
That does not mean "don't talk about racism", which is impossible because this struggle is obviously fundamentally about ending racism, it means to not make racial identity in itself a salient point of social division.
> Furthermore, I'm not an expert on this by any means, but I'm not sure how you have actually established that the "flight" is caused primarily by immigration as a push factor and not something else as a pull factor.
When you ask wealthy white people why they refuse to live next door to wealthy Asians, even as property values are rising for _everyone_, this is the answer they give (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/caixin/2015/07/silicon_valley_white_asian_divide_why_families_self_segregate_and_what_can.html): "Many white parents say they’re leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurricular activities like sports and other personal interests. The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian.”
And [here](https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessing-white-flight-from-an-asian-ethnoburb): "I bump into former neighbors at the grocery store, the bookstore, the bakery. They tell me how much they save annually in property taxes, but in the same breath, admit how many thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, they lost in the sales of their homes at the height of a brutal recession. They rave about their new, friendly neighborhoods, compliment the stellar academics of their children’s new high school, which has the same number of Advanced Placement courses, the same intense preparatory curricula, as the old high school.
Except it’s whiter."
Asians are the model minority, so the particular materialist theory you're using really doesn't apply here. Nobody thinks "Chinese engineers!" and then thinks, "wow, my property values are going down." On the contrary, Chinese overseas investors are now being blamed for driving up demand for housing in desirable cities.
> Unless you actually want some kind of ethnic war, it's important to keep the identities, divisions, and conflicts focused on rival conceptions of the social good (pro- or anti- racially discriminatory systems) and not on racial identity itself.
You just said it's important to downplay the importance of racial identity, lest people start getting beaten up, but so long as racism continues to exist, it's impossible to avoid talking about white identity as a category unto itself. You know perfectly well white people will kill POCs just for existing in public for no reason at all, so POCs refraining from mocking whiteness is likely to accomplish zilch, except making a few white people feel better about themselves.
You think we ought to restrict the conversation solely to 'rival conceptions of the social good,' but one of them is "white people on top."
If an ethnic war breaks out, it won't be because Sarah Jeong said "cancel white people." It's going to be because white racists whip themselves into enough of a frenzy that they start shooting.
> "Many white parents say they’re leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurricular activities like sports and other personal interests.
This is *literally* them saying that they are acting in their material self-interest by moving away from places with excessive competition. No explicit racial animus is necessary for this effect to exist, it just develops out of material conditions and rationally self-interested behavior.
Seriously, *nobody* is going to sell their house at a loss and abandon their neighborhoods just because "ew Asians are gross, man". It has to do fundamentally with systemic incentives, and the racist sentiment is tacked on.
>Okay, where I disagree is that Scooter is not also a thoughtless racist with the usual ordinary prejudices. The kind you apparently want to not offend.
The easiest thing to do with those types of people is just to kindly educate them about why their views of other people are inaccurate. I do it all the time, because I like talking about sociology/history nerd shit with people, and I can say that for most decent ordinary people who share our humane values it works far better than antagonizing them with inflammatory rhetorical jargon.
It's the people who intentionally want to *uphold racist systems*, like Scooter, that are the real evil, no matter how unprejudiced they are in their personal lives. They think oppression is a good thing *on principle*, because dismantling the racist system "violates property rights" or "is a socialist plot" or "fails to consider IQ differences/Black Culture" or whatever nonsense. These people are the real enemy that decent people of all races need to organize against, the ones who have a fundamentally different system of values that will always pose a threat to PoCs.
>but so long as racism continues to exist, it's impossible to avoid talking about white identity as a category unto itself.
Yeah of course, talk about how it is a scam that plays an integral role in upholding a morally bankrupt system. But *don't actually make white identity a salient point of social division*. Why is this so difficult to understand?
With the respect to the white flight, in particular in the suburban areas, some of it is (in my experience) caused by, essentially, the fact that schools are too "asian" for a lot of white families, and they don't want their children to have "that" kind of schooling. The atmosphere is undeniably stressful and often toxic; there was an article about suicides at one of the local high schools, and there circulated jokes about how if there were trains next to the other schools in the area, then they would've had the suicides. I don't think it's necessarily fair to call that prejudice.
Anecdotally, most of the white people I knew in the area that thrived were recent immigrants, often from Eastern European countries with similar attitudes towards school as the immigrants coming in from China/India; often the only white people in a class would be 1st gens from the CIS region.
A couple sources for good measure:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113236377590902105
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/
Full disclosure: this is the area I grew up in (I am very much white; Russian/Jewish American), and I personally did generally do well in the culture; regardless, I'd be hesitant to condemn the white families who left. There were some weird latent (and more recently, plainly visible) racist undercurrents that I suspect came from excessive reddit/4chan browsing, but in my limited experience a surprising amount of it didn't actually come from the white students, and very rarely did it target any of the minorities that actually live in the area.
Edit: Rephrased some stuff; spirit should be the same
I grew up in Palo Alto, which is ground zero for the suicides. I agree completely that Asian culture has its toxic side, but I don't think that upper middle class white Americans are paragons of parenting. I ended up going to Stanford, and I think it's fair to say that a lot of Asians are noticeably more messed up, but I met a _lot_ of messed up white kids too. The mass Asian influx to the Bay Area is, after all, due to the schools and economy that white Americans have set up.
> Anecdotally, most of the white people I knew in the area that thrived were recent immigrants, often from Eastern European countries with similar attitudes towards school as the immigrants coming in from China/India; often the only white people in a class would be 1st gens from the CIS region.
What exactly is this supposed to add?
> but in my limited experience a surprising amount of it didn't actually come from the white students, and very rarely did it target any of the minorities that actually live in the area.
Holy shit, are you seriously going to use your personal experience as a white person to comment on how much racism there is? White people are generally very poor at perceiving racism towards minorities. Nobody is ever going to yell at you, "go back to your country!" which has happened multiple times to my Asian friends in the Bay Area. It happens in SF, it happens in Palo Alto, and it happens, subtly, when people throw their hands up and say, this school's gotten too Asian. One of my Asian friends told me her teacher said she wasn't creative--way to play into old stereotypes about Asians all being the same, thanks a lot white high school English teacher. She said also she faced skepticism that her English was good, even though she was born in America.
Yes, your experience is limited all right. What are you going to say next? That you've had great experiences with the police? Did you grow up in Palo Alto too? Do you remember the time the pigs beat up Albert Hopkins, the black janitor at Gunn?
You should know better, if you're on this sub, to expect that you can always detect racism if you're white.
Did you even read your own article by the way?
>“We are comparing them to a group of parents we think of as being in dire straits—largely single mothers on welfare whose circumstances are assumed to affect the quality of their parenting. And yet kids from these affluent families, _mostly Caucasian,_ say they feel no closer to their parents than the poor kids do.”
> But it was also true that non-Asians were too quick to deflect scrutiny away from themselves. Luthar’s research documenting problems among affluent kids was conducted in schools with largely white populations.
And you did this too. You didn't say, "the culture at these schools got too toxic." You went and said, "they got _too Asian._" If you gave a damn about making life better for kids, you'd notice that white families have these problems too.
Oh man, let's recap--white dude shows up, says he doesn't notice racism in the Bay Area, and then says that white flight is justified because the neighborhood got _too Asian._ Amaaaazing.
I feel like my post was a bit all over the place and so you may have somewhat misread it. Though I could be wrong, I think we disagree on a lot less than you imply.
First some internet defensiveness:
I very carefully said that /the parents/ believe the culture is too Asian. The fact that you missed this very important qualifier is frankly sort of frustrating. I made a concerted effort in the last post to not emphasize the fact that I thrived in and liked this culture, lest I accidentally condone what, for some, was basically child abuse. Again, I really enjoyed the somewhat extreme and competitive academic culture. I hope you'll understand why I was hesitant to praise it, though, especially considering the stuff I later found out some of my friends/acquaintances went through. I mention this in passing in my previous post. If and when I have kids, I would honestly like them to grow up in a similar environment as compared to most of the alternatives I've seen, and I hope to live in a similar area when I'm done with school.
> What was quote about cis kids supposed to add?
I was, albeit unsuccessfully, trying to show that there were not a lot of Americans, and that in some sense the statistics for whiteness actually made the white flight seem LESS pervasive than it actually was; so if anything it was sort of a side note about the degree of the problem. My bad; I should have communicated that better.
Additionally, I was trying to argue that it wasn't Asians they were fleeing from so much as immigrants, including white ones. A mostly white, but entirely immigrant town with an emphasis on tech would make for a good data point here, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.
> You used your experiences as a white person, the fuck.
The fact that to an outsider the culture there might seem (please notice my qualifier this time! Not to me, /to an outsider/. I personally thought it was fine, and absolutely prefer it to the nasty drug abuse shit I've heard about in other suburbs [I'm in the midwest now]) toxic, seems to be a reasonable explanation of white flight in the area, rather than the overt racism that you're attributing it to. My argument here is mostly that it's a lot more plainly visible, and may spook some parents.
> SMH associating academic toxicity with Asian.
This feels like the part that matters in your response, the argument that I'm conflating toxicity with being Asian.
This makes sense, I'll be more careful about word choice in the future; there may have been some conflation going on in my head.
With all of that me-being-defensive defensive stuff aside, I think I see your point. Is another part of your argument (qualifier, again; there was obviously far more to it than just this) arguing that this dislike of Asian culture is racist because of the fact that white suburbs have their own, arguably more shit problems? I guess that makes sense, I'll keep it in mind.
> You clearly don't really care about the kids.
Back to being defensive:
I do genuinely give a shit about the kids in the area; I come back and try to do stuff for them (I'm uncomfortable sharing any more details about this because it's sort of personal, but I guess take my word on this? It's fine if you don't.) This feels like gatekeeping for... Wanting children to have a better life? Like sure a bit of it is fine but in this context that's a little bizarre.
> You a racist mayo
Yeah ok fair enough. If anything, white people are still to blame, but I do still think discomfort with the academically toxic culture is a reason for them to leave.
> What about non-Asian minorities?
Yeah, I'm not at all informed on this topic. The area seemed fairly bad about this, but as this almost never came up during my time there, it ended being one of those things that seemed to be there but didn't seem to actually have a chance to manifest. That's why I called it latent. That said, that sentence is wrong so I'd like to retract it. As a side note, the Albert Hopkins incident was before my time.
I guess as a final note on which we do actually disagree, I tried very hard to make it clear that I felt the families were leaving because of toxicity, which they then may attribute to the area being too Asian. I sort of disagree with the attribution, but the clearly visible toxicity (and therefore, the source for their moving) seems to me the fundamental reason for which they want to leave, and I can't really blame them. In particular, I argue the presence of children of white immigrants, one would think, would provide some sort of comfort to these presumably racist families - and yet, anecdotally, that's not what I observed.
That said, I lack sources for either direction so I'd appreciate any reading.
I don’t have an issue with any of this. I like the shaming. Call out every racist, sexist, perverted POS out there. But I start feeling kind of torn on public trends when I see people not reacting negatively to a skinny white dude at a train station being punched onto the tracks by a black guy who outweighed him by 80 lbs and who could have killed him had he touched the third rail, all for saying some generic racist crap. I saw that trending a couple of weeks ago. I’m not superhuman, I get annoyed when white people nervously say hi if they pass by me at night just because I’m a bit darker than them. But I don’t know if I’d feel great about almost killing a scrawny racist and I saw an uncomfortably high amount of people react positively to it. I’m seeing too many people happily cross a dangerous line.
Yeah, I can't imagine anyone who's ever done any actual organizing work offline giving a damn about Sarah Jeong. I was part of a coalition to get more affordable housing built that's had some minor successes, and the battles of the Extremely Online left never came up. There's just too many other things to talk about--logistical stuff, mostly.
Additionally, she was often mocking bad arguments, like her tweet that was quoted in Andrew Sullivan’s article trashing her (asking if white people are goblins). That tweet is itself dunking of another of Sullivan’s “got to hear both sides” columns defending “race science.”
I think the best subthread is, as normal, /u/darwin2500’s thread
where all the free speech absolutists of SSC insist that it’s
not hypocrisy to simultaneously think “people shouldn’t be fired for
their tweets” and “Sarah Jeong should be fired for her tweets”.
I mean obviously, that would be ~~having principles~~ unilaterally disarming. The fact that any liberal ever did something they didn't like justifies doing that thing to every liberal forever, even if they're nominally opposed to doing it. That's just how politics works.
>I mean obviously, that would be ~~having principles~~ unilaterally disarming.
That really is a genius bit of sophistry. They can continue talking about how awful their opponents are for using a tactic, then next week they celebrate their own side using the same tactic without even a glimmer of cognitive dissonance.
Yeah, going off some reactions you'd think the Times had just hired Frantz Fanon or CLR James.
I sucked it up and forced myself to read Andrew Sullivan's pearl-clutching column about Jeong's tweets and I was struck by how fucking banal they were. It's just that typical vacuous edge-lordism that you get from elite, upper-middle class types seeking a thin veneer of radicalism on their standard professional class politics.
it's also weird because they're a group of people who will routinely dismiss the NYT as neo-marxist lugenpresse but for some reason care if someone who voiced opinions distasteful to them writes for it. surely this should just be confirmation they can safely dismiss it on ideological grounds instead of some heinous encroachment on a once-pure bastion of freethinking sullied only now by the acceptance of this eeeeeevil culture warrior.
Yeah, I saw the examples he cited and I was like, "yeah, right on, Sarah." There are legitimate criticisms of her (see Naomi Wu and that whole Jacobin thing) but that is not enough to fire her or stop her hiring.
So in the linked article, this is the example of Razib Khan saying
something “offensive” and “controversial” that they came up with:
If by “intelligence” once means analytic reasoning skills, it seems
that the Northeast Asians – Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans — are
somewhat more intelligent than the white norm.
Compared to Sarah Jeong’s tweets this is extremely mild. Maybe with
more effort someone can come up with something worse, but apparently it
wasn’t necessary to come up with a real smoking gun to get him
fired.
This is what happens when you reduce racism to hostility.
It’d be nice if her tweets were actually meaningful in any way.
They’re basically “I don’t like white people guys!!” and show another
NYT hire that’s not going to argue positions further than progressive
neoliberalism.
I’m getting real sick of people taking joke tweets out of context and
pretending they’re supposed to be read 100% literally and seriously. I
don’t expect that to happen anytime soon though, which is why I rarely
use Twitter or really any social media under my real name.
The only bad thing about Sarah Jeong’s tweets is a how sitcom level
some of her white people burns were - I mean really - “The greatest
trick the devil ever pulled was convincing white people that folk music
is good.”
I wonder if this story is getting so much traction because Asians
probably are racially superior to Whites? No one really takes
anti-white stuff from Black people seriously, but Asians would be 100%
justified in looking down on White people.
Ah yes, the well-known rule of comedy that it’s only okay if you’re
punching down the rankings of racial inferiority.
I don’t understand how these people can be regulars in the culture war thread and still think they’re contributing to valuable, rational discussion by posting another variation of “Well if you switch ‘white’ with ‘black’ then it’s obviously racist.”
I think the best subthread is, as normal, /u/darwin2500’s thread where all the free speech absolutists of SSC insist that it’s not hypocrisy to simultaneously think “people shouldn’t be fired for their tweets” and “Sarah Jeong should be fired for her tweets”.
these people are idiots if they think the NYT would ever hire anyone legitimately subversive in the first place
This is what happens when you think the word “racist” is a magic incantation that instantly unpersons its target if you scream it loudly enough.
This dialog is interesting:
This is what happens when you reduce racism to hostility.
It’d be nice if her tweets were actually meaningful in any way.
They’re basically “I don’t like white people guys!!” and show another NYT hire that’s not going to argue positions further than progressive neoliberalism.
I’m getting real sick of people taking joke tweets out of context and pretending they’re supposed to be read 100% literally and seriously. I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon though, which is why I rarely use Twitter or really any social media under my real name.
The only bad thing about Sarah Jeong’s tweets is a how sitcom level some of her white people burns were - I mean really - “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing white people that folk music is good.”
[deleted]
Ah yes, the well-known rule of comedy that it’s only okay if you’re punching down the rankings of racial inferiority.