I love much of the stuff Vice creates and Sarah Jeong is a important voice I follow. But it seems both could not see past the appearance of Naomi Wu, could not understand her circumstances and putting her at risk to make a minor point in a story.
If there are tweets like that, I'd genuinely love to see them - I'd rather have my knowledge updated than continue being wrong.
Racism is not just a matter of politeness. It is not arbitrary rules of decorum that you have to follow. It is not a semantic property of a sentence in isolation. Racism is a systemic problem that threatens people and limits their opportunities.
When Sarah Jeong snarks at Andrew Sullivan for being an old white man, old white men are not actually threatened.
Yes, this means you can switch races in a comment and it will change from racist to not racist, or not racist to racist, and that's because there's context, it's not just arbitrary rules about words.
Do you want it to be symmetric? Then it would not be the thing we know as racism.
Again, this isn't an abstract rule of a game, it does not get its validity from applying the same way to everyone. Racism in our society doesn't apply the same way to everyone, that's the whole point.
'prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.'
It seems to me that there's an attempt to shift the definition of racism towards something different from above in order to facilitate the spread of consequence free hate speech.
Based on my direct experiences with racism and discrimination due to my skin tone and national origin, I'd find it fairly insulting for you or any other poster here to lecture me on what racism is and how it affects people. I like to think I have a pretty good understanding of it, and not just from academic studies, but from my own experiences. For the record the tweets I've read from Sarah Jeong seem wholly unacceptable to me, and quite racist.
If you think that Jeong's
tweets are equivalent to
actual racism, you don't
understand what racism is
and how it affects people.
limits their opportunities.
old white men are not
actually threatened.
Different ethnic groups always fought each other (contemporary examples: shiites vs sunnis, jews vs palestinians, croats vs serbs, muslims vs US (Iraq, 9/11), buddhists vs muslims, hindus vs muslims ), but in the past US whites had numeric superiority over other races (and -- arguably -- other advantages like better education), which gave security, but with demographic changes, this security is withering away, which makes it more likely that the annihilatory phantasies ethnic groups have of each other (but usually don't express too publicly, or only obliquely ... have a look at Rastafarianism ...) will be acted out.
just arbitrary rules about words.
That's a good rule to follow in life.
It's pretty clear that Jeong understands this. The reason she made these sexist, racist, and agist tweets are also very clear: being controversial on Twitter brings attention. Indeed nothing but extremes bring attention on social media. Sufficient attention on social media brings money. Jeong monetises sexism, racism and agism to get a cushy job at the NYT, because the NYT know very well -- like any journalist -- that racism brings outrage, brings clicks, brings money.