White Women Need Not Apply | Hacker News Reader

White Women Need Not Apply

arcdigital.media

146 pointsexolymph94 comments

A few thoughts here:

1. Who are all of these people? I've never heard of them. Is this a storm in a teacup, or is the implication of the article that this incident is a taste of what's to come?

2. The story seems almost too conveniently negative towards Sojwal. As someone who's well on the opposite side of radical intersectionality and radical feminism, this article feels written for people like me who will get outraged at the behaviors of the villain in the story. Makes me suspicious of actually having all of the facts and context here. Seems.. too easy?

3. Ironically, if the current trend continues, Sojwal will soon find herself in a lower intersectionality caste, and will herself be accused of taking space on platforms that are restricted to members of the BIPOC group. She, being an AA and a non-elite PoC, will not be invited.

Form your own opinion here: https://twitter.com/senti_narwhal?lang=en

I think it's worth observing that mob rule is never good, and racism is actually pretty universal, as are bullies, it's just the target group that changes. But as you point out, the bullies are subject to instant replacement once the mob decides to switch its allegiances.

And this context: https://twitter.com/amywestervelt/status/1316923479011303424

Is this a storm in a teacup?"

It's a storm within the academic liberal arts community. See [1].

That community has big problems. Once they ran education. Now they're not very influential. Many small liberal arts colleges are going out of business.[1] This sort of thing is a cry for attention.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-08/colleges-...

That would be nice, but seems they're plenty influential as their beliefs and value systems keep spilling out out of universities into the corporate world. This dangerous position that it's OK or even virtuous to be racist towards white people keeps popping up in places it shouldn't, and they keep getting what they want. Yes, we can simply treat the entire academic liberal arts as fundamentally toxic and poisoned by this kind of racial hatred, but that won't stop it spreading short of shutting down their funding completely. Even then they'd just get hired by places culturally allied to them.

This sort of story has happened many times before, it's just an unusually clear example. Senti Sojwal could easily be prosecuted for this, as there are laws against racism and she openly admits that she is discriminating against white women, but of course she won't be. The only serious way to put a lid on this would be for Trump to win and then to start systematically prosecuting academics and companies who ban white people from things, under racism laws. Once a bunch of them have lost a lot of money or worse, the actual legal definition of racism might start being respected again.

I don't mean this as a joke, but I'm actually rather hesitant to express any thoughts on this after reading it. I'll just leave it at that.

Could you imagine _any_ of the comments here HN affixed to that Twitter thread? You could seriously jeopardize your career.

What I wonder is how people can live in such wildly divergent realities? I suppose social media (which includes both Twitter and HN) plays a primary role.

Social media no doubt exacerbates the problem, but I think it also makes the problem a lot more visible and easier to draw connections with. If some similar spat had happened in the 90s - with none of the participants or their organizations being tremendously well known - how many of the people reading this thread would have ever heard about it?

Have a different online identity that's not associated with yourself?

Maybe it's because of the way Twitter is designed. On Twitter, the root of a discussion thread is a post made by a particular user on their feed. If I want to talk about another person's post, I don't need to reply on their thread - I can just create my own. Maybe this leads to an explicit bifurcation in conversation and similarly in perspectives and point of view.

For example, if I disagree with something that Donald Trump said, I won't simply reply to his tweet where everyone including his supporters can see it, I will reply to in on my timeline. Similarly, my followers won't follow Donald Trump to hear what I have to say about him, they will only follow me directly.

Given the root of discussion is always a person rather than an idea it forces people to judge in advance the content they read based on who said it. Perhaps if Twitter didn't allow retweets and separate comment threads, this kind of division in commentary wouldn't happen so much.

PS - I hardly use Twitter at all, the above is just speculation.

I can only think of few more radioactive topics and just like in WarGames: The only winning move is not to play.

EDIT: A more nuanced answer less prone to misinterpretation: I don't think there's a clear good answer w.r.t the topic at hand because no matter how you answer, even the most well-meaning and best-argumented answer would be, well, prone to misinterpretation.

There is a name for this: Oppression Olympics [1].

For almost any group you can think of, there's a more oppressed group that feels entitled to rave against the former group.

Fortunately most people are not that bitter, I certainly hope so at least.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppression_Olympics

As a card game .... (comedy sketch)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2X-qQ-uMW8

A lot of drama here that seems to spill out into real life. Two opposing sides. But, they're largely on the same side it seems like. One seems to have made a mistake in submitting her article unknowingly to a blog that doesn't accept articles from white women, and the other wasn't happy about this or the tone from the first person.

> But, they're largely on the same side

There's no such thing for the people who buy into this kind of identity politics.

Any difference in views, no matter how small is irreconcilable. No leeway is allowed. The best option for any reasonable person is to keep quiet, stay as far away from these hypocrites as possible and hope that when they inevitably self-destruct, none of the fallout lands on you.

Such bullying and racism need to be called out. Calling it politics is wrong.

> made a mistake in submitting her article unknowingly to a blog that doesn't accept articles from white women

I am still pretty aghast that the liberal side thinks that is acceptable without irony.

Hence the need to think in more than a 1 dimensional description of the entire political landscape.

Because the "doesn't accept articles from white women" is just a clickbait statement -- the group she posted to is "Asian American Writers Workshop".

It's not "anti-white" -- its just an Asian targetted group.

Except if you read even the beginning of the article you learn that she was accepting submissions from black people as well. In other words, anti-white, or, at least, white-exclusionary. What everyone used to call “racist”.

This entire situation is so absurd. Two people who are equally rude are offended by each other and then air their grievances on Social media to gain sympathy and blow this out of proportion. And everyone around them is trying to distance themselves from the blowout inadvertently creating an even bigger blowout.

It's almost as if people forget that there's consequences of everything you do, especially on the internet.

1) If people are really interested in the topic, they should read the source material and draw their own conclusions.

I thought the article's characterization of Westervelt's tweet was incorrect. The author claimed that Westervelt "inadvertently revealed how the fear of being tarred by association motivated (Westervelt) to turn on (Roost)". Instead, Westervelt's opinion comes across as more nuanced.

2) I am happy I keep semi-anonymous accounts. In an age where it's easy to be the internet villain of the day, I thank the heavens that Natural Language Processing hasn't reached the point of deanonymizing me yet.

I agree with your point about the mischaracterization of Westervelt's tweet, after reading some longer explanations from her on Twitter.

However, I do think it's notable that she'd had repeated, recurring problems with Roost in the past but didn't actually do anything firm about it until there was a big public brouhaha that could make her look bad if she didn't do anything. That doesn't absolve Roost from any blame here, but I think it does suggest that Westervelt's motivation for cutting Roost loose was at least partly informed by a desire to not suffer backlash herself.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that, per se, but let's not pretend that everyone here is doing things solely for the right reasons.

I find stories about cancel culture both interesting and vexing.

I disagree with so many of the premises behind such alleged behavior that I want to write off the entire topic and its participants.

And I'm vexed and dismayed by the issue because, by it's very nature, I hold no hope of resolving it by polite but critical discussion.

But there's a small part of me that suspects its a low-probability risk I need to be aware of.

I find it eerily reminiscent of trying to live near someone with poorly managed mental illness.

I'm not sure how well this is going to go over, but whenever I read something along these lines, I can't help but wonder, what's the end goal of all this?

Complete segregation? Apartheid? Set up bubbles where only people of certain colours or orientations can go, work, etc?

Why would anyone actually want this? I've met a lot of different people from a lot of different places, the things i've found the least important for determining the character of a person are their colour or orientation or any other equally superficial thing like the colour of their hair, or eyes or how tall they are or any of these other things that have absolutely nothing to do with the character and personality of a person.

Dividing, segregating, judging or making any kind of decisions based on a person's skin colour just overall makes you a shitty person. Regardless of who you are or how much privilege you think that person has over you.

I thought everyone was supposed to read Nathanial Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” in high school.

Maybe it should return to being required reading.

You can tell by the way people write on the internet that they have never read a book, let alone a classic with an important lesson to learn.

I wrote this hours ago and I want to remark that it seems that story isn't relevant to the facts of the situation gone on here and I shouldn't have invoked it. It's too late to edit my original post, which is fine, because I can still recant in a secondary post.

The story that this article is referencing may not be about marking those we dislike with an emblem meant to separate them; but, something more complicated and with many details I don't know; so, I want to roll back this particular comment.

The message was very easily missed because the story doesn't actually start until halfway through the book. Most of our class had already given up on the book by that point.

There's a movie based on it called Easy A [0], set in highschool, that gets across a similar message except it actually works because it's a comedy that keeps you interested.

(And I only say "similar" instead of "the same" because although I can remember what the A was, I can't remember anything about the narrative in The Scarlet Letter)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_A

I have a feeling a lot of people missed that one, along with the writing of George Orwell.

I feel like I'm so burnt out from reading about conflict. I can't even comment on who is right or wrong...it feels like such an overinflated digital age argument.

>it feels like such an overinflated digital age argument.

It is and if it just stayed on twitter it would be a nothing burger ... but somebody's real life career, good name, and business was destroyed. It wasn't the first time this happened in the past 5 years (but especially in the past year)

From the article: "Roost’s podcast network dropped her show; her producer publicly denounced her character (“We stand against racism”)"

Isn't it ... terrible that her producer performed this public shaming ritual where they denounced their former coworker and friend and labeled them a racist? Imagine seeing your friends, family and coworkers publicly denounce you because either they themselves are afraid to stand up to the mob, or maybe because they have something to gain. There have been people who were ostracized because they wouldn't sufficiently (and publicly) denounced their family or if they attempted to defend their children (!!).

In a few years, these kinds of shenanigans are going to be characterized as a moral panic, in the same vein (though orders of magnitude more broad) as the "Satanic ritual abuse" in the 80s, and heck, even the "Salem witch trials".

I swear it's a modern day Shibboleth[0]. I mean, just look at the picture in that article of the pogrom. Villagers displaying pictures/support for Jesus during pogram == internet denizens (and companies) showing that they denounce racism. Or to use another biblical analogy, I suspect a lot of times when a company publically denounces racism, what they are really doing is painting lamb's blood above their doorway in the hope that the "destroying angel" (mobs) will pass by them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth

A more apt, and more modern, analogy is the struggle session (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session).

>Isn't it ... terrible that her producer performed this public shaming ritual where they denounced their former coworker and friend and labeled them a racist? Imagine seeing your friends, family and coworkers publicly denounce you because either they themselves are afraid to stand up to the mob, or maybe because they have something to gain. There have been people who were ostracized because they wouldn't sufficiently (and publicly) denounced their family or if they attempted to defend their children (!!).

This is no less than a 2020 version of the Communist world's struggle session (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session).

I agree, I think a lot of people are going to look back on this period with more than a little embarrassment. What will make it worse for them is that so much of what they said and did will remain preserved forever.

It is kind of entertaining in a guilty sort of way. Like Jerry Springer or a car crash it can be hard to look away. And they do seem mostly to be going after one another so it’s hard to feel too much sympathy for the victims.

> digital age argument

There is something about the lack of personal connection that leads to extremes in the digital environment. I have a feeling that if these people had met over coffee to discuss her story it would have been a non-issue. Instead, disagreements and mistakes blow up, because once an audience is involved it's very hard for either side to back down.

Sometimes it's a challenge, but I always think 'is this how I would act if this person was sitting in front of me'.

This Sojwal is obviously a bully and a racist; as bad as anyone covered with Aryan Nation tattoos. But she didn’t destroy anyone’s career. No one bully can do that. That was done by a mob of cowards.

Re: The podcast getting cancelled. This is what Amy Westervelt (who cancelled her) has to say. She also provides context on what lead to that decision and it wasn't just a random twitter fight.

https://twitter.com/amywestervelt/status/1316923479011303424

Doesn't this kinda feed into the larger statement of the message about how a larger apology is required by the collective when someone stays allied to the current deplorable person for longer?

From what I read, I still don't know what happened (I don't care, either); but, the discussion on Twitter is so devoid of details that nothing can be learned or obtained from it, except that the person now cancelled seems to come from a different generation and that there have been numerous things that need to be changed about scripts, or something, and that she's generally pretty okay with it, if a bit difficult - but then, if a script you write, or whatever, has experienced a death by thousands of cuts where the implication of story decisions are continuously assumed to be, or explained how they could be interpreted as malicious when they weren't intended that way, that could get a bit tiring and one's tolerances might get weak.

Everybody continuously needs another dose of empathy. Everybody.

Again, I have no opinion on the matter, I don't know any of these people. Everyone seems to be painted in a bad light in this story (not just the twitter post) and the Amy Westervelt just seems trapped in the middle of it all, attempting to be very diplomatic about everything.

The article in this case seems to be a very bad source for the actual details and is much more concerned with painting a macro picture of woe. Reading the actual twitter thread and email exchange[1] plus this pretty helpful Westervelt thread, here's what I gather:

0. Roost has a history of having some racial blind spots in their field

1. Roost emails Sojwal to submit something that wasn't really what Sojwal was looking for, more or less as already made clear through public info.

2. Sojwal rejects rudely in frustration

3. Roost responds rudely, lacking contextual awareness

4. Sojwal responds in turn

....

5. Roost goes and complains about the rude rejection

6. Sojwal gets mad about this complaint out of context

7. Roost digs in and then attempts to report to Twitter

Step 0 and Step 7 are the keys here it seems, and Westervelt added a lot of important context for me. This was a straw that broke the camel's back for Roost it appears, not an isolated incident. Reporting someone on twitter for a personal spat at best from a misunderstanding is not putting Roost in any sort of decent light, and her prior context doesn't appear to have earned her any goodwill.

I know nothing of either until reading this either. I suspect Sojwal's response was anger out of frustration. Rude, absolutely. But I think reading what the org is about [2] really sheds light that it would be clear this isn't an outlet looking to publish stuff from Roost. If Roost read that before responding and took a second, this response [3] would probably have not been a good idea. While the original rejection is rude, I actually don't see the "assumptions" that Roost is trying to defend, and that backhanded apology isn't going to sit well with anyone. She didn't even need to apologize, but the apology + you're wrong about me (along with the submitted piece's perspective) doesn't look good. And then that's where the prior history comes in for the dominos after.

Roost had many points they could have dropped this at and didn't, which seems to me like it was a common issue from Westervelt's thread. Westervelt doesn't seem to be caught to me so much as disappointed in a friend they were trying to help, who seemed to just refuse to learn. Both, but more disappointment than posturing.

To be clear, this is far from cut and dry and I can very much understand why there are so many confused or hesitant commenters. It took me a decent deal of digging and nuance to get this picture of what happened. This all could have been avoided, and this 100% seems to be twitter drama that escalated needlessly, and certainly may be reflective of some negative parts of this world we're getting a glimpse into that an article like this could have critiqued with nuance. But to me, the issue is far from what this piece seems to diagnose. To make this about cancel culture and the title, "White Women Need Not Apply", misses the point, just as Roost did with what originally went wrong.

[1] https://twitter.com/senti_narwhal/status/1316379426892984320

[2] https://aaww.org/about-us/

[3] https://twitter.com/senti_narwhal/status/1316379426892984320...

Thanks for your perspective. It really does take a lot of effort to research and understand the context of these kind of events and I really wish everyone would make the same effort before jumping to their own conclusions.

Let's say we take Westervelt's tweet thread as the unvarnished truth. Some observations about that:

Westervelt noticed problems with Roost but tried to gently correct those and give her second chances.

Westervelt noticed problems that were recurring: that is, even after being nudged and given a second chance, Roost made the same mistakes more than once.

Roost now does something that ended up being very public. Now, finally, conveniently, Westervelt decides this is the last straw, and cuts her loose.

I'm not saying Roost is a saint, or that Westervelt is being disingenuous. In general, people try to do the best they can with the information they have at the time. But I think it likely that Westervelt's decision was also influenced by the fact that this storm was public and heated, and if she'd done nothing, that might have blown back on her. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but let's at least acknowledge that's what could have (and IMO probably) happened.

I am so sick of cancel culture. Roost did not deserve this.

Please get some context on why she was "cancelled".

https://twitter.com/amywestervelt/status/1316923479011303424

After reading those four email screenshots, my conclusions are:

1. Roost should probably do a better job in the future figuring out who she's trying to send her work to.

2. Sojwal's reaction was way out of proportion to any slight or offense, real or otherwise.

3. Roost's further reaction was foolish and condescending; taking Sojwal to task for her response was never going to be well received.

4. Sojwal's further escalation was ridiculous; equating "sending an essay that doesn't meet the submission requirements" with "racism" is just bonkers.

Beyond that, Roost should have just left well enough alone; it likely could have ended with that email exchange. Whining about the interaction on Facebook and threatening to report Twitter posts would have been a bad look even if she had been completely in the right.

I don't think Sojwal looks great here, but Roost had plenty of opportunities to put down her shovel and climb out of the hole she'd dug for herself, but instead chose to keep digging.

It's just disappointing that public discourse around race has devolved so far that this sort of thing happens at all. The excesses of cancel culture are a symptom, not the cause.

See it in the context of a job application

What are the race/age/gender expectations of the hiring manager?

Would an applicant ever have to apologize for applying to the wrong job or having the wrong qualifications?

I read through the whole thing and came to the same conclusions. Your comment summarises the situation well.

Honestly, I think the furries have it right, at least in concept. (I know a surprising many of them.) They've solved racism and sexism by abandoning the vestiges of these notions altogether.

I wish the real world was just as blind.

Why do people have to behave like the tribalistic great apes we descended from? It's 2020 and we have rockets that travel to Mars and beyond.

So many people love to bully...

Explain Nazi Furs.

I have no idea what that is, and I don't think I want to.

I don't really feel like this article explores the situation fully. Why are there no quotes from either Roost or Sojwal or their respective supporters? For an article that talks about the concept of keeping an open mind to the other side of a story I feel like we really only hear one side. Maybe one needs to be actively following everything that happens on Twitter in order to get the necessary context before reading this article?

If you look at the previous pieces of the author, it becomes clear that this is not about the people involved here but the larger narrative the author wants to write about, with is cancel culture. You can see this with another piece, asking basically if the Amy Barrett case went too far.

https://arcdigital.media/karens-all-the-way-down-cd530b0c0a0...

This is more or less in line with HN's general "slippery slope" sentiment, and is likely why the piece was originally submitted. It doesn't seem like many here care about the particulars, and the affected community appears to be small. So the article as posted is just rehashing a macro debate with no contextual add or news.

This thread gives actual perspective from a coworker of Roost's, the aforementioned cancelled podcast. A lot more nuance there. I made a post from what I could glean from the actual situation as an outsider here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24832827

Wow thanks for this reply and the other reply that you linked. I think it just goes to prove how valuable it is to do your own research before passing judgement but sadly this takes a lot of time and effort that many people (including me) don't have.

> “Not here to play” was an understatement: 48 hours and more than 7,000 retweets later, Roost’s career was toast. In hindsight, this was probably inevitable. Nobody gets canceled quite so enthusiastically as a middle-aged white woman accused of racism

Here's a Perry Bible Fellowship comic that first was funny, but now I realize is prescient[1]. We're beginning to see something akin to Newton's Third law of social justice.

1. https://pbfcomics.com/comics/deeply-held-beliefs/

I’ve been “blipping the throttle” to add accelerant to these kinds of absurd happenings for exactly this reason.

The sooner society recoils toward valuing personal liberty and responsibility again, the better!

These absurdly tone deaf and hateful “anti-fascist” fascists are going to go down in the history books as one of the most ridiculous groups of thugs we’ve seen in the short and violent (but mostly peaceful) history of America...

this comic in a way is backed by science

https://www.tidalequality.com/blog/dont-do-unconscious-bias-...

This is a big reason for Trump’s appeal - being able to rally behind someone who can so effectively withstand constant derision from all directions. Moreover, the apologists on this site and elsewhere will continue to excuse this behavior until they are backed into a corner and enclosed into a tomb of their own making.

being able to rally behind someone who can so effectively withstand constant derision from all directions

Americans love an underdog, from baseball to politics.

Whether or why Mr. Trump is an actual underdog, or plays one on TV is left as an exercise for the reader.

One of the fascinating aspects of the Trump phenomenon to me is how a globalist billionaire celebrity who started his career with a million dollar loan from his father managed to convince a demographic that hates globalists, billionaires and celebrities that he was the scrappy underdog and hero of the common man running against someone with a fraction of his net worth, a better pedigree of political advocacy and who actually held down a real job at least once.

Granted, it amounts to the difference between a silver spoon and a platinum spoon but it's still surprising.

who started his career with a million dollar loan from his father

I've never understood why people keep repeating this line as if it's derogatory.

I know a fair number of first and second generation immigrant business owners, and they have almost all started their businesses with help from their families. This has been very common in America for the last couple of hundred years. Probably longer. Why is this now considered a bad thing?

It is a bad thing to claim to be an underdog when you started with a massive advantage over what most people start with.

No, it is not very common in America to have parents wealthy enough to loan a million dollars to their kid on a whim - most people take out loans from banks or work to pay for new businesses, rather than being born into it and then marrying it. It indicates a degree of privilege the vast majority of Trump's working class base can never hope to have access to.

I mean, Mitt Romney was ridiculed for being rich and upper class and even he was less rich than Donald Trump.

Trump did largely all the same stuff, canceling Kaepernick and others.

Not sure if they are both professors, but, if so, I'd wager his evangelical base wouldn't allow either woman in the article to teach at their evangelical schools on ideological grounds, canceling them from reaching a whole set of students.

Social media is truly terrifying, it seems to be leading to more and more extreme takes by each side of any issue. There's 0 middle ground, as should be obvious here (the article in question was about hate crimes against 3 Muslims!).

Although I normally agree with the notion of "In order to allow the voices of the less privileged to be heard, some voices must be limited." especially when it comes to hate speech or divisive topics.

However I'm not sure how I should feel about this scenario, one could argue that she's on a platform reserved for PoCs. Alternatively, the colour of her skin shouldn't play a part in her opinion.

Is Senji Sojwal a pseudonym? I can’t seem to find that this is a real person. When searching for “Senji Sojwal” in a search engine, this article is the only result returned.

It was misspelt in the article. If you clicked through to the Twitter thread you'll see that her name is Senti, not Senji.

This is the natural outcome of far leftist identity politics, nothing to see here.

"I am really tired of white women's tears." This is a plainly racist comment.

Justification is "it's okay to punch up, just not punch down"

One might argue that pragmatically being a member of a group that it's unacceptable to punch is superior to being a member of one that it is. For example historically in pretty much every culture the persons of civil and religious officials have been inviolate. The modern USA culture of contempt for leadership is clearly unsustainable and thus it will end.

A Chinese colleague told me a joke a few years ago. "An American asked a Chinese, 'how does it feel to not be able to publicly criticize your President?' And the Chinese replied, 'How does it feel to not be able to publicly support yours?'"

> A Chinese colleague told me a joke a few years ago. "An American asked a Chinese, 'how does it feel to not be able to publicly criticize your President?' And the Chinese replied, 'How does it feel to not be able to publicly support yours?'"

Gonna put on my pedantic buzzkill hat for a second. I do actually find that joke to be funny, but it hides potential discussion of real differences behind a pithy comment.

Being jailed for criticizing your president is much much worse than suffering social backlash for supporting a president that your chosen community has judged to be bad.

Depriving someone of their freedom through legal force is not the same thing as people getting mad at you on the internet (even if that anger causes you to get fired).

> The modern USA culture of contempt for leadership

Give me leaders who aren't contemptuous and then we'll talk. They do exist, on both sides of the aisle, even though they sometimes seem to be in short supply these days.

Individual racism is far different from systemic and systematic racism.

A Brahmin Indian immigrant like Sojwal is a pretty good contender for least-oppressed group in America. Top of the charts in income by ethnicity, college admissions, low crime rates.

White people falling far behind east asians in practically every measurement shows what a crock of crap "systemic racism" is.

Eh. Its pointing out the concept of victimhood by the privileged class. I don't take it to be a blanket statement against all white women.

The dark side of xkcd 1357 rears its ugly head... again...

Sojwal is certainly a disgraceful racist, but in our neo-racist culture, it's taboo to say so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com