Category: “privilege”

NY Times columnist defends the hiring of racist Sarah Jeong

August 9, 2018 • 12:45 pm

I suspected that the New YorkTimes would publish at least one of its regular columnists defending the hiring of tech editor Sarah Jeong, who over several years put out a hoard of racist, sexist, and anti-police tweets that, because she was Asian and her victims were SJW Approved Malefactors™ (mostly white), were excused by the Times. She was hired as their head tech columnist, yet you can bet that if her tweets were anti-immigrant or anti-black, she would have been out on her tuchas. The Times and Jeong both claimed that her racism was simply a response in kind to trolls, but there is no evidence that that was the case (see here, here, and here). Her hiring—after Quinn Norton, another writer, was fired when it was revealed she put out racist tweets—marks a new low in the history of the Regressive Left, and an ineradicable black mark on the name of the New York Times. Click on the screenshot to read the piece:

 

It is a sign of our times that columnists like Stephens, and the Times editors themselves, defended Jeong when other Times writers banded together to demonize Bari Weiss, an anti-SJW progressive who is far more sensible than is Jeong. When Weiss tweeted “Immigrants get the job done,” referring to a skater, Mirai Nagasu, who was the offspring of an immigrant (but praising Nagasu), Weiss was demonized by her fellow NYT writers for a simple error which was made in praise of an immigrant. How dare she call the daughter of immigrants an immigrant as well?

Yet when Jeong broadcasts pure hate, she is adamantly defended by both Stephens and the editors, and her racism is excused. What kind of world is this? (Weiss, by the way, hasn’t written a column since June 20, and I don’t know why. I suspect she’s lying low for fear of being fired. Weiss will never, I predict, call out Sarah Jeong, though she would if she weren’t writing for the NYT.)

In fact, Stephens says that Jeong’s tweets were indeed racist and that the Left’s defense of her is hypocritical. In fact, I have to agree with this conservative columnist when he begins his apologetics like this:

We should call many of [Jeong’s] tweets for what they are: racist. I’ve seen some acrobatic efforts to explain why Jeong’s tweets should be treated as “quasi-satirical,” hyperbolical and a function of “social context.” But the criteria for racism is either objective or it’s meaningless: If liberals get to decide for themselves who is or isn’t a racist according to their political lights, conservatives will be within their rights to ignore them.

Also worth noting is the leftist double standard when it comes to social-media transgressions. In February, my centrist colleague Bari Weiss celebrated U.S. figure skater Mirai Nagasu’s historic triple axel by tweeting a line from the musical “Hamilton”: “Immigrants: They get the job done.” Left-wing social media went berserk over this alleged “othering” of Nagasu, who was born in California to immigrant parents.

By contrast, the left has been nothing if not aggressive in its defense of Jeong. That’s the right thing to do, but it’s also rank hypocrisy coming from many of the same people who loudly demanded the ouster of Williamson, Weiss, or, well, me. The tests for who gets to work at publications like The Times or The Atlantic ought to revolve around considerations of liveliness, integrity, maturity, and talent. When ideology becomes the litmus test, we’re on the road to Pravda.

Note, though that the Times fired Quinn Norton for similar transgressions, described here in Wikipedia:

On February 13, 2018, The New York Times announced that Norton would join its editorial board as a lead opinion writer covering technology.  Within six hours, Norton stated on Twitter that she would not be joining after all. “Between the two statements,” the Times reported, “a social media storm had erupted, with Ms. Norton at the center of it, because of her use of slurs on Twitter and her friendship with Andrew Auernheimer who gained infamy as an internet troll going by the name ‘weev.'”

Norton first argued on Twitter that her use of the slur had been misconstrued, and later referred to her characterization on Twitter and in relevant press coverage, as a “bizarre doppelganger version of myself” which had nothing to do with reality. She highlighted that she herself was part of the LGBT community and words referring to gay people were covered by “in-group” referencing. She also pointed out that her friendship with Auernheimer, whom she called a “terrible person”, started when he was her journalistic source, and that her main effort with him was to discourage his racism. She pointed out that her idea was to engage racism to change it, rather than to shun racists. She noted she was not currently in contact with Auernheimer.

According to April Glaser, writing for Slate, Norton’s friendship with Auernheimer, regardless of whether she personally confronted him on his views, should be viewed as contributing to the culture of a larger group of Internet freedom activists who lionized Auernheimer for his hacking without denouncing his racism and anti-Semitism.

The Times responded to the online uproar within eight hours, claiming that this information was new to them. The firing led to debate over the ethics of free speech in the hacking community at large and the ethos of the  vis-à-vis Twitter.

So if we’re to forgive Jeong, why not Norton? And god forbid that a NYT columnist like Stephens would call out his own newspaper for hypocrisy. No, it’s the “leftist double standard,” not the New York Times‘s double standard!

So if Stephens finds Jeong an ill-intentioned racist in her tweets, and those who defend them misguided, why is he supporting her? Because of the “first stone” effect (look at the title) and his claim that Jeong has produced good journalism and that her tweets are the equivalent of losing it when you get drunk or stoned, which, he says, is what Twitter and social media do to people (my emphasis in the following):

My own misgivings about Jeong’s tweets have less to do with their substance than with their often snarky tone, occasional meanness, and sheer number: 103,000 over some nine years, averaging about 31 tweets a day. (Donald Trump only averages 11.)

But that’s the way we live now — unfiltered — and many of us, including me, have been late to appreciate Twitter’s narcotic power to bring out the worst in ourselves. Undigested thoughts. Angry retorts. Jokes that don’t land. Points made in haste. All the mental burps and inner screams that wisely used to be left unspoken — or, if spoken, little heard and seldom recorded.

That’s a reason to treat social media approximately the way we do opioids: with utmost caution. But it’s also a reason to temper our judgments about people based on the things they say on social media. The person you are drunk or stoned is not the person you are — at least not the whole person. Neither is the person you are the one who’s on Twitter.

I’ve spent the last few days reading some of Jeong’s longer-form journalism. It’s consistently smart and interesting and as distant from some of her more notorious social-media output as a brain is from a bottom. But you’ll struggle to find her articles on an internet search, because her serious work is overwhelmed by the controversy her tweets have generated.

Is it ultimately her fault for writing those ugly tweets? Yes. Does it represent the core truth of who she is? I doubt it. Anyone who has been the victim of the social-media furies knows just how distorting and dishonest those furies can be.

Note, two things. First, Quinn Norton said in her defense that she was doing exactly what Jeong was doing, producing a “doppelganger” version with “ingroup references”, and that she, Norton, was engaging with racists using their own language. To keep Jeong on for the same transgression for which Norton was fired is arrant hypocrisy.

More important: no, not everyone is a toxic Tweeter, pouring out a gaggle of racist tweets and hateful epithets. You will not find that on my site, nor, I suspect on most other people’s sites. I can cast a stone because I have no “bad” tweets of the kind hurled into the ether by Jeong. Jeong was neither drunk nor stoned on the Internet; she was just hateful.  In fact, the person you are on the internet is largely the person you suppress to get along in civil society, but the hate is still there, hidden from view. I refuse to accept that people cannot learn from others how to behave civilly on social media. If they can’t, then you know what kind of person they really are.

I don’t necessarily think that Jeong should be fired; but if they fired Quinn Norton, they should either fire Jeong or reinstate Norton. Absent either, the Times is reprehensible.

I’ll give the final word to Grania, whom I asked for her opinion:

NYT is losing the run of itself. Journalists are supposed to report the news, not be the news. This is soap opera level stuff. As for the twit who wrote “Let he who is without a bad tweet cast the first stone.” that may actually garner a crowd larger than he likes to think. Not everyone is an arsehole on the internet. Finally, “bad tweets” is a relative term. There’s a difference between someone who is occasionally an ill-mannered or bad-tempered jerk and someone who habitually harasses and stalks those they disapprove of.

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

August 3, 2018 • 9:45 am

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.

Sarah Jeong, named NYT’s lead technology writer, has a history of racist tweets

August 2, 2018 • 12:45 pm

On February 13, the New York Times hired Quinn Norton to write about technology for the paper, and later that day fired her. The cause was Norton’s history of questionable tweets, as well as a friendship with a white supremacist—things that social media apparently called to the paper’s attention. According to Wired, the issues are more complicated than that, and Quinn’s “racist” tweets might have been misinterpreted.  I take no stand on this because I haven’t followed Quinn’s story, but the fact is that the paper decided to let Quinn go because of her bigoted tweets in the past.

The case of Sarah Jeong, however, just hired by the paper as the head technology writer, seems less complicated, as there’s no way one can interpret her tweets —made between 2013 and 2015—charitably. They’re racist, bigoted (against white people, especially men), and numerous. Here’s the Time’s announcement yesterday of Jeong’s hiring (click on screenshot to see it on the NYT site):


Jeong’s Twitter handle is “professional twiter name” (she now uses her real name), and here are some of her tweets unearthed by various sources. These are screenshots saved and tweeted by others, or collected by others, and I haven’t verified their existence on her Twitter feed; I suspect they’ve been deleted. Have a look at these, which go back four years or so. I believe they’re all authentic because the paper itself has admitted she engaged in this behavior (see below):

https://twitter.com/TheRalphRetort/status/1024790335434698752

https://twitter.com/TheRalphRetort/status/1024791982047195136

Here’s a collection:

 

 

 

You can see more at the right-wing websites The National Review and The Daily Caller. In this case even the conservatives got the facts straight.

Now these could have been fabricated tweets, but the Times itself has more or less admitted that they were real (see below). And if they are real, then there’s no way they can be interpreted charitably.  If the Times fired Quinn because of her history of questionable tweets, it has set its own standard, and must therefore fire Jeong.

But they’re defending her, saying that her tweets came from her being harassed and she was merely “respond[ing] to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.” Here’s the NYT’s defense. 

That is absolutely pathetic when set next to the case of Quinn. Can you imagine what would happen if a black man harassed a white woman and she responded with racial invective, calling for the extinction of black people and using the word “nigger”? That kind of “response in kind” would be deemed unacceptable.

The differential treatment of Quinn and Jeong seems to derive solely from Jeong being an Asian woman rather than a white woman. I can understand this hypocrisy in no other way.  Jeong’s defense, clearly written in collusion with the Times, reproduces two cases of abuse she’s gotten. Just two, and even if there are more this is no excuse for her racist tirade. Further, perhaps people should go back and see if in all these cases she was responding to online harassment. Frankly, I don’t believe it.

Should anybody be fired for a history of racist tweets? Readers can weigh in on that below; I have no firm opinion. My point here is simply that the New York Times, which I maintain is becoming a Control Leftist paper, is engaging in arrant hypocrisy by treating two identical cases differently based solely on ethnicity.  In this case the content of the women’s character was outweighed by the color of their skin.

My respect for this paper has eroded rapidly, and this case is the kicker. The paper is reprehensible.

 

 

Lionel Shriver removed as judge of literary competition for questioning a diversity algorithm

June 13, 2018 • 11:30 am

Four days ago I reported on a piece author Lionel Shriver published in the Spectator: a criticism of UK Penguin/Random House’s (PRH) striving for diversity in its authors and employees in the form of a questionnaire. The piece, called “When Diversity Means Uniformity,” accused PRH of being “drunk on virtue”, and pointing out two problems with this quest for diversity (granted, the questionnaire was bizarre):

I see two issues here. First: diversity, both the word and the concept, has crimped. It serves a strict, narrow agenda that has little or nothing to do with the productive dynamism of living and working alongside people with widely different upbringings and beliefs. Only particular and, if you will, privileged backgrounds count. Which is why Apple’s African-American diversity tsar, Denise Young Smith, got hammered last October after submitting, ‘There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.’ She hadn’t bowed to the newly shackled definition of the word, which has now been effectively removed from the language as a general-purpose noun.

Second: dazzled by this very highest of social goods, many of our institutions have ceased to understand what they are for. Drunk on virtue, Penguin Random House no longer regards the company’s raison d’être as the acquisition and dissemination of good books. Rather, the organisation aims to mirror the percentages of minorities in the UK population with statistical precision. Thus from now until 2025, literary excellence will be secondary to ticking all those ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual preference and crap-education boxes. We can safely infer from that email that if an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling. Good luck with that business model. Publishers may eschew standards, but readers will still have some.

I wouldn’t have written it exactly that way, partciularly the antepenultimate sentence. But it’s a fair point, and worthy of discussion. Are we striving for equal representation or equal opportunity? That is the most important question that progressive liberals need to answer for themselves, along with “does unequal representation mean unequal opportunity?”

Well, there are always professional consequences to bucking the tropes of Control Leftism, and Shriver is about to pay one—not that it’s going to hurt her much. Mslexia, a British magazine aimed at women authors, is holding a short story competition for women from any country with a £5,000 top prize. Shriver was going to be a judge.

Not any longer:

Translation: Mslexia has to have a safe space for authors, and by questioning a “proportional representation” view of diversity, Shriver has violated that. So she’s out.

Somehow I suspect that the strong-minded Ms. Shriver won’t mind; in fact, she’ll probably write a snarky piece about it. But this just goes to show how those who are Ideologically Impure get punished. Shriver is now is a non person, or rather a person who doesn’t create a “safe space for all women writers.”

Of course Mslexia can choose whomever they want as a judge. But removing Shriver as a judge isn’t going to improve the quality of the entries and winners; Shriver, I suspect, would judge submissions on their merit. Why would she not? No, this is, pure and simple, a form of virtue signaling by Mslexia.  It’s not as if some women weren’t going to submit their stories because they’d be judged by Shriver.

h/t: BJ

What is a microaggression?

May 19, 2018 • 10:00 am

I had some discussions recently with a member of a group that would be considered a ‘minority group’ in America, but not one that’s obviously oppressed—Asians.  I was given some statements made by Americans that the woman saw as either insulting or benighted, and I had to agree. This made me rethink the whole concept of “microaggressions.”

But first, are “microaggressions really “aggressions”?  Here’s the definition of the “aggression” as given by Wikipedia:

A microaggression is the casual degradation of any marginalized group. The term was coined by psychiatrist and Harvard University professor Chester M. Pierce in 1970 to describe insults and dismissals he regularly witnessed non-black Americans inflict on African Americans.Eventually, the term came to encompass the casual degradation of any socially marginalized group, such as the poor or the disabled.Psychologist Derald Wing Sue defines microaggressions as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership”.

Here’s another definition from the UCLA Diversity Group:

Microaggressions are the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership

I think two things are conflated here: bigotry and ignorance, with the ignorance being either willful (boorishness) or not (unintentional phrases that offend some). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first two meanings of the term “aggression” are these:

 1. An unprovoked attack; the first attack in a dispute or conflict; an assault, an inroad.

and

 2. The practice of attacking another or others; the making of an attack or assault.

Now if you look at lists of what are considered “microaggressions” (e.g. here, here, or here), you see that many of them aren’t really “aggressive” in this sense. In other words, they aren’t intended to be attacks or to be derogatory. That doesn’t mean they’re not offensive, for many of them are indeed boorish and can easily take its toll on one’s self-esteem. Although I’m not a person of color, I’ve talked to enough white women to know the many ways women get subtle messages of degradation on a constant basis.

But beyond that boorish words can reflect two things. First, a stupid question, born of ignorance, that any person living in a civilized society should realize could be taken as offensive. Second, a naive question that you could construe as based on simple ignorance, and asked simply from a curiosity about cultural differences. (This holds not for gender, but does for race and ethnicity.)

Finally, there are those “microaggressions” that can be seen as offensive only by those people looking for offense, and which are intended as conciliatory or at best neutral. I’ll list a few examples from the lists in all four classes.

1. Really aggressive microaggresions (born of bigotry, meant to insult members of minorities or clearly having that effect):

“You are a credit to your race.” (Implies that that ‘race’ itself is somehow debased.)

A cab bypassing a black person. (Implies that black people are either criminal or undesirable customers)

A store owner following a person of color around a store (implies they are thieves); same goes for calling the cops on people, like the woman student at Yale, simply because they’re black.

“I am not a racist/anti-Semite; I have several black/Jewish friends.” This old chesnut has been uttered by so many racists and anti-Semites that it bears no credibility. It could mean something useful (falling in class 2 below), but has been so often abused that it should be retired.

“Don’t you realize that you got the job because you are a woman/black person, not because you are the best qualified candidate?” (Clearly offensive and intended to denigrate an individual.)

Using the words “you people” to refer to the behavior of an individual in a minority group. (Never positive, reflects bigotry and stereotyping.)”I jewed him down on the price.” (Obviously anti-semitic, but not often said to Jews!)

“She’s just acting that way because she’s having her period.” This is simply sexism, used to dismiss women who have a valid reason to be upset.

2. Microaggressions that are easily seen as offensive and whose issuer should have known better.

“Do they have cars in China?” (I heard this from an Asian friend). Jesus, you should know the answer!

“You can’t order beef!” (Michael Ruse asked this question to my Colombian graduate student when the latter ordered beef at a conference dinner. He assumed my student was Indian, but never bothered to find out.)

“She’s such an articulate person.” (Usually said of blacks or Asians, implying that they’re speaking better than most people from that group.) People should know that being “articulate” is not a matter of race, but of education and culture (which of course are correlated with race to some extent). This implies that most members of the group are not, or don’t have the capacity to be, articulate.” It is offensive.

Talking loudly and aggressively to someone who doesn’t speak English well. (Volume isn’t going to increase their comprehension, and is a sign of ignorance and lack of respect.)

Always referring to a person of indeterminate gender as “he”. (Pinker says use “they” or alternate genders.)

3. Microaggressions that are excusable because, though asked from ignorance, not everybody would know the answers.

“Do they use forks in China?” (Well, in general they don’t, but when said to a Chinese person who lives in America, it could imply that they don’t know how to use them.)

“No, where are you really from?”  This is sometimes said to people of foreign ancestry who live in the U.S. or even are American citizens. It could be seen as insulting if you think it means that foreign ancestry means you can’t be truly American, but it could also reflect simple curiosity. For instance, when I get a cab driver of Indian or Pakistani ancestry, I often like to find out where they or their ancestors come from. Having been to India many times, this often leads to a spirited conversation that is educational for me and fun for both of us. (Of course, I love India and its people, and that comes through in such talks.) But I never ask them where they’re “really” from; they already clearly live in America! Sometimes they’ll tell me that they’re planning to go back to where their relatives live, or their country of origin, which of course conveys the lesson that not everyone wants to live in the U.S.—something that Americans need to learn.

“When I look at you, I don’t see a black person/race.”  This may in fact be true for friends of different races. In fact, the object of racial tolerance is to act as Martin Luther King urged: to judge someone by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. This statement reflects that desire. Those who consider it a “microaggression” are implicitly suggesting that we should always be conscious of someone’s race or ethnicity when talking to them. But that then assumes that there is a commonality of experience among all members of a group that comes out in their character, which simply cannot be true.

4. Microaggressions that are neither bigoted nor aggressive, but offend those who practice Recreational Outrage.

“America is a melting pot.”

“There is only one race—the human race.”  This is meant to be conciliatory and emphasize the common elements of humanity, but will outrage those who say that races are real, even though they’re also social constructs.

“I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” While people may construe this as a statement about affirmative action, with racial or gender preferences needed, it is in fact useful to debate whether affirmative action is the best thing to do to remedy bigotry and its sequelae (I still think that such provisions have to be made); and being meritocratic doesn’t necessarily mean you’re bigoted. Perhaps you want equality of opportunity rather than outcome, which I don’t see as a either aggressive or bigoted. But you’re bigoted if you don’t want to ensure equality of opportunity.

Virtually all forms of “cultural appropriation”, which most often reflect admiration or aspects of a culture rather than denigrating the entire culture. There are exceptions, of course, and I’ve mentioned these, but wearing dreadlocks or practicing yoga is nothing you need to apologize for.

Now this is just a tentative classification, and there may be other groups of “microaggressions” as well. Readers should feel free to weigh in.

Lumping all of these different phrases, or forms of behavior, under as single term that implies that they’re aggressive and bigoted blurs the real differences in attitudes and motivation behind them. And most of these aren’t “aggressive” in the sense of “meaning to offend someone”. That doesn’t mean they’re okay to use, but “aggression” is an example of verbal goal-post moving that makes something seem worse than it is, or different from how it’s meant.

In that sense, then, using the term “microaggression” is like saying “hate speech is violence”. Not all critical speech is “hate speech” and virtually no hate speech is “violence.” In fact, microaggressions are often seen as both manifestations of hate speech and of violence.  I’d suggest ditching the term “microaggression”, as it plays into the identity-politics narrative; but the term has become too entrenched. Still, it pays to tease apart the different forms of what are lumped together by colleges as a unitary form of “hate speech”.

Should we avoid using phrases in classes 3 and 4 because not all members of a minority group get offended by some of them? It depends. Some of these will be seen as offensive to members of many groups, and not just because they’re looking to be offended, but because they do experience the pain of ignorance and bias on a frequent basis. But as for phrases like “America is a melting pot”, or “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” I see no need to apologize (I’d use the first phrase but not the second.) We cannot avoid offending everyone with what we say; if we did, then virtually everything would be considered a microaggression and a form of racism (e.g. “Israel has a right to exist” or “not all Republicans are racists”). It seems to me that living in a multicultural society will quickly educate you about the norms of offense and civility. Lists of terms that conflate entirely different things, as handed out by colleges to their students, are not helpful.

Finally, are microaggressions forms of violence? The answer is no. Are they expressions of bigotry? Sometimes, whether that bigotry is instilled by parents or acquired elsewhere. But not always. And we don’t always have to apologize for everything we say that is considered offensive. Use your common sense.

 

A new book (and a video) on “Victimhood Culture”

April 10, 2018 • 9:15 am

I believe a reader recommended the book I highlight below, which I’ve just finished. It’s written by two sociologists who take a sociological rather than a polemic approach to their topic, so that they analyze both Right- and Left-wing instances of victimhood. (As we all know, both Christians and conservatives often paint themselves as beleaguered victims.) In the end, though, the main topic is the pervasiveness of victimhood culture on college campuses, which means mostly the Left.

Campbell and Manning explain why campuses seem to have become the focus of this culture (I won’t explain that here), and contrast it with two other forms of culture that have existed over history. One is “Honor Culture” (the culture of the Old South, some Muslim societies, and many street gangs), in which individuals are expected to be offended by insults and take matters into their own hands, meting out what they consider “justice” to restore their honor. Another is “Dignity Culture”, in which individuals are supposed to ignore insults, but, if harassment becomes too pervasive or damaging, to appeal to third parties like the government rather than acting as vigilantes.

Campbell and Manning claim that “Victimhood Culture” is a hybrid of these two forms: individuals, seeing themselves as victims (the pivotal aspect of such a culture), easily take offense at slights and insults, real or perceived, and yet rather than rectifying these slights themselves, appeal to third parties for adjudication. In this case, it’s mostly university authorities (and, of course, social media) who are the “third parties.” That explains in part the huge recent growth of administrators relative to faculty members in American universities. Many of these administrators are there to adjudicate disputes or enforce speech or behavior codes.

The Rise of Victimhood Culture is a relatively short and lucid read, and has a lot of anecdotes you might know about, but also many you don’t. Where there are sociological data bearing on the issue, the authors adduce it. They cite one paper on “microaggressions,” for instance, that analyzes whether they are even definable and whether they cause psychological damage (the answers, respectively, are “not easily” and “no evidence”). I’ve cited that paper at the bottom, and, if the link doesn’t work, judicious inquiry might yield you a copy.

I realize that, working on a college campus, I am immersed in victimhood culture every day, and the features of such culture might not be as evident to those who live and work in the real world. Nevertheless, victimhood culture is spreading—now to social media as well as mainstream media like the New York Times and the New Yorker; and it will spread further as the termites dine. I recommend this book (click on the screenshot to go to the Amazon link):

Apropos of victimhood culture, I’ve put up several videos about it showing social psychologist Jon Haidt (see here), who sometimes calls this “offense culture.” Here’s another 11-minute talk by conservative scholar (and atheist) Heather MacDonald decrying that culture and its spread.

MacDonald has been demonized by the Left and deplatformed at several universities for her support of the police (she wrote The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe and has also been a critic of the Black Lives Matter movement). But nobody denies she’s a serious scholar—far from the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos and other provocateurs. Nevertheless, this is how she’s been treated (from Wikipedia):

In the spring of 2017, a protest group announced plans to “shut down” her speech on the Black Lives Matter movement at a college campus in California, on the grounds that Mac Donald is, they allege, racist, fascist, and anti-Black. On April 7, around 250 protesters surrounded and prevented audience members from entering the building where she was speaking at Claremont McKenna College, whose president Hiram Chodosh stated afterwards: “Based on the judgment of the Claremont Police Department, we jointly concluded that any forced interventions or arrests would have created unsafe conditions for students, faculty, staff, and guests.” Mac Donald ultimately gave the talk to a small audience in the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum which was also live-streamed on the Claremont McKenna website. Chodosh added: “In the end, the effort to silence her voice effectively amplified it to a much larger audience.”

But listen to what she has to say and tell me if you think her thoughts are sufficiently odious to shut her down, much less see her as someone creating an “unsafe condition” for students. It seems to me that there’s plenty of food here for discussion—at least for those willing to hear her. (If you want to hear the full event—a discussion between MacDonald, Howard Dean, and Steve Pinker—the two-hour video is here.)

____________

Lilienfeld, S. O.  2017. Microaggressions: Strong claims, inadequate evidence. Perspectives on Psychological Science 12: 138-169.

HuffPo has quotas for op-ed authors by race and gender. Is this okay?

March 16, 2018 • 9:45 am

Here are some tweets from HuffPo Deputy Opinion Editor Chloe Angyal, stating that she, the site, or both, adhere to quotas for op-ed writers based on considerations of gender and ethnicity:

https://twitter.com/ChloeAngyal/status/974031492727832576

https://twitter.com/ChloeAngyal/status/974031596184588290

This disturbs me not so much for the affirmative action aspect but because op-eds are supposed to reflect viewpoint diversity, not genetic or gender diversity. The implicit assumption here is that everyone within a given identity class will have similar opinions, so perhaps by ensuring gender and ethnic diversity you perforce ensure opinion diversity.

But let’s be clear, HuffPo, like Breitbart, doesn’t really care about viewpoint diversity: there is one Authoritarian Left viewpoint that, with few exceptions, will be scrupulously adhered to by almost all writers. What they’re doing, then, is enforcing an equality of outcome without caring much about equality of opportunity (which would mandate a blind selection of writers on the basis of merit) or, indeed, even presenting a decent panoply of opinions.

But you weigh in. First, vote below, then give your more nuanced opinion in the comments:

Chloe Angyal:

HuffPo is the Breitbart of the Left, and I predict that its authoritarianism will soon bring it down, if for no other reason that more centrist Leftists can’t stand the site’s grandstanding and virtue signaling. Already the articles in sections other than its front page are barely being updated. I can hardly thing of any non-irritating and non-tabloidy Leftist websites save Slate, but would be glad to hear of any.