Saturday, August 4, 2018

For the Record: Can Korean-Americans be Racists?

Like did somebody say there was anything wrong with being an underground goblin?  Via Monsters Vault.

I feel like I warned everybody about Kevin Williamson, that when the Atlantic hired him and then fired him over his ridiculously ghoulish tweets demanding capital punishment for women who undergo abortions—by hanging if I remember it right—the world would have been better off focusing on what a terrible writer he was, and how thoroughly dishonest, instead of pressing him like a mob of Jake Tappers to confess that he really wanted mass executions, which of course he didn't, he's much too clubbable for that—he just wanted to make people's flesh creep, like the fat boy in Pickwick Papers, only with self-righteousness instead of honest fear, and without any sense that his stupid and careless words were encouraging actual real-world abortion haters to kill, as they have killed before—

But no, everybody wanted to make it about the tweets, and now the world has constructed its equal and opposite reaction in the form of The New York Times hiring a gifted young tech writer, Sarah Jeong, to serve on its editorial board, and a massive rightwing butthurt protest because she once emitted some mean tweets, displaying an alarming lack of compassion for white people, because that's one of the big issues of the day. For example, in response to some especially obnoxious "can we hear both sides?" tweet from Andrew Sullivan in 2014, she'd responded,


Comically enough, this was the one Andrew Sullivan himself would personally call out four years later, as especially hurtful, completely unaware that it had been composed as a direct parody of his own most offensively just-saying "can't we at least consider the possibility that black people are genetically predisposed to sit around gossiping in the low-stress environment of the African savannah?" manner.

Everything's going to be fine for Sarah Jeong, the Times has backed her up appropriately, but I really can't pass over the implication around the intertubes that it's somehow impossible for Asian women to suffer discrimination:


Especially as I've been nursing my own ethnic-Chinese old lady over the past three or so years through a ghastly discrimination case at her place of employment that hasn't actually harmed her income much (a ten percent pay cut when she was relieved of administrative duties in a mostly academic job isn't exactly small though) but has made her pretty cranky, if you know what I mean, and if you've ever been married you know what I mean, involving among other things the continuing assumption that she doesn't "really" know English though she's been speaking it all her life and has a degree in the subject (from New Zealand) and can write and edit rings around her monolingual supervisors (the pretext problem, as opposed to the underlying racism, involved writing and editing). That's ended, with the firing of two of her worst tormentors (unfortunately they were fired for spectacular misfeasance that had nothing to do with her, so it was sort of unsatisfactory, the way we'll feel if Trump is sacked for making payoffs to his ladyfriends and not gross corruption, treachery, and policy disasters).

And then Ben Shapiro:
Thinking about how Shapiro could have had the decency to note that Jews didn't always feel totally welcome in the U.S. in spite of the gentleman's agreement allowing them access to CCNY and even a couple of proper colleges like Brandeis and NYU, back in the day:



Please check out that last link, which leads to maybe the best—and least threatening—account I've ever seen of ways in which making fun of white people is not necessarily racist.
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