{"id":10485,"date":"2018-08-04T18:44:42","date_gmt":"2018-08-05T00:44:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=10485"},"modified":"2018-08-04T20:32:44","modified_gmt":"2018-08-05T02:32:44","slug":"i-which-i-think-about-sarah-jeong-racism-and-privacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/08\/i-which-i-think-about-sarah-jeong-racism-and-privacy.html","title":{"rendered":"In which I think about Sarah Jeong, racism, and privacy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

First, to catch readers up on news that, to be honest, they\u2019re probably better off if they haven\u2019t been paying attention to, tech writer Sarah Jeong was hired on at the New York Times and, shortly thereafter, was revealed to have written a large number of anti-white tweets, from the period 2013 to 2015.\u00a0 (The twitter thread by Nick Monroe<\/a> documents large numbers of hostile tweets, found by searching for all tweets by her account with the phrase \u201cwhite people\u201d.)\u00a0 The New York Times came to her defense<\/a> with a statement that she \u201cregrets\u201d her statements (seeming not so much in the manner of an apology as a recognition that they were imprudent) and that they were only ever responding to people who had harassed her (which seems to be wishful thinking).\u00a0 She has now acquired large numbers of defenders (e.g., Vox<\/a>), critics (such as Andrew Sullivan<\/a>), and middle-grounders who say that what she wrote was bad but that the game of digging up dirt to get people fired based on past misdeeds needs to come to an end (see David French<\/a>).<\/p>\n

First, a comment on terminology:\u00a0 we\u2019re hearing the repeated assertion that Jeong\u2019s comments were in no way racist because by definition only people in power (that is, whites) can be racist.\u00a0 Now, never mind that most of the world, whites are not the ethnic group in power \u2014 and, in East Asia (Korea, Japan, China, etc.) there\u2019s not even the postcolonial dimension to power.\u00a0 But this concept that \u201cracism = prejudice plus power\u201d is a matter of sociological jargon.\u00a0 Pretty much everyone outside the academic world would define racism as prejudice against people due to their race.\u00a0 Why should ordinary English-speakers be obliged to adopt sociological jargon instead of the everyday meaning of words?<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s grant this assertion and instead revert to using the word \u201cprejudiced\u201d rather than \u201cracist\u201d or \u201cprejudice\u201d instead of \u201cracism.\u201d\u00a0 I can\u2019t really account for why it\u2019s fallen out of favor since it\u2019s a perfectly serviceable word, unless it\u2019s a matter of responding to a need to specify in what way an individual was prejudiced (racial prejudice?\u00a0 prejudiced against people of other religions?\u00a0 etc.).\u00a0 According to the anti-racists\u2019 own definitions, Jeong is prejudiced against white people even if, because her ethnic group does not have the power to cause harm to them, she is not \u201cracist.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I suspect that those same anti-racists would object to rephrasing complaints into \u201cJeong is prejudiced\u201d using some complaint such as \u201cthat\u2019s blaming the victim,\u201d e.g., \u201cethnic minorities shouldn\u2019t be criticized for being prejudiced because of all they\u2019ve suffered; this only points to the obligation whites have to behave better so as to avoid being the recipients of prejudice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having said this, here\u2019s Vox\u2019s take on the whole dispute<\/a>:\u00a0 addressing Sullivan\u2019s criticism of her use of the hashtag #cancelwhitepeople, for instance, Zach Beauchamp says,<\/p>\n

The problem here, though, is assuming that Jeong\u2019s words were meant literally: that when Jeong wrote \u201c#cancelwhitepeople,\u201d for example, she was literally calling for white genocide. Or when she said \u201cwhite men are bullshit,\u201d she meant each and every white man is the human equivalent of bull feces. This is expressly Sullivan\u2019s position: He calls her language \u201celiminationist,\u201d a term most commonly used to describe Nazi rhetoric referring to Jews during the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

To anyone who\u2019s even passingly familiar with the way the social justice left talks, this is just clearly untrue. \u201cWhite people\u201d is a shorthand in these communities, one that\u2019s used to capture the way that many whites still act in clueless and\/or racist ways. It\u2019s typically used satirically and hyperbolically to emphasize how white people continue to benefit (even unknowingly) from their skin color, or to point out the ways in which a power structure that favors white people continues to exist.<\/p>\n

I get that white people who aren\u2019t familiar might find this discomforting. Sullivan thinks it\u2019s unacceptable on an \u201can open-forum website like Twitter.\u201d But the reality is that Twitter is where these conversations between people of color are taking place, and (given the 280-character limit) it\u2019s a lot easier to use the kind of \u201cwhite people\u201d shorthand rather than adding endless qualifications (\u201ca certain kind of white person, definitely Not All White People,\u201d is pretty lengthy).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So what Beauchamp seems to be saying is this:\u00a0 \u201cyou\u2019re eavesdropping on conversations that weren\u2019t meant for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s think about that.<\/p>\n

The justification is essentially that Jeong and her community of Social Justice Twitter, being beaten down by racism, need to have a safe space in which to vent about the injustices they experience, and that they should be free to use Twitter as this space without needing to qualify every tweet in which they express their unhappiness with the world.<\/p>\n

Were these tweets in response to specific incidents of harassment?\u00a0 Jeong\u2019s anti-white-people tweets continued for too long a time period to be explained by this.\u00a0 At the same time, though, all reports were that she did stop apparently of her own accord.\u00a0 Did she do so because she concluded that it reflected poorly on her?\u00a0 Did she decide that they did more harm than good by reinforcing the idea that it\u2019s OK to voice angry sentiments about outgroup people?\u00a0 Did her circle of friends in fact wisely step away from this rhetoric collectively because they recognized the harm it did to themselves to focus on their resentments?\u00a0 Was she receiving reinforcement for her tweets, recognition, retweets, new followers, which became less necessary as she continued to build up a name for herself?\u00a0 Or did she move her venting to a more private forum but she still resents white people?\u00a0 And will her white co-workers feel uncomfortable, especially those who are her subordinates such as whatever administrative assistant might be assigned to her?<\/p>\n

Fundamentally, though, I just don\u2019t buy the Vox article\u2019s claim that essentially twitter was a private forum in which Jeong communicated with her community, which we are now eavesdropping on.<\/p>\n

Folks, that\u2019s not how Twitter works.\u00a0 Twitter is a public forum.\u00a0 Jeong is a writer on technology, for crying out loud.\u00a0 She has 89,000 followers (though conceivably during 2014 when she was spewing her anger, she may have had fewer).\u00a0 She should know this.\u00a0 She should know that there are other platforms for private discussions.\u00a0 Maybe she thinks that Facebook Is For Old People, but Facebook\u2019s ability to set privacy settings to \u201cfriends only\u201d or to set up a closed group are two ways to accomplish exactly the ability to vent without the whole world knowing about it.\u00a0 At best, one could give her a bit of a pass on the assumption that, in getting carried away, she forgot about this \u2014 but, again, the whole point of aspiring writers being on twitter is exactly to promote themselves.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ll go back to the example set of a friend from grad school.\u00a0 I\u2019ve now lost touch with her, but back in the day, we would both get into a routine of bonding over shared venting about things we disliked, in particular, an RCIA program which appeared wishy-washy in teaching actual Catholic doctrine.\u00a0 Over the years, she\u2019s blogged in various incarnations, and I\u2019ve watched her launch into a long litany of reasons why everyone around her, and sexism in general, has conspired to prevent her from achieving her dreams, which leaves me very aware of the fact that this sort of venting can easily move from being productive to being damaging.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image:\u00a0\u00a0https:\/\/pixabay.com\/en\/twitter-social-media-icon-social-3319619\/<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First, to catch readers up on news that, to be honest, they\u2019re probably better off if they haven\u2019t been paying attention to, tech writer Sarah Jeong was hired on at the New York Times and, shortly thereafter, was revealed to have written a large number of anti-white tweets, from the period 2013 to 2015.\u00a0 (The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[45,789,328],"class_list":["post-10485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-racism","tag-social-justice-activism","tag-twitter"],"yoast_head":"\nIn which I think about Sarah Jeong, racism, and privacy<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"First, to catch readers up on news that, to be honest, they're probably better off if they haven't been paying attention to, tech writer Sarah Jeong was\" 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