You\u2019ve heard by now that The New York Times hired Sarah Jeong<\/a> to be lead technology writer for its editorial board. You\u2019ve also heard that Jeong has a tendency toward declarative statements about \u201cwhite people,\u201d and that these statements are uncharitable and unkind approximately 100% of the time.<\/p>\n

Jeong is a prolific writer. As currently comprised, you could wallpaper a walk-up in Brooklyn Heights with her epic saga of the feckless and revolting \u201cwhite people,\u201d which spans hundreds of tweets and appears to have been written continuously from 2013 through this year. A freelance journalist claims he spent six hours compiling this thread<\/a> of just some of them. (At one point, believing his work complete, the archivist discovers he misplaced an entire page<\/a>.) Perhaps, like the Mayan Codices and poems of Sappho, entire volumes of Sarah Jeong\u2019s White People Chronicles are lost to antiquity.<\/p>\n

Online outrage followed the discovery of Jeong\u2019s tweets, which included calls for her to be fired because we live in a deterministic universe subservient to the laws of physics and that is what those laws decree. A writer at Vox called the kerfluffle \u201ca major bullying tactic of the alt-right<\/a>,\u201d despite social media mobs having a distinctly bi-partisan history<\/a>. The term \u201cfuror\u201d is used<\/a> most often<\/a>, strangely enough.<\/p>\n

In response, the Times<\/em> released a quixotic statement<\/a> in support of Jeong, followed by an article<\/a> characterizing the issue as an \u201coutcry over old tweets.\u201d This is true in the entirely ridiculous sense that every tweet is \u201cold\u201d from the moment it\u2019s sent, but doesn\u2019t quite capture the fact that Jeong has been taking \u201cwhite people\u201d to the woodshed on a regular basis since <\/em>2013, not merely in <\/em>2013. (If Jeong had only attacked white people in 2013, who knows? Maybe white people had a bad year.)<\/p>\n

Most importantly, the Times<\/em> lays out its absolution narrative by describing Jeong\u2019s tweets as \u201cimitating the rhetoric\u201d of people online who were harassing her first. The loops, arches, and whorls of HR almost obscure the text. Wouldn\u2019t it make more sense if this arose out of a handful of direct confrontations between Jeong and someone or some group of people who claimed to or at least appeared to be white? How can the Times\u2019<\/em> explanation possibly map onto hundreds of tweets on dozens of different subjects over several years? People sent Jeong bigoted messages about her race and gender, so Jeong fired back with bigoted messages about their race (but only if they were white), then kept firing back and to the side and in every other direction hundreds of additional times for years afterward. That\u2019s the explanation?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a word for the process of becoming angry at individuals from a particular demographic, sublimating that anger over years and years into seething hatred for anyone else belonging to that category, and adopting extreme positions on political or social issues as a result. That word is radicalization<\/em>. The Times\u2019 <\/em>story\u2014and Jeong\u2019s, it appears\u2014is that Jeong was radicalized by twitter harassment.<\/p>\n

But radicalization isn\u2019t a play on words or a language game. When we say someone has been radicalized, we\u2019re talking about their beliefs, not their tone of voice or their hair color or whether they fight a bit dirtier online than they used to.<\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/em> explains that Jeong\u2019s rhetoric <\/em>was radicalized but her beliefs<\/em> were not. Why should anyone believe that? (Hell, why should the Times<\/em> believe that? Did anyone at the paper\u2014a lawyer, perhaps\u2014consider for even a moment that this unbounded set of several hundred hateful tweets might not fully circumscribe the multiverse of potential problems here?)<\/p>\n

Most sessions of the Twitter Racism Tribunal are about teasing out someone\u2019s inappropriate beliefs from their more moderate statements. Identifying code words and dog-whistles. Cross-referencing problematic friends and acquaintances. Compiling enough scraps of circumstantial evidence to convincingly improvise a stranger\u2019s innermost thoughts.<\/p>\n

The Times<\/em> flips all this on its head: hundreds of plainly bigoted statements made over half a decade are actually<\/em> only one regrettable decision to talk like the ur-bigots. (A transgression so small even an apology is unnecessary. Apologize for what<\/em>?) It\u2019s not that the Times<\/em> thinks Jeong\u2019s beliefs are beyond reproach: The Times<\/em> thinks Jeong\u2019s beliefs are irrelevant<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The online far right, true believers and trolls alike, has proven adept at repurposing the left\u2019s ill-conceived terms<\/a>, claims<\/a>, and defenses<\/a> and smearing them across social media\u2019s bathroom walls. By providing a hackneyed, post hoc explanation of Jeong\u2019s tweets, the Times<\/em> may well keep her on staff, but in doing so it has blessed an infinitely versatile \u201cradicalization of rhetoric\u201d argument that the far right will be more than happy to add to its arsenal and employ more creatively than the left ever dreamed.<\/p>\n

No matter that if you replaced \u201cwhite\u201d with \u201cblack\u201d in any of Jeong\u2019s tweets, she would not now work at The New York Times<\/em>. This is true, yet unilluminating. And most would agree that Jeong\u2019s statements about \u201cwhite people\u201d are not as harmful as if they were about a different race. But if you replaced \u201cwhite\u201d with \u201cblack\u201d in all <\/em>of Jeong\u2019s tweets, she would be banned from Twitter, listed by so-called hate-watch non-profits, and employable only by tabloid smear rags. The far right dines out on these perceived asymmetries, and\u2014this may be news to the left\u2014online harassment doesn\u2019t only flow downhill from Kekistan.<\/p>\n

Disparaging others on the basis of race is a foolish act emblematic of a lazy mind and flawed thinking; venting that disparagement publicly reflects poor judgment and unprofessionalism. Neither the inscrutable contents of Sarah Jeong\u2019s heart nor the difference between true belief and mere rhetoric changes that. (Imagine the candidates who were rejected for the position!)<\/p>\n

I\u2019m excited to read what Sarah Jeong writes for the Times<\/em>. To land a cushy position in a prestigious media outlet despite a self-published bestiary of anti-white bigotry must be the mark of a rare talent indeed.<\/p>\n

Or maybe \u201cdespite\u201d isn\u2019t the right word.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times’ defense of radicalization is inadequate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":345,"featured_media":126445,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_wpscppro_custom_social_share_image":0,"_facebook_share_type":"","_twitter_share_type":"","_linkedin_share_type":"","_pinterest_share_type":"","_linkedin_share_type_page":"","_instagram_share_type":"","_medium_share_type":"","_threads_share_type":"","_selected_social_profile":[]},"categories":[12209],"tags":[12505,12504,1201],"class_list":["post-126441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","tag-jeong","tag-nyt","tag-racism"],"yoast_head":"\n