START with this truth of American society: disparaging remarks about white people as a whole that would be simply impermissible for other sets of people are largely permissible and carry few repercussions. This fact seems to enthrall the left and enrage the right. Sarah Jeong, a newly hired editorial writer for the New York Times, found herself embroiled in a controversy of this sort after critics dredged up her old tweets on white people.
Ms Jeong wondered: “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like grovelling goblins.” In another, she noted: “It’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men”. And she commented: “White people have stopped breeding. You’ll all go extinct soon. This was my plan all along.”
Right-wing pundits were outraged. The favourite thought experiment for this crowd is the substitution test—imagining the consequences of similar statements, with the word “black” replaced for “white”. Yet Ms Jeong kept her job (and the Times says it reviewed her previous social-media posts before she was hired). She would surely have never been offered the job if the target had been a minority.
Those on the left came up with different philosophies to explain her behaviour. One was that, as an Asian-American woman, she was incapable of racism altogether. Another was that it was really the critics who had excavated Ms Jeong’s public statements who were racists. For her part, Ms Jeong labelled her extreme statements as “counter-trolling” the deluge of sexist, racist and homophobic slurs directed at her. She expressed her regret and said she understood “how hurtful these posts are out of context”. This strains credulity, given that her posts span August 2013 to November 2015, but that is no matter.
