Jeong has several times in the past couple of years tweeted her contempt for whites in general and white men in particular, but evidently race hatred only stunts your career among liberal progressives such as those who populate the Times' upper echelons if it's expressed by whites against any other group.
If you're a "minority", on the other hand, you can say the vilest things about white people and be rewarded with a plum contract at the nation's "paper of record".
Andrew Sullivan includes a sampling of Ms Jeong's thoughts on white folks in this paragraph in a piece at The New York Magazine:
A little more disturbing is what you might call “eliminationist” rhetoric — language that wishes an entire race could be wiped off the face of the earth: “#cancelwhitepeople.” Or: “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along.”Ms Jeong's new employer, the folks who would ostensibly have us believe that they deplore the culture of incivility that has descended like smog upon our politics over the past two decades, have enthusiastically defended her bigoted comments. Sullivan, however, does a fine job of dismantling what is, in fact, an astonishingly tendentious apologia.
....[H]ere’s another gem: “Dumb..s f...ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs p...ing on fire hydrants.” Or you could describe an entire race as subhuman: “Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”
And then there’s this simple expression of the pleasure that comes with hatred: “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” I love that completely meretricious “old” to demean them still further. And that actual feeling: joy at cruelty!
The defense of Jeong is predicated on the left's insistence that racism is a blight which afflicts all and only white people. Thus, Ms Jeong, being Asian, cannot possibly be a racist ab defino.
The definition is, of course, a perversely moronic and self-serving bit of special pleading, but it's widely adhered to by Ms Jeong's fellow-travelers who insist that she did nothing wrong to post odious, hateful tweets about whites and that it's a form of bigotry to criticize her, an Asian woman, for having done so.
Here's Sullivan:
[Jeong] blames her ugly tweets on trolls whose online harassment of her prompted her to respond in turn. She was merely “counter-trolling.” She says her tweets, which were not responses to any individual, were also “not aimed at a general audience,” and now understands that these tweets were “hurtful” and won’t do them again.It's not a very great step from defining racism as a white people's disease to demands for actions like those of the South African parliament which has passed a law to allow for the confiscation of white-owned farms without even compensation to white farmers and whose leaders are even making veiled threats of genocide of white citizens.
The New York Times also buys this argument: “her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time, she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.”
Let me explain why I think this is the purest of bulls..t. If you want to respond to trolls by trolling them, you respond to them directly. You don’t post slurs about an entire race of people (the overwhelming majority of whom are not trolls) on an open-forum website like Twitter. And these racist tweets were not just a function of one sudden exasperated vent at a harasser; they continued for two years.
If a white person tweeted about blacks anything as vile as Ms Jeong did about whites that person would certainly never be hired by the New York Times or any respectable employer. Yet, Ms Jeong is not only hired, she's praised.
It's worrisome that bright people at the Times don't see how this ugly episode makes them all look like rank hypocrites.
