what do we really mean about racism? i mean, at least in america, white people are generally not denied jobs for their race. there arent significant groups of people who would prefer their child not marry a white person. white people dont get disproportionately longer prison sentences. they werent redlined. they werent denied the right to vote. they werent enslaved. they werent lynched. they werent the victims of rosewood or tulsa. they werent denied entrance to universities. their families werent split up in auction houses. laws werent passed to exclude them from federal jobs. they werent banned from playing in the major leagues. their churches werent bombed. and so on.
Neither did Korean-Americans though. Is she getting angry on behalf of African-Americans? Can I get angry on behalf of the Chinese for centuries of Japanese aggression and go for a #CancelTheJapanese hashtag?
so what racism are we talking about? personal dislike of another race? or system injustice over centuries. for racism to really mean anything it has to be backed by power. whites have almost all of the power in this country. the government is run by a white supremacist. so while i dont know anything about her other than what has been quoted in this thread, nothing has been offensive in any real way. whereas the racism andrew sullivan espouses is backed by institutional power and a history of it in action killing and raping and stealing from the people he denigrates. he can frankly feck off
The problem with this narrative is that people are not contiguous groups, not all whiter people are in position of power and not all non-white people are systematically prejudiced. People are individuals too and as individuals they can be in position of power or not. Sarah Jeong being on the board of the NY Times is technically being in a position of power over hundreds of employees. Are you saying that if you have a board member in your company that openly dislikes a racial group, that somehow is not problematic and can be laughed off?
Not downplaying the larger extent of institutional racism in America, but also it'd be largely disingenuous to be claiming that it was equally applied to anyone non-white. African-Americans bore the brunt of it. Latinos to a much lesser but still significant extent. Koreans and Far East Asians? Not really.
But the core problem, I think, is that if you legitimise bigotry and prejudice under the pretext that "it's OK if it's not coming from people in position of power" the effect is you just get more prejudice and bigotry back. It leads nowhere good. The more you think that Jeong's type of speech is acceptable, the more likely you are to end up with another Trump. The rhetoric just gets angrier, the politics more partisan. You can basically only really move on in America if the moderate voices are louder than the extreme voices. At the moment the former are being drowned by the screeches from the latter. On either side.