A Closer Look at Anti-White Rhetoric
"The New York Times announced that technology writer Sarah Jeong would be joining its editorial board. Almost immediately, old tweets from Jeong containing derogatory remarks about white people were being shared widely on twitter...
New York Magazine’s Andrew Sullivan pointed out the implausibility of The Times’s defence of Jeong. Her tweets had occurred over a period of several years, Sullivan noted, and were mostly directed at whites as a group, not individual people. No one could reasonably believe this was all a response to trolls. Sullivan argued that The Times’s defence was just a façade, because the prevailing view on the political left is that it’s impossible to be racist to white people:
'The editors of the Verge, where Jeong still works, described any assertion of racism in Jeong’s tweets as “dishonest and outrageous,” a function of bad faith and an attack on journalism itself. Scroll through left-Twitter and you find utter incredulity that demonizing white people could in any way be offensive. That’s the extent to which loathing of and contempt for “white people” is now background noise on the left.'...
A very similar dynamic occurred on feminist twitter where the line #KillAllMen became popular a few years ago...
For someone following the story from the sidelines, this is quite a development. From the emergence of a history of seemingly bigoted tweets from a person hired to The New York Times’s editorial board, to the defence that she was counter-trolling, to the realisation that this type of rhetoric is prevalent on the social justice left, to the argument that—while it is indeed prevalent—it’s not to be taken literally but as clever satire and hyperbole...
Anti-white rhetoric functions as a way for upper-class and upwardly mobile whites and select people of colour to distinguish themselves from less cosmopolitan whites, who also tend to be lower-income. Furthermore, many progressive environments encourage it, especially universities, and it conveniently helps obscure or rationalise their elitism—in part by shifting the focus away from class and in part by painting lower-income whites as immoral and thus unworthy...
It’s possible for anti-white rhetoric to simultaneously be self-critical/-flagellatory and outgroup-demonising. After all, the whites engaging in this are acknowledging their own perceived flaws, but they’re also distinguishing themselves from other whites by doing so. This is well-captured, I think, in Salam’s phrase: “the supposed nobility that flows from racial self-flagellation.” In other words, the process of self-flagellation confers nobility on cosmopolitan whites, thus elevating them morally over other whites who become distinguishable as a lesser class. The more this process is ritualised, the more significant the distinction becomes...
Does some anti-white rhetoric satirically “capture the way that many whites still act in clueless and/or racist ways?” Sure. But there’s a significant portion of it that—like the above—is hateful and malicious. So when Jeong tweets about how much joy she gets out of being cruel to old white men, is it any wonder many people automatically associate it with the kind of tweets mentioned above, rather than read it as clever sarcasm?
Perhaps what critics of anti-white rhetoric find most distasteful is this: that it often comes from members of the academic and cultural elite, implicitly directed towards lower-income whites for the crime of not being sufficiently cosmopolitan, in a world that’s changing rapidly and where it’s a struggle just to find something to anchor oneself to. This is surely not what social justice is about."
Sarah Jeong, Harvard, and Strategic White-Bashing - The Atlantic
"Many of the white-bashers of my acquaintance have been highly-educated and affluent Asian American professionals. So why do they do it? What work is this usually (though not always) gentle and irony-steeped white-bashing actually performing?
Some of this is just obvious edgelord trolling: the most transgressive thing you can get away with saying without actually getting called out for it. In this sense, it’s a way of establishing solidarity: All of us in this space get it, and we have nothing but disdain for those who do not. And some may well be intended as a defiant retort to bigotry.
But that doesn’t exhaust the universe of possibilities. In some instances, white-bashing can actually serve as a means of ascent, especially for Asian Americans. Embracing the culture of upper-white self-flagellation can spur avowedly enlightened whites to eagerly cheer on their Asian American comrades who show (abstract, faceless, numberless) lower-white people what for. And, simultaneously, it allows Asian Americans who use the discourse to position themselves as ethnic outsiders, including those who are comfortably enmeshed in elite circles...
Consider the recent contretemps over Harvard’s undergraduate admissions policies. Critics argue that the university actively discriminates against high-achieving Asian American applicants by claiming that a disproportionately large number of them have lackluster personalities. One obvious reaction to this charge is to denounce Harvard for its supposed double standards. This reaction might be especially appealing to those who see themselves as the sort of people who’d be dismissed by Harvard’s suspect screening process, and who’d thus have every reason to resent it. Viewed through an elite-eye lens, though, this sort of reaction can seem a little gauche. You’re saying, in a sense, that you can’t hack it—you just can’t crack the code. To a successful code-cracker, that could seem more than a little pathetic.
So what if you’re an Asian American who has already made the cut? In that case, you might celebrate Harvard’s wisdom in judiciously balancing its student body, or warn that Harvard’s critics have a darker, more ominous agenda that can’t be trusted. This establishes you as an insider, who gets that Harvard is doing the right thing, while allowing you to distance yourself from less-enlightened, and less-elite, people of Asian origin: You’re all being duped by evil lower-whites who don’t grok racial justice.
And if you’re an Asian American aspiring to make the cut, even with the deck stacked against you, you might eschew complaining in favor of doing everything in your power to cultivate the personal qualities Harvard wants most, or at least to appear to have done so. One straightforward way to demonstrate that you are Harvard material might be to denounce Harvard as racist, provided you’re careful to do so in a way that flatters rather than offends those who run the university and are invested in its continued success. For example, you might reject the notion that affirmative action is the problem while arguing that Harvard shouldn’t endeavor to increase representation of rural and working-class whites, on the spurious grounds that all whites are privileged. That you’ll make these claims even though you yourself are hardly among the most downtrodden is immaterial: The important thing is to be interesting. What better way to demonstrate that you’re not a humdrum worker bee, afflicted with a lackluster personality, than to carefully and selectively express the right kind of righteous indignation?
I certainly don’t mean to single out Harvard. As the senior assistant director of admissions at Yale recently observed, “for those students who come to Yale, we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice. We encourage them to be vocal when they see an opportunity for change in our institution and in the world.”...
Because you are present in elite spaces, your authenticity will often be called into question. So white-bashing becomes a form of assuaging internal and external doubts, affirming that despite ascending into the elite, you are not entirely of it."
Of course, since Asians are next on the chopping block...
