On Friday, The Washington Post ran a piece asking a vital question: “Is it okay to make fun of white people online?”
The piece, which is guised as reporting, surrounded the controversy regarding Sarah Jeong, The New York Times’ latest editorial board member, and a woman who has written vile things about white people on Twitter. Leftists argue that Jeong should be given a pass; conservatives argue that Jeong is benefitting from a media double standard in which racism against whites is treated far differently from racism against other people.
Now, suffice it to say that The Washington Post would never have asked the same question about people of any other color. But that’s precisely their point: racism against white people isn’t the same thing as racism against others, because white people have historically had power. Ironically, this argument only justifies the popular conservative perception of a double standard.
But according to the Post, that double standard is justified:
Without evidence that they had any bearing on Jeong’s extensive body of work, which includes a book she wrote about online harassment, these statements could have perhaps been unceremoniously dismissed as insignificant. But after conservative media seized on the story Thursday, they ignited a firestorm of debate.
Yes, it was conservatives pouncing, not the tweets, that were the issue. The same Post that never would have written a similar “reported” article about anyone on the right says that we should simply look at Jeong’s “extensive body of work” rather than her tweets. How odd.
But the Post story gets worse. Eventually, after quoting Gateway Pundit and Infowars, the Post suggested that Jeong’s tweets were fine because of context, you guys:
But others were quick to say that the statements Jeong made could be skewed as racist only if the culture, history and current sociopolitical context of the United States were ignored. “Part of the reason it was so easy for the outrage to be manufactured in the first place was it was completely decontextualized and ahistorified,” said Nolan L. Cabrera, an associate professor at the University of Arizona who will publish a book in the fall about racial attitudes held by white college students. “Then it was easy to drum up anger and say it looks like she hates white people. That only makes sense if you are willfully ignorant of 400 to 500 years’ history and contemporary social context and also the context from which the tweets were sent.”….“You hear that all the time: Substitute white and put in minority group x,” Cabrera said. “The term ‘racism’ is not the equivalence of prejudice or bigotry. It’s an analysis of social inequality along the color lines and an analysis of power dynamics and social oppression. None of which has ever been in the hands of people of color or communities of color: There’s never been the social structure to be able to oppress white people.”
So, in other words, racism against whites is indeed fine, because white people have had more power historically than non-white people. That’s why Sarah Jeong, an Asian Harvard Law graduate, should be let off the hook for her racism. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act or Operation Wetback (both of which are referenced directly in the piece). It’s no wonder that so many Americans don’t trust a media that reports on anti-white racism by making excuses for it in a way they never would regarding racism against any other group.