Of White People and the New York Times

• The latest addition to The New York Times’ editorial board is a young woman named Sarah Jeong, and although it wasn’t the most momentous story on Thursday it was the one that caught our eye. After so many decades in the newspaper business we still follow the big hires, and this one comes with one of those racial brouhahas we can’t resist commenting on.
  Jeong is of Asian heritage, as you might have already surmised from the name, and she’s a liberal, as you might have already surmised from her hiring by The New New York Times, and although those obvious facts should have little bearing on the story of course it does in this day and age. So far Jeong’s generally white and mostly right-of-center critics aren’t criticizing her for being Asian, but these days almost everyone in the public eye has a history of spouting off on social media and other internet niches in controversial ways, and Jeong apparently has a history of writing rather harsh things about white people. The bowdlerized versions of several “tweets” require numerous asterisks to convey her chosen epithet about white people, and another expressed that “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get from being cruel to old white men.”
  Being old white men our first instinct is to take offense, but there’s so much offense to be taken these days by almost everybody that we’re trying to stay off the stuff, and by now we know these things are always complicated.
  Jeong’s defense is that she’d been “trolled” by seemingly white and explicitly racist commenters on the internet, and was only responding in kind. We don’t doubt that a liberal writer with a noticeably Asian name has been subjected to obnoxious harassment by racist old white men in the comments section of an internet site, and can well understand why she might be provoked to respond in unkind, but we’d like to think that such an august American newspaper as The New York Times would hold its editorial board to a higher standard. On the other hand, we’d prefer a Republican president who doesn’t feel obliged to punch back ten times harder in similarly stupid fashion against any caustic internet commenter, and by now we realize that we can’t always get what we want.
  Jeong’s defenders are also reviving the familiar argument that she can’t be guilty of racism because she’s not white, which is as noisome to our old white ears as ever. The argument holds that racism is not merely an animus toward other races but rather a political system or the majority oppressing the minority, and that non-white are therefore blameless by their powerlessness, agency, and even the most well-intentioned white folks are guilty by virtue of how well things might be going for them.
  The argument has never held up in the ope skies of our real lives. We’ve had many fine African-American and Hispanic and Asian and Native Americans friends in our lives, but we’ve also encountered people in each group who had a prejudiced dislike to us based on our skin tone, and if they’re racist by the politically correct definition they’re aspiring racists who would happily oppress us if they could. We’ve had street and school hall encounters with minorities where they held all the power, and can well understand why the guy in the “Make America Great” ball cap at the latest Trump rally doesn’t consider himself more privileged than than the latest hire on The New York Times’ editorial board.
  Still, we can’t blame any of our current woes on the systemic anti-white oppression that somehow persists in the era of President Donald Trump, and we’ll not worry that Jeong’s missives from the editorial pages of The New York Times will much disturb us. There were some conservative “tweets” lamenting that the estimable National Review columnist Kevin Williamson lost a prestigious job at The Atlantic Monthly because of some past “tweets” about abortion that went far beyond even our pro-life sympathies, and finding double standard in the liberal media, and although he’s controversial in conservative circles for prescribing the same harsh get-off-your-ass  medicine to the white underclass that conservatives has always preached to the minority underclass he’s suddenly a darling of the Trump-ian right. He came out squarely on the side of The New York Times’ right to hire whomever the hell it wants, and that’s pretty much all we have to say about it.

  — Bud Norman