Sarah Jeong: A Selection from Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds (2019)

“In August 2018, The New York Times announced the appointment of a 30-year-old writer on tech issues to join the paper’s editorial board. Like all such appointments, Jeong’s promotion to such a position at a young age attracted a considerable amount of attention. And attention in the age of the internet obviously includes online rakings of everything the person has said. In Jeong’s case the raking turned up tweets with a particular focus–which was a sustained and pretty crude abuse of white people. Jeong’s tweets included ‘Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like grovelling goblins?’; ‘I dare you to go on Wikipedia and play “Things white people can definitely take credit for”, it’s really hard’; ‘White men are bullshit’; ‘CancelWhitePeople’ and in one stream of tweets ‘Have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation? There’s literally nothing. Like skiing, maybe, and also golf . . . It must be so boring to be white.’

It is fair to say that her Twitter feed showed an obsession with this theme. She even committed the basic error of comparing those people she didn’t like with animals. ‘Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.’ Another tweet said, ‘Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.’

Jeong was also a keen user of the phrase ‘Kill all men’. But under the circumstances this took a second order of priority for her critics. It was the incessant racism expressed towards white people which drew some ire towards Jeong and against The New York Times for hiring her. For its part the newspaper stood beside its latest recruit. There was to be no throwing to the internet wolves on this occasion. The official statement from the paper of record said that it had hired Jeong because of her ‘exceptional work’ on the internet. It went straight on to claim that ‘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. She sees now that this approach only served to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media. She regrets it, and The Times does not condone it.’ The paper finished by saying that having learned this lesson it was confident Jeong would be ‘an important voice for the editorial board moving forward’. . . .

In defence of Sarah Jeong making repeated racial slurs against white people, Ezra Klein explained that when Jeong uses the term ‘white people’ in her ‘jokes’ it does not mean what it says. As Klein put it, ‘On social justice Twitter, the term means something closer to “the dominant power structure and culture” than it does to actual white people.’

Here is a magnificent spur for madness. If Benedict Cumberbatch and Sarah Jeong can both end up in ‘race rows’ it would ordinarily mean that they would have been guilty of similar provocations. And yet they were not. Cumberbatch got into a ‘race row’ because he used an outmoded term. Jeong got into a race row because over a period of years she had repeatedly used the same racial epithets in a derogatory way, and appeared to have enjoyed doing so. What is worse is that motive can be assigned without reference to the severity of the words. Whereas a term that one person may use unwittingly can in some cases be levelled against them (Cumberbatch), in other cases extreme terms which people are using knowingly do not in fact count as being the words they have used. This is the explanation that Klein, El-Wardany and others have given. Whereas some people unwittingly use the wrong term and can be castigated for it, other people use terms that are so wrong and so extreme and yet no especial castigation is due. Because of something. . . .

It is impossible to unscramble the different standards being applied simultaneously by the content of speech because speech itself has become unimportant. What matters above everything is the racial and other identity of the speaker. Their identity can either condemn them or get them off. This means that if words and their contents do still matter then they have become deeply secondary orders of business. It also means that rather than managing to ignore the issue of race we are going to have to spend the foreseeable future constantly focused on it, because only by concentrating on people’s race can we work out who we ought to allow ourselves to listen to.”—Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019)