According to what I learned, Sarah Jeong was born in South Korea and came here with her parents. In other words, her parents grew up in a South Korea made possible by the death of 30,000 U.S. soldiers who fought there. I don’t know the statistics, but there’s no doubt that most of them were white men.
Her social media statements were awful, but people are making excuses. I like this editorial at the Weekly Standard:
The Times, no doubt assuming Jeong’s status as a good liberal made it impossible for her to express retrograde opinions, evidently neglected to search her social-media history.A scroll through her Twitter page quickly revealed plenty of unsavory stuff. Among her charming declarations on the subject of race:“basically i’m just imagining waking up white every morning with a terrible existential dread that i have no culture.” “White men are bullshit.” “[O]h man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” “Dumbass f—ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.” In short, Jeong can get pretty nasty behind a keypad.Her explanatory statement on these and similar remarks is self-exculpatory but not totally unconvincing. “As a woman of color on the internet, I have faced torrents of online hate,” she writes, supplying a couple of sinister remarks directed at her.She goes on: “I engaged in what I thought of at the time as counter-trolling. While it was intended as satire, I deeply regret that I mimicked the language of my harassers. These comments were not aimed at a general audience, because general audiences do not engage in harassment campaigns. I can understand how hurtful these posts are out of context, and would not do it again.”Maybe she’s not the bigot her meta-satirical tweets suggest, but her apology doesn’t explain her malicious tweets about police officers:A sampling: “F— the police.” “If we’re talking big sweeping bans on sh— that kills people, why don’t we ever ever ever ever talk about banning the police?” “[C]ops are a—holes.”
Is her work supposed to be humorous? Or commentary on the cutting edge?
It sounds like a lot of awful racism, especially the comments about police officers and white men in general.
The New York Times should call on this young woman to go down to a police station in New York and explain to the police officers that she meant no harm.
Then she should explain to the families of Korean War veterans why she does not appreciate the work they did to give her freedom.
Or maybe we should buy her a one-way ticket to North Korea and let her see what repression looks like.
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