Racism and Reverse Racism

A woman of Asian ancestry named Sarah Jeong was just appointed to the editorial board of the New York Times. Sarah has a history of tweets that are anti-white, anti-male and otherwise offensive. He defenders insist that she can't be a racist because only whites are in an institutional position of power so only whites can be racists. There's also some blather about whites not actually having an identity the way blacks and other groups do. If this was so then she wouldn't have been tweeting about white.

Back to the first point - that only whites are in a position of power so only whites can be racists. This is an incredibly racist statement. It lumps all white together and all non-whites together. There is no room for the individual in that blanket statement. If you aren't white then you are oppressed and powerless.

But Sarah isn't powerless. She's on the editorial board of the most powerful newspaper in the country. It's silly to excuse her because of her powerlessness. She has more power than 99% of whites will ever have.

If you insist on lumping people together by race (and that is racist by the old standards) then you might notice that some groups are doing better than whites in America today - Jews and Asians to name two. And, surprise, Sarah is among those doing well. She's on the editorial board of the New York Times. For someone who's oppressed, she's doing well.

All of this mental gymnastics is silly. Racism is bad, period. It's not excusable to say that it's ok to be racist against whites because our ancestors were racist first. That just leads to a never-ending cycle of hate.