There’s a lot of heat in this discussion and I’ll freely admit I haven’t read most of the recent posts. I’ll just cut to the chase with my thoughts:
First off, the issue with Jeong arose due to a coordinated alt-right attack, part of an organized large scale campaign to damage and discredit liberal writers and pundits. I’m not going to get into the whole “two wrong don’t make a right debate” but instead I will point out that what happened to Jeong is going to keep happening. In fact, as the alt-right racks up “successes” they are going to be energized and do this more frequently. What that means is, we need to be able to deal with these issues when they come up and thus far the whole thing seems to boil down to “Racism BAD!!!” versus “Ideology WINS!!!” which is not IMO a great way to deal with this sort of thing. That leads to my second point:
On this type of issue, as well as the #metoo type issues, we need to apply proportionality. For the #metoo stuff, that’s somewhat clear: there are differences between harassment, sexual assault and rape, for example. Well, you know what? The same concept, that there are degrees of wrongdoing, applies to racism. In this country we have a binary view of racism with all racist acts being treated as equally evil which is just not the case. Heck, we don’t even treat killing as equally evil (there’s justified homicide, manslaughter, 2nd degree murder, 1st degree murder etc.).
The criminal law example is a useful one: a few centuries ago, the English common law only recognized a few felonies (murder, rape, mayhem, arson, burglary and larceny IIRC) which were all capital crimes which could carry the death sentence. In early 19th century England you could quite literally be hanged for stealing (that’s actually one of the driving forces of the whole commutation/transportation thing which helped populate Australia).
More modern legal systems have moved away from that by treating different felonies differently, and also by defining degrees of wrongdoing and degrees of punishment, within felonies. I mean, no one is saying murder two is OK, but we do punish murder two less severely than murder one.
That same concept needs to be applied to racism, instead of the IMO antiquated “one drop” type rule of “ALL RACISM IS EQUALLY EVIL AND MUST BE SHUNNED!!!” with it’s corollary “IM A GOOD PERSON SO I CANNOT BE RACIST!!!”
So, yeah, Jeong’s posts are racist. But to what degree? And what level of punishment is appropriate?
My take on this is that I would consider this a lesser degree of racism that should be reprimanded and prohibited but having this in Jeong’s background is not a full-blown firing offense. Now, if she were to post the same thing on the NYT going forward, that WOULD be a firing offense. Context matters and we have to look at things proportionally.
Because this is going to keep happening and if we apply the political equivalent of capital punishment to every offender, we are going to be exiling a lot of people to Australia.
Proportionality is a key principal of justice. Even though racism is morally abhorrent, we still need to apply proportionality.