The new face of racism is now an Asian-American woman. To be specific, it’s Sarah Jeong, the newest hire of the New York Times editorial board. Who would have thought?
For decades, Asian-Americans have been a mere afterthought in the Left’s paradigm of political correctness and identity politics. Now all of a sudden, one of them has not only sparked nationwide outrage over her despicable personal opinions, she has also cast a spotlight on the Left’s absurd core teachings about race and identity.
Jeong’s anti-white tweets, dating from late 2013 to early 2018, have now been dredged up for the whole world to see. They are atrocious, stupid, immature, and racist.
Jeong claims she regrets her tweets, but justifies them as countertrolling in response to the online racial harassment she has received. The New York Times refuses to fire her and reiterates her justification. Jeong’s other defenders insist she cannot be a racist because racism is prejudice plus power, and since nonwhites are not in power in this country, they simply cannot be racist. Jeong’s critics accuse the Times of hypocrisy, noting that similar derogatory comments about any other race would result in a staffer’s removal.
Lost amid the hubbub is the fact that Jeong is yet another confused young woman who has fallen prey to the idiocy and moral bankruptcy of identity politics. After all, the Left has long taught that race is an individual’s defining characteristic, and that this characteristic is worth more in some racial groups than others. In this paradigm, nonwhites have the right to say the vilest things about white people with impunity. That is precisely what Jeong did.
Yet even as an avid leftist, Jeong, too, is worth less than others in the world of identity politics. In fact, Asian-Americans rank near the bottom of identity politics’ pecking order. Grievance is what sends a racial group to the top: The more aggrieved a group is perceived to be, the higher up it sits in the pecking order. Asian-Americans simply are not perceived to be that aggrieved, and they will never be perceived as equally aggrieved as African-Americans, who must bear the history of slavery and Jim Crow as well as the manifestations of modern racism.
Without sufficient grievance to claim stature in identity politics, Jeong harangues white people with the immaturity of a teenager who wants more attention, hoping the public will find her funnier and more clever than she really is. By magnifying whatever racial slights she has encountered, she hopes to become more important in a pecking order that is stacked against her.
In one tweet, Jeong laments the difference between how white people treat her parents, who speak with an accent, and how they treat her, given that she has no accent. Certainly, immigrants with accents often face discrimination in this country, but not just from white people. If white society were really that racist, how did the daughter of Korean immigrants end up graduating from the elite institution of Harvard Law School and then later landing a job at another elite institution called the New York Times?
In the end, Jeong is nowhere as racially aggrieved as she portrays herself to be, and her Twitter feed is a narcissistic endeavor that far too many now have had the displeasure of reading.
In some ways, this sordid tale involving Jeong is the reverse of the real and systematic anti-Asian discrimination in which Harvard and other elite universities have engaged in during the admissions process. These institutions do not wish to admit too many Asians, even though more and more Asian applicants with extraordinary academic achievements and other stellar credentials keep applying.
In Harvard’s case, the university makes it more difficult for Asians as a group to be accepted than for so-called underrepresented minorities, namely African-Americans and Latinos, whose academic and other quantifiable qualifications are far less stellar. As Harvard itself has admitted, “eliminating the consideration of race ‘would reduce the population of students who self-identify as African-American, Hispanic, or “‘Other”’ … by nearly 50%.” In other words, yellow people are collateral damage for Harvard’s racial guilt of possibly having too few black and brown people.
In the pecking order of Harvard’s racial preferences, Asian-Americans do not matter much. Their academic achievements have taken away their grievances and made them less relevant. Similarly, in the identity politics pecking order that governs Jeong’s outrageous tweets, she has magnified her own racial grievances to make an Asian woman like herself matter more. In both cases, Asians are merely appendages to a greater struggle against white America.
Alas, Harvard and Jeong show that racism is alive and all too well. The solution from identity politics, to blame white people for other racial groups’ misfortunes, has failed this country for far too long. It is time to tear down the edifice of identity politics altogether so that Americans can stop viewing individuals through the prism of racial grievance.
Ying Ma (@GZtoGhetto) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential Blog. She is the author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, which has just been released in audio book. During the 2016 election, she served as the deputy director of the Committee for American Sovereignty, a pro-Trump super PAC, and the deputy policy director and deputy communications director of the Ben Carson presidential campaign.
