Black Conservatives Speak Out Against NY Times Hiring ‘Racist,’ ‘Vulgar’ Sarah Jeong

INSET: Writer Sarah Jeong. NEW YORK, NY - JULY 27: The New York Times building stands in M
Spencer Platt/Getty Images, Twitter/@sarahjeong

The black leadership coalition Project 21 is speaking out against Sarah Jeong, the New York Time’s hire for its editorial board, calling her history of anti-white person slurs on social media “racist” and “vulgar” and the decision reveals “inconsistency” and “irresponsibility” in the media outlet’s handling of race issues.

“Ms. Jeong is the recipient of leftist privilege, which means that whatever she says can and will be forgiven no matter how vile or racist her actions may have been,” Project 21 Co-Chair Stacy Washington said.

“In response to the backlash over her addition to the New York Times editorial staff, the paper shared that they had discussions with her about the appropriateness of her tweets,” Washington said. “This is within their purview, but the double-standard is glaring.”

“Roseanne Barr was blacklisted for one tweet,” Washington said. “Even after she showed remorse and apologized profusely, there is no path of redemption for her.”

“In the freest nation on the planet, we are witnessing jackbooted political thuggery,” Washington said.

“Sarah Jeong’s comments are antithetical in an age when we should be moving beyond racism to embrace our greater American identity,” Project 21 member Rich Holt said in a statement distributed to the media. “This racist liberal engages in a divisive anti-white narrative that is just as damaging as black codes and segregation were in the past.”

“As Americans, we need to erase the hyphens that divide us and embrace our unity under the red, white and blue,” Holt said.

“Despite firing technology reporter Quinn Norton earlier this year within hours of revelations of racial posts, the paper now says it ‘stands by’ Jeong,” the Project 21 press release said. “Reporting that Jeong ‘regretted the tweets,’ the Times also confirmed, ‘there had been a conversation about her social media history as part of the hiring process.'”

“Project 21 members believe the handling of these cases shows a political bias at the New York Times that is harmful to American race relations,” the press release said.

“The fact that the New York Times came out in defense of Sarah Jeong’s visceral racism and animosity toward white people proves how low liberal newspapers have sunk,” Project 21 member Stone Washington said. “The radical left now deeply believes it is impossible to be racist against white people, fostering a culture that encourages insulting whiteness while criminalizing even the slightest attack against any other racial group.”

New York Magazine also weighed in on whether the Jeong remarks can be dismissed because she is a woman and a member of a racial minority.

Is the newest member of the New York Times editorial board, Sarah Jeong, a racist? From one perspective — that commonly held by people outside the confines of the political left — she obviously is. A series of tweets from 2013 to 2015 reveal a vicious hatred of an entire group of people based only on their skin color.

But the alternative view — that of today’s political left — is that Jeong definitionally cannot be racist, because she’s both a woman and a racial minority. Racism against whites, in this neo-Marxist view, just “isn’t a thing” — just as misandry literally cannot exist at all. And this is because, in this paradigm, racism has nothing to do with a person’s willingness to pre-judge people by the color of their skin or to make broad, ugly generalizations about whole groups of people, based on hoary stereotypes. Rather, racism is entirely institutional and systemic, a function of power, and therefore it can only be expressed by the powerful — i.e., primarily white, straight men. For a nonwhite female, like Sarah Jeong, it is simply impossible.

The New York Times also buys this argument: “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.”

https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/534822442079109121

Project 21 is a leading voice of black conservatives for more than 25 years and is sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research.

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