{"id":12756,"date":"2018-10-09T15:56:33","date_gmt":"2018-10-09T07:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=12756"},"modified":"2018-10-09T15:56:33","modified_gmt":"2018-10-09T07:56:33","slug":"minorities-have-to-be-extra-sensitive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2018\/10\/09\/minorities-have-to-be-extra-sensitive\/","title":{"rendered":"minorities have to be extra-sensitive"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(these were thoughts in response to Sarah Jeong being called out for being racist towards white men<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think one of the rules of being a minority is that you have to always be sensitive to the feelings of the majority. Outspoken, risk-taking minorities might try to fool around with boundaries, and get some laughs, but it\u2019s dancing on thin ice. You\u2019re not allowed to be stupid<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are all race-directed jokes equally racist? No. Does that mean some race-directed jokes are acceptable? You better be really, really skilled at what you\u2019re doing or you\u2019re going to get burnt. \u201cYouthful indiscretions\u201d and \u201cmoments of folly\u201d are acceptable excuses for some not all<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Funnily I\u2019m reminded of marital jokes here. Should you jokingly insult your spouse? I extremely do not recommend it. \u201cBut its an inside joke, we have a common understanding, we have a thing going!\u201d Uhuh. That\u2019s never gonna bite you in the ass ever. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe the real crime was that her tweets weren\u2019t funny enough \ud83e\udd14 she spoke too plainly, was too brazen – unacceptable for minorities, particularly unacceptable for women, god help you if you\u2019re both and you aren\u2019t operating with surgical nuance and lvl 3 encoding<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No I don\u2019t think that\u2019s it. That\u2019s a thing, but not the main thing here. Reflecting on my own tweets from years ago – the problem is that she was tweeting to a smaller audience which had a common understanding of the context she operated in. Eg my old tweets are full of Singlish<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m guessing she wouldn\u2019t be so dumb as to tweet those things today in the present context – but contexts CHANGE, man. It wasn\u2019t that long ago that \u201cthat\u2019s so gay\u201d was an acceptable slight, that homosexuality was a punchline. This was everywhere in pop culture. Also: \u201cr*tarded\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be clear I don\u2019t think I\u2019m trying to defend her or support her or say she should be forgiven or not-forgiven or anything of that sort. I don\u2019t know shit about that. This stuff is moral fashion, it\u2019ll be fashionable one week and out of date the next<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have a feeling when she tweeted \u201cI get joy out of being cruel to old white men\u201d she was referring to a narrow subset of old white men and did not at the time expect that it would eventually be seen to mean all old white men everywhere. (Not defending here; trying to understand)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think it\u2019s plausible and maybe about 70% likely that she was taking calculated risks with those tweets. ones\u2019s calculus is always imperfect because you can\u2019t foresee the future. Ultimately I think she\u2019ll be ok<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps then ultimately her strategy was optimal given her context and circumstance, and this is just the price you pay for this particular path<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of that said generally I would discourage anybody from tweeting, even ironically or cleverly at some meta level, that they wish violence or harm or cruelty towards others. This is not about race; it\u2019s just tacky tbh. If you want others to suffer, try to be classy about it<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More extreme eg \u201dHaha I was being ironic and clever when I tweeted about touching children inappropriately\u201d – why. Why is this the itch you need to scratch publicly. Then people gotta waste resources and goodwill defending your dumb ass from overreactions. I wouldn\u2019t, but still<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also definitely true that her tweets make great recruitment material for alt-right kids<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(these were thoughts in response to Sarah Jeong being called out for being racist towards white men) I think one of the rules of being a minority is that you have to always be sensitive to the feelings of the majority. Outspoken, risk-taking minorities might try to fool around with… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[601,586,577,602],"tags":[661,656],"class_list":["post-12756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-searching-for-truth","category-perception","category-society","tag-minority-life","tag-race"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3jK","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12756\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}