Andrew Sullivan and the New Power Dynamics of "White People"

It was something of a great irony that Andrew Sullivan, one of New York Magazine's brave warriors against political correctness, took issue with Sarah Jeong, the latest hire to the New York Times editorial board, for her impolitic tweets. He was certainly not alone.

In the latest of hyper-speed online battles over the keepers of cultural discourse, Jeong, a Verge technology writer with a prolific Twitter habit, became the target of right-wing conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and run-of-the-mill conservatives for off-hand snark after the announcement of her appointment. Amidst a slush pile of 103K tweets, online activists dug up ones that displayed a nonchalant, sometimes sloppy, approach characteristic among many young writers in using shorthand to skewer white racism, with tweets like “white men are bullshit” and “it's sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”

Race-baiting outlets like The Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, and Fox News gleefully tried to brand her as a racist; the Times defended the hire. And in a statement, Jeong claimed that, as a woman of color who experienced online abuse, she engaged in what she thought of as counter-trolling and satire, not aimed for a general audience, by mimicking the language of her harassers. That certainly seemed to be tangentially the case for tweets like “are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins”—likely a reference to racist pseudo-scientific theories asserting that IQ differences between races are genetic and account for achievement gaps in academia and the workplace. But seemed less likely for parenthetical asides of “and fuck white women lol,” which seemed to be more indicative of a reflexive habit than conscientious counter-trolling.

In previous pieces, Sullivan has decried the absurdity of “microaggressions” and leftist hyperventilating over “an off-color remark.” So, one might think that he could brush off a tweet about “dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet like dogs pissing on fire hydrants,” instead of characterizing it as pure “hatred.” But the Jeong episode turned out to be something of a modern race Rorschach test: revealing the thinking of pundits rather than all that much about Jeong herself. And, in the case of Sullivan, his reaction exposed, or reinforced, a kind of old-school white identity politics, in which the grievances and fears of white people are afforded empathy and consideration (he calls white anxiety about ethnic transformation “predictable and entirely understandable”) while those of minorities are ridiculed or treated with grave alarm (he has chastised Ta-Nehisi Coates for “raw tribalism”)—an inverse to both the historical and present threat posed by both.

In articles on campus politics, Sullivan has argued for “treating people as individuals rather than representatives of designated groups” and “a politics that never discriminates against someone for immutable characteristics—and tries to make sure that as many people as possible feel they have access to our liberal democracy.” Yet, in defense of a piece promoting the idea of giving Trump his border wall, in which he claimed that “we have been fools on mass immigration,” he wrote, "slowing massive demographic change is not fascist; it's conservative." It was an argument exactly for treating people as groups—so long as those groups are non-white—and one echoed by Fox News' Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, who said on a recent broadcast, “massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people and they're changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don't like…much of this is related to both illegal and in some cases, legal immigration.” Sullivan has also claimed that “preventing illegal immigration is not racist,” a dubious assertion proven wrong just weeks later when reports came out that the Trump administration will also seek to limit legal immigration.

In the racially refracted schema of America's immigration policies, the England-born Sullivan seems to have benefited greatly. He has openly written about illegal drug use at Burning Man and had a federal misdemeanor on possession of marijuana dismissed, which could have derailed his U.S. immigration application. The harsh immigration stance Sullivan champions, the kind that scoops up non-white immigrants for minor infractions and upturns their lives, is not the kind that would ever be applied to him. (And, as opposed to strawberry picking, he actually takes a job—a plumb gig in ever-shrinking prestige media—that many Americans would want.)

Since his days at The New Republic, Sullivan has achieved a notoriety for defending The Bell Curve, which advanced the noxious hypothesis that differences in average I.Q.s between races are grounded in genetics. His continued defense of author Charles Murray seems to reflect, not an openness to debating controversial ideas as he has claimed, but his personally held beliefs. According to Brendan James, a former intern and former Chapo Trap House producer, when his staff at the now defunct The Daily Dish challenged him on his affinity for race science, he responded by asking: "well, why didn't Africa conquer Europe, then?"

For his follow-up to The Bell Curve, Human Accomplishment, Murray claims, ridiculously, objective measures for the superiority of so-called Western art and music, writing out a significant portion of great jazz virtuosos in favor of minor European composers and revealing his priors on the superiority between races. In Sullivan's 1,300-word meltdown on Jeong, in which he asked if she had ever read Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson, he bemoaned a worldview holding white people as “parasites and contemptibly dull”—strangely the mirror worldview of Murray. Also disconcerting that Sullivan spent a Friday night retweeting assessments of Jeong from an apparent white supremacist, one whose timeline is littered with praise of prominent global white nationalists, including Canada's Faith Goldy, America's Brittany Pettibone, and Austria's Martin Sellner, and who appeared on the Holocaust-denying podcast Red Ice. Jeong's tweets were being used, cynically, as a cudgel by those who sincerely believe in using government policy to create white ethnostates, and here was Sullivan with the helping hand.

It is this kind of deep and flagrant hypocrisy that makes liberals both dismissive and skeptical of Jeong criticism, at times overly so. On Vox, Zack Beauchamp argued that expressive statements, like #cancelwhitepeople, are “satirically and hyperbolically to emphasize how white people continue to benefit (even unknowingly) from their skin color.” They aren't racist because racism exists as a power structure favoring whites. Yes, I suppose, but it seems a little shaky as a defense—semantics and power dynamics aside, expressing casual vitriol towards a group carries ugly prejudicial strains, whether they play out in widespread oppression or not. For Slate, Inkoo Kang wrote that “aspiring writers of color…may be scared off from engaging with a frequently nourishing community they might otherwise call an online oasis.” This too feels like a stretch. I doubt writing “fuck white women lol” is necessary to nourishing one's community, nor Twitter an online oasis, but I can certainly understand some of the impulse in these defenses.

To be frank, I can remember the time when I decided I hated white people.

I was in middle school. I didn't need critical race theory or leftist academic indoctrination to hate white people. I knew every slur for an Asian person, every pee-pee-Coke-style joke, before I knew algebra. I grew up in a town that was 94 percent white and the fact that I was not was regularly and unnecessarily brought to my attention. The thing was that my best friend, since the age of five, was white. I didn't hate her. Nor did I hate her parents, whose nearby house I spent almost as much time at as my own. In fact, almost all of my childhood friends, neighbors, and teachers were white. I didn't actually hate white people, although that was how the feeling of rage coalesced in my young mind. What I hated was being told to go back to my own country when I was already in it, of being made to feel like an interloper and an outcast in the land where I was born. In some ways, racism is often the binding Asian-American experience. We may not share food, traditions, or history (just ask the Koreans how they feel about the Japanese), but many of us have met plenty of white people, coast to coast, who treated us with the very same casual belittlement or outright viciousness.

As the years rolled on, that feeling evolved into something more nuanced, something more precise. I saw that Asians weren't treated as individuals when it came to Hollywood (see: the current mania over Crazy Rich Asians), the covers of fashion magazines (see: almost never?), or corporate leadership (see: the gap between high educational achievement and professional advancement)—there were enough biased white people in power who saw us as an immutable group to reinforce ongoing discrimination, which morphed from explicit restrictions (the Japanese-American internment camps, the Chinese Exclusion Act) to softer forms of mass bigotry. Yet, more and more, I started to become uncomfortable with “white people” tossed around as a careless pejorative, although I never stopped using it, certainly not in private where it wouldn't be subject to easy misinterpretation. On Twitter, in particular, I noticed that friends and colleagues started using the term more frequently—white people jokes and grievances became a common refrain. Somewhere along the way, it began to feel lazy, safe, and, at times, unnecessarily nasty. There are fast rewards for the kind of easy snark of dunking on white people on Twitter, in part because no one of import will say shit to you, unless you're hired to a prestige media company. And so, when I read Jeong's tweets the other week, I felt a mixture of both personal recognition and slight discomfort.

I have a theory that many of the online outbursts on issues like cultural appropriation or what seem to outsiders as mundane slights are rooted in a kind of childhood trauma—racism at the very development stage when in-group bonding and belonging feel critical. Often when you talk to young writers of color about why they are so mad about seemingly inoffensive events, they will recall a searing incident from their youth or times when beloved family members were cut down in humiliating ways related to race. Among the tweets activists dug up, Jeong refers to being teased for 12 years by white kids for eating kimchi, and in another, she recounts “I don't have an accent and it makes me sick when I see how white people treat my parents vs. me.” Across the country, kids who experienced this kind of formative-years racism eventually grew up and found each other in college and later online, and so these communal primal screams about white people have become something of common ritual, particularly as they have gained positions in places of cultural prominence. This is not leftist indoctrination, as right-wing cranks assert, but a generational shift as groups, who were previously terrified of speaking out, have gained just enough social standing to do so.

That said, understandable private feelings are quite different from defensible public statements. And Twitter, where cynical outrage takes precedence over resolution and equanimity, might just be the worst possible place to work out childhood and generational traumas, even if it's become a socially acceptable one among a certain milieu.

That is not to say that any invocation of white people is off limits. Some pundits, like David French in the National Review, who argues “people to reject unhealthy temptations to generalize,” failed to make a useful distinction between what they perceive as white-bashing and any use of the term “white people.” This seems to me to be both over-simplistic and the enforcement of a new standard. For several decades now, we, as a society, have tacitly agreed that the term “white people” does not refer to every single white person. It refers to a type of white person, depending on the context. A couple weeks ago, when GQ senior editor Kevin Nguyen, tweeted “white people need to get less angry when I tell them my parents fled communism,” some of the same online activists lashing out at Jeong praised him. Soy-drinking socialists, apparently, were the kind of white people everyone could get behind censuring. There have also been myriad pop-culture references: the 1992 movie White Men Can't Jump, the 1982 Saturday Night Live sketch “Kill the White People” with Eddie Murphy, and the 2000s blog Stuff White People Like, which offered a blueprint of self-effacement for woke white people.

The term has also served a political purpose, as in describing the type of white people who call the police on black people for, say, eating lunch, listening to a yoga CD in their cars, or being in their own homes. Martin Luther King, Jr. now widely praised for his brand of non-violent anti-racism, often evoked “the white man.” As did James Baldwin. And in a 2014 interview for New York Magazine, Chris Rock told Frank Rich, “When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before…So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he's the first black person that is qualified to be president. That's not black progress. That's white progress.”

White people were crazy. Now, anyone with half a brain, presumably including Sullivan et al, knows that Rock wasn't referring to Michael Henry Schwerner, Rev. James Reed, Viola Gregg Luizzo or any of the other white civil rights activists who were murdered by white supremacists in the civil rights era or John Brown and the white abolitionists before them. But the difference is that Rock's meaning was explicit, historical, and serious, and Jeong's were often frivolous, and that Rock is a comedian, not a future New York Times contributor. It is also a slight tilt in power dynamics—how the minority resentment of their treatment by white people is perceived today in an era, post-Obama, but presently of Beyoncé, Henry Golding, and Cardi B—whether you call it racism or not.

There may not be a phrase in the English language more critically dependent on context than “white people,” with its intricate layers of brutal historical violence, government-enforced bigotry, everyday vitriol, and slight mocking. We don't yet have widely agreed upon terminology to capture these various phenomenons. Strangely, attempts to zero in on these different meanings and make them more explicit—say swapping in terms like otherizing or whiteness—are routinely mocked by the very same people who decry Jeong's loose use of the term today. “White people” sticks because it is the most widely understood even if it is now, as people of color gain more cultural cache, more easily subject to misinterpretation.

The thing is that Sullivan, himself, has tweeted similarly flippant bits about Asians, warning of the “yellow peril”—a racist metaphor for the threat of East Asia to the West—in one. And remarking in another, “I'm English by origin. As a people, we will never stop giggling at funny names and Asian accents.”

Sullivan, it seems, doesn't have a problem with race-based generalizations or off-color jokes about race, so long as the target group is not his own. “White men,” as Jelani Cobb put it in the New Yorker, “in this country have been, largely if not universally, exempt from the default demand that we look askance at their claims to humanity.” The problem, as it were, is with people of color starting to openly talk about white people in the way in which white people have long talked about them—even stripped of all the attendant social obstacles and implicit threats. Sullivan wants to reserve the right to never stop laughing at Asian-ness from the scourge of political correctness, while righteously and ferociously demanding that those he howls at never dare return the favor. Now, I'm curious to know, what's the proper terminology for that?