From National Review:
Sarah Jeong Is a Boring, Typical Product of the American Academy
By HEATHER MAC DONALD
August 8, 2018 3:32 PMTo decry her anti-white ‘racism’ gives her too much credit for originality.
The most significant feature of Sarah Jeong, the New York Times’ embattled new editorial board member, is not that she is a “racist,” as her critics put it. It is that she is an entirely typical product of the contemporary academy.
… But most important, her tweets are not imitative of anything other than the ideology that now rules the higher-education establishment, including UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School, both of which Jeong attended. And that ideology is taking over non-academic institutions, whether in journalism, publishing, the tech sector, or the rest of corporate America. Sarah Jeong’s tweets and blog posts are just a marker of the world we already live in.
The key features of Jeong’s worldview are an obsession with whiteness and its alleged sins; a commitment to the claim that we live in a rape culture; and a sneering contempt for objectivity and truth-seeking. These are central tenets of academic victimology. From the moment freshmen arrive on a college campus, they are inundated by the message that they are either the bearers of white privilege or its victims. …
Jeong’s contempt for whites is the natural outcome of the victimology university, which teaches students to hate and rewards them for doing so. …
Jeong deploys a coy, warmed-over postmodernism to buttress her refusal to accept facts.
Jeong’s magnum opus of academic victimology is a long 2014 blog post on the Rolling Stone campus-rape hoax. Written after the Rolling Stone had retracted its sensational and wholly fictional story on a gruesome fraternity rape at the University of Virginia, Jeong’s post tortuously and often incoherently explains why it is imperative to continue believing the pseudo-victim, Jackie. The effort to discredit the Rolling Stone story (a process otherwise known as belated fact-checking) represents the patriarchy’s campaign to deny the existence of rape culture, she writes.
The credo of the campus rape movement is: “Believe unconditionally,” as New York University’s Wellness Exchange puts it. Jeong takes that credo to heart. “The more I see these ‘inconsistencies’ and ‘discrepancies’ [in the Rolling Stone story] touted as evidence of falsehood, the more convinced I am that Jackie is not lying,” Jeong writes. She sneers at such “mundanities” as dates and times that refute Jackie’s narrative, a remarkable stance, one might think, for a journalist. …
Jeong deploys a coy, warmed-over postmodernism to buttress her refusal to accept facts. “They own the words [‘they’ are presumably white males]. They own the law. They own reality or at least what everyone acknowledges as reality. They own the Truth™, the Truth that makes up how we understand our society.” Another of those anti-feminist “Truths™” that Jeong, in her Foucauldian mode, dismisses is “what happened with the Duke Lacrosse players” (falsely accused of raping a black stripper). To Jeong, the fact that the prosecutor in the Duke case was disbarred for ignoring clearly exculpatory evidence is of no import. The post-modernist belief that truth is always an ideological construct allows her to ignore whatever facts contradict her favored story about the world. …
To focus on Sarah Jeong’s “racism” is too comforting, since it personalizes the issue and suggests that she is an outlier. Instead, she is all too common.
It’s interesting to speculate what set off the sizable public reaction against Jeong when similar anti-white hate has been building up for years:
- Straw that broke the camel’s back.
- Being South Korean, in a year when lots of Americans have been reminded of their country’s sacrifices for South Korea, was another factor.
- But I think Jeong just has an unusually nasty personality.
