(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 boundaries, and get some laughs, but it’s dancing on thin ice. You’re not allowed to be stupid

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’re doing or you’re going to get burnt. “Youthful indiscretions” and “moments of folly” are acceptable excuses for some not all

Funnily I’m reminded of marital jokes here. Should you jokingly insult your spouse? I extremely do not recommend it. “But its an inside joke, we have a common understanding, we have a thing going!” Uhuh. That’s never gonna bite you in the ass ever. 😉

Maybe the real crime was that her tweets weren’t funny enough 🤔 she spoke too plainly, was too brazen – unacceptable for minorities, particularly unacceptable for women, god help you if you’re both and you aren’t operating with surgical nuance and lvl 3 encoding

No I don’t think that’s it. That’s 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

I’m guessing she wouldn’t be so dumb as to tweet those things today in the present context – but contexts CHANGE, man. It wasn’t that long ago that “that’s so gay” was an acceptable slight, that homosexuality was a punchline. This was everywhere in pop culture. Also: “r*tarded”

To be clear I don’t think I’m trying to defend her or support her or say she should be forgiven or not-forgiven or anything of that sort. I don’t know shit about that. This stuff is moral fashion, it’ll be fashionable one week and out of date the next

I have a feeling when she tweeted “I get joy out of being cruel to old white men” 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)

I think it’s plausible and maybe about 70% likely that she was taking calculated risks with those tweets. ones’s calculus is always imperfect because you can’t foresee the future. Ultimately I think she’ll be ok

Perhaps then ultimately her strategy was optimal given her context and circumstance, and this is just the price you pay for this particular path

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’s just tacky tbh. If you want others to suffer, try to be classy about it

More extreme eg ”Haha I was being ironic and clever when I tweeted about touching children inappropriately” – 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’t, but still

Also definitely true that her tweets make great recruitment material for alt-right kids