JESSE SINGAL: Privileged, Highly Educated People Are Rapidly Colonizing The Racial-Justice Conversation.
It’s also undeniably the case that there is a long history of anti-Asian racism in the U.S. No one is questioning that, or claiming that stereotypes widely held 30 years ago have somehow been entirely snuffed out in the intervening period.
What I’m questioning is the importance of focusing so intently, and so repeatedly, on the complaints of very privileged people who, whether or not they are victims of racial discrimination, have been at worst very lightly dinged by it.
After all, this is a trend. In the New York Times alone, there have been recent articles about alleged racism within the wine world, at Condé Nast, at Bon Appetit, within top medical journals, and at Gimlet Media. Some of these institutions surely have genuine race issues, but in certain cases the allegations are questionable at best. The Condé Nast article includes a young staffer offended she was given a copy of a style guide, because she was apparently unaware that this is a common gift for editorial higher-ups to give to their subordinates (she interpreted it as a racist implication that she didn’t speak good enough English). No one has any freaking clue exactly what happened at Gimlet, and despite so many media folks’ evident eagerness to present it as a race-related controversy, the closest anyone can get to a coherent argument in favor of this storyline is “Two staffers, one of them herself a woman of color, initially opposed a unionization drive favored by many staffers of color.” This is not exactly fodder for a pattern-or-practice investigation.
What all these institutions have in common is that they are the domains of highly privileged, college educated people. If you are in the wine world, or publishing or food writing or medical research, there is an overwhelming likelihood you have a college degree, probably a good one, and that you did not come from a poor family. Here and there are exceptions, of course, but they prove the rule. deBoer is right that this conversation is increasingly about microaggressions committed by and inflicted upon very, very privileged people. People who are likely to be only a couple steps removed, at most, from the sorts of journalists who write for The New York Times and other elite outlets, and who can raise awareness of their plight.
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