Sarah Jeong is a warning sign of something wrong with the left, by John Sexton.

I don’t even care very much about her racist tweets, per se, or even her lame excuse for making them. What does bother me is the way in which the left collectively responded to her tweets with a big shrug. …

That really sums up what bothers me about this whole story. It’s the assumption that a public comment like “White men are bullshit” would get a shrug if not for conservatives seizing on it. It’s an admission from the Post that there is almost nothing you can say about white men that anyone on the left would deem problematic (to borrow a popular SJW term of art).

The reason why Jeong’s tweets didn’t really matter to anyone on the left is that they’ve nearly all accepted the idea that racism doesn’t mean what most people think it means. Andrew Sullivan points out how the left has redefined it:

The alternative view — that of today’s political left — is that Jeong definitionally cannot be racist, because she’s both a woman and a racial minority. Racism against whites, in this neo-Marxist view, just “isn’t a thing” — just as misandry literally cannot exist at all. And this is because, in this paradigm, racism has nothing to do with a person’s willingness to pre-judge people by the color of their skin, or to make broad, ugly generalizations about whole groups of people, based on hoary stereotypes.

Rather, racism is entirely institutional and systemic, a function of power, and therefore it can only be expressed by the powerful — i.e., primarily white, straight men. For a nonwhite female, like Sarah Jeong, it is simply impossible. In the religion of social constructionism, Jeong, by virtue of being an Asian woman, is one of the elect, incapable of the sin of racism or group prejudice. …

Scroll through left-Twitter and you find utter incredulity that demonizing white people could in any way be offensive. That’s the extent to which loathing of and contempt for “white people” is now background noise on the left…

That’s what really bothers me about this. It’s that one form of blatant bigotry gets a pass on the grounds that it won’t really hurt anyone. If the left thinks that’s true, I think they’re not paying attention. Sarah Jeong isn’t all that significant but what this affair says about the left’s mindset does matter.

Jeong made a lot of anti-white tweets.