Andrew Sullivan has been saying dumb things about race and racism on TV and the Internet for as long as I’ve known who Andrew Sullivan is. I’m convinced he’s able to do this because he’s British and has an admittedly nice beard—which makes people assume his words are 30 percent smarter than they actually are. Listening to him speak is like watching a straight-to-DVD Kingsman movie.
Yesterday, New York Magazine published a column where Andrew Sullivan does Andrew Sullivan things. This time, he pointed his beard at Sarah Jeong, a recently hired member of the New York Times editorial board who has come under some aggressively stupid fire for being “racist” against white people. In his column, Sullivan writes dozens of increasingly dumb-as-the-fuck sentences to explain why Jeong is, in fact, a racist and why you can be racist against white people.
Below are the 10 worst:
10. “The neo-Marxist analysis of society, in which we are all mere appendages of various groups of oppressors and oppressed, and in which the oppressed definitionally cannot be at fault, is now the governing philosophy of almost all liberal media.”
9. “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.”
8. “Aren’t Jews included in the category of whites?”
7. “A series of tweets from 2013 to 2015 reveal a vicious hatred of an entire group of people based only on their skin color.”
6. “What many don’t seem to understand is that their view of racism isn’t shared by the public at large and that the defense of it by institutions like the New York Times will only serve to deepen the kind of resentment that gave us Trump.”
5. “A little more disturbing is what you might call ‘eliminationist’ rhetoric—language that wishes an entire race could be wiped off the face of the earth: ‘#cancelwhitepeople.’”
4. “Yes, we all live on campus now.”
3. “But it does reveal a worldview in which white people—all of them—are cultural parasites and contemptibly dull.”
2. “Another indicator that these statements might be racist comes from replacing the word ‘white’ with any other racial group.”
1. “But 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.”