Subject: Re: Charlie Kirk in His Own Words
Karen Attiah, a black woman, got fired from the Bezos owned Washington Post for accurately quoting what Charlie Kirk said about Black women.
Well, whether it's an accurate quote is a contested issue. His supporters are strenuously arguing that it wasn't. But I don't think that's why she got fired. I think the more likely reason are these quotes:
One of her posts read, “Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.”
In another, she wrote that she refused to “tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/...
Or as she put it in her substack, "They rushed to fire me without even a conversation — claiming disparagement on race. "
Attiah didn't get the memo. The WaPo doesn't want their employees making comments singling out "white men" as a racial and gender category, especially if they're going to imply that they are less deserving of something than other groups by virtue of their race and gender. In the next few years, a lot of heat is going to be directed towards people who talk about white men (or white people generally) in ways that indicate hostility or resentment or even "less-than-ness" about them or their place in society. Conservatives have the whip hand now, and they're going to use it against folks who categorize white men and white people this way. Probably with the same fervor and lack of prior warning/grace that they feel they were treated in prior cultural shifts on talking about race and racism.
Attiah failed to notice that the world had changed. Many institutions will be implementing a new definition of what it means to be racist, and it will include posts like the above. The day where it was generally okay to say these sorts of things about white men are over, in many places. There will be few (if any) "conversations" with people that are newly considered racist. Rather, we'll the same sort of summary firings that attended prior attitudinal shifts about past behavior that is newly considered unacceptable by TPTB.
Watch your tongues when publishing to the entirety of the English-speaking world, kids!