Sarah Jeong and the Victimhood Motte and Bailey
As Quillette editor Claire Lehmann pointed out recently, the controversy over New York Times hire Sarah Jeong’s anti-white tweets has led much of the left to abandon their usual motte-and-bailey tactic about racism.
The defence of Jeong is interesting because for once the social justice left actually have to defend their bailey position (racism=power+prejudice) rather than simply retreating to their motte position (dictionary definition of racism)
— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) August 4, 2018
This means many people are hearing for the first time an argument they might find unusual and extreme. But readers may be unfamiliar with the term motte and bailey, so let’s look at this some more.
In a footnote to our book The Rise of Victimhood Culture, Jason Manning and I discussed how campus activists and others who embrace an extreme form of the moral framework we call victimhood culture might fail to defend their more unconventional ideas when challenged, and then go right back to them later. The philosopher Nicholas Shackel calls these kinds of shifting beliefs motte and bailey doctrines, after a type of castle called a motte and bailey castle. From our book:
A motte and bailey castle consists of the courtyard, or bailey, the desirable land where people spend their time, and the motte, a mound in the center with a stone castle on the top. When under attack, people may retreat to the motte and lose the bailey, but always return to the bailey when it is safe. In the same way people may hold doctrines that are difficult to defend when challenged (bailey doctrines), so rather than attempt to defend them, they retreat and talk only about their less controversial ideas (motte doctrines), returning to the more exciting ideas when the challenge is over…. Thus on campus, activists might busy themselves arguing outright against free speech and academic freedom as impediments to protecting the disadvantaged from verbal harm… while elsewhere their supporters claim no one is talking about limiting free speech or academic freedom. (P. 26, n. 11)
Other bailey doctrines include the related idea that some kinds of speech are literally violence, that women can’t be sexist, that racial minorities can’t be racist, or that it’s okay to disparage and express hatred toward men, whites, and others considered to be among the privileged. These are the kinds of things people say loudly and emphatically in some environments and then qualify in others.
The bailey doctrines increasingly seem to be making their way outside of academia. Consider the recent Washington Post op-ed by sociology professor Suzanna Danuta Walters called “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” Walters asks whether it’s actually illogical to hate men and mocks the idea that “we’re not supposed to hate them because… #NotAllMen.” And she gives this advice to men who don’t want to be hated:
So men, if you really are #WithUs and would like us to not hate you for all the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this: Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down. Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you.
In a later interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education (now behind a paywall), she said it would also be legitimate to ask, “Why can’t we hate white people?”
The idea — a common one among campus activists — is that sexism and racism are about structural power, not about hatred toward people because of their sex or race. And in the conflict theory framework that many leftist activists draw from, the idea is that men have power over women and whites have power over nonwhites, leaving all interactions between them a zero-sum game involving domination or resistance. In this view, the hatred of men by women or whites by nonwhites can’t be sexism or racism because it’s not furthering the domination of the oppressed. And if you see tend to see all morality through the lens of domination and oppression, it’s not much of a stretch to decide that not only is it not sexism or racism, but that it’s not wrong at all. Maybe it’s even edgy.
So that’s the context in which Sarah Jeong, the newest member of the New York Times editorial board, tweeted things like “I wanna cut all those white people” and “It’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men,” “#CancelWhitePeople,” and hundreds of similar tweets over the course of several years.
Shocking as this was to many people hearing this sort of thing for the first time, it’s pretty typical of the language seen today from leftwing activists. When things like this get exposed to wider audiences, though, there’s often a retreat to the motte. And indeed, that’s what Sarah Jeong and the New York Times did immediately. Jeong explained her tweets as “counter-trolling.” She said she was mimicking the language of racists harassing her online, and that she understands “how hurtful these posts are out of context.” The New York Times likewise put out a statement saying that she was responding to “harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.” “She regrets it,” they say, “and the Times does not condone it.”
Many of Jeong’s defenders did condone it, though. So while she and her new employer were trying to reassure their audience that Jeong wasn’t in fact a racist and that the tweets were wrong but more understandable in context, people like Zach Beauchamp of Vox were defending them. Beauchamp’s defense is still to some extent a retreat. He says that what people don’t understand is that the Jeong was relying on a special meaning of the term “white people.” You might naively think a person saying things things like “#CancelWhitePeople” or “White men are bullshit” has some animus against white people, but you’d be wrong, he explains:
To anyone who’s even passingly familiar with the way the social justice left talks, this is just clearly untrue. “White people” is a shorthand in these communities, one that’s used to capture the way that many whites still act in clueless and/or racist ways. It’s typically used satirically and hyperbolically to emphasize how white people continue to benefit (even unknowingly) from their skin color, or to point out the ways in which a power structure that favors white people continues to exist.
There’s still a motte and bailey element in that people get to have fun out on the bailey expressing their hatred for white people, and then retreat to the motte by explaining it’s shorthand for power structures that favor white people. But he’s defending something that neither Jeong nor the New York Times will — the content of the tweets. Beauchamp is in this sense out on the bailey defending the idea that what looks to everyone else like hate speech is okay if it’s about whites.
Likewise, over at Slate, Inkoo Kang explained that “when people of color rail against white people, that’s often shorthand for speaking out against the existing racial structure that serves to keep white people in power.” Others took to Twitter and elsewhere to explain that Jeong’s tweets can’t be racist because “racism is prejudice plus power.” Or that anti-white racism is “not a thing.”
What it all amounts to, go back to Claire Lehmann’s tweet, is the end of the motte-and-bailey tactic on this issue, even from mainstream liberal sources. Perhaps this should be welcomed. Maybe, as Lehmann says, “when the façade drops, it’s game over.”
The social justice left's entire modus operandi is to implement extreme positions using the language of moderate positions. But when this facade drops, it's game over.
— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) August 4, 2018
Or maybe it’s not game over for the left, but game over for the center. What does it mean that people no longer feel the need to hide or moderate their more radical views for mainstream audiences? What does it mean that Jeong was hired by the New York Times and that they’re standing by her? Their explanation of the tweets made little sense to begin with, and now the evidence of hundreds of other tweets suggests it is certainly false. What does it mean that others on the left have continued defending the tweets? Will this discredit the left, or will it just further polarize the country? As extreme positions become mainstream, they lead to extreme counterreactions and endless conflict, a war in which neither side any longer has a motte to retreat to.