I disapprove of what Sarah Jeong says, but I will defend her right to say it

Sarah Jeong, a 30-year-old journalist who’s just been hired by the New York Times, was trending on social media yesterday. The reason, predictably enough, is that she wrote a series of ill-judged tweets several years ago. Jeong is an Asian-American and, four years ago, expressed a number of racist sentiments about white people, whom she compared to ‘dogs’ and ‘groveling goblins’. ‘Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get from being cruel to old white men,’ she wrote in 2014.

The New York Times issued a statement yesterday defending their new hire and claiming that Jeong’s status as a person of colour went some way to excuse her apparently racist tweets. “Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment,” The Times said. “For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.