sarah jeong

I’m not sure I can put into words the feeling of powerlessness that the “gooks” headline induced in me.

There are so many As-Am people I’ve never met, whose lives have never interacted with mine, who were struck by the same feeling.

What the fuck happens in America to make us like that?

It’s not the word that hurt so much, it was the obscene dance of victory around the audience’s pain.

“Thanks for reading.”

Gawker ethos decontextualizes humor born in absurd hierarchically-flattened contexts, & deploys it for profit from a position of power.

Journalism doesn’t have to be nice. But.

The kids who spent every breath making sure you felt weird and ugly and foreign because it amused them — they never go away.

The participation of two Korean-American men in this ugliness is not surprising. The chance to be “with it” is always dangled before us.

Back to David BY Lee: “America tries constantly to ignore the weak and break the strong. Korea has no love for itself or for the others.”

In the Lee essay he talks a bit about his friend who says to him, “I think white people are just better” and then has a mental break.

“this is a crazy-making environment” — we call each other hysterical, we call each other crazy, we call each other gooks.

our identity is too twisted-up, maybe too broken, for meaningful pride or meaningful solidarity.

I thought a lot about how the click-centric, ad-driven model of journalism had broken down the marketplace of ideas.

But when it comes down to it — as gross and worrisome as the click-centric model is — it’s rather irrelevant.

There are a lot of click-centric publications out there, & a great many would never, ever publish something with “gooks” in the headline.

There’s a smug sociopathy that’s set in at Gawker, and I suppose their profit model encourages it — but it’s not the cause.

That mindset existed long ago. We knew it well from the playgrounds of our childhoods.

@sarahjeong back when Buzzfeed fucked up their rape story I said something to you about the deontological ethics of journalism

@sarahjeong but Gawker, the Awl under Sicha, Hairpin up until fairly recently, all do the Stewart/Colbert thing of crafting overton windows