Two years ago, the ESPN host Bomani Jones appeared on the network’s “Mike & Mike” morning show wearing a T-shirt that seemed, at first glance, to bear the logo of Cleveland’s baseball team, but, in place of the trademark cursive “Indians,” the shirt read “Caucasians”; the crude caricature of a Native American had also been altered to look like a grinning white man. The reaction was swift: ESPN demanded that he cover up the shirt while on air; many white people criticized Jones’s “racism” on social media. The point was easy to discern: Native Americans continue to be depicted in derogatory ways and relegated to a kind of racist stereotype in a manner that many white people would find intolerable were it directed at them. Stripped of context, the shirt appeared to be a needless racial provocation. Situated amid the dynamics that inspired it, though, the shirt becomes an attempt to undermine racism by forcing observers to think about the nature of the Indians’ iconography.

These matters of race and context arose yet again (as they have almost incessantly in recent years) when tweets by Sarah Jeong, a newly hired member of the editorial board at the Times, resurfaced last week. Jeong tweeted, among other things, “white men are bullshit”; “basically i’m just imagining waking up white every morning with a terrible existential dread that i have no culture”; “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men”; and “#CancelWhitePeople.” Jeong said in a statement that the tweets were intended to be an inversion of the racist and sexist trolling that had been a feature of her digital life—an attempt to fight racism by deploying its own language against it. She said, “While it was intended as satire, I deeply regret that I mimicked the language of my harassers. These comments were not aimed at a general audience, because general audiences do not engage in harassment campaigns.” She added that she understood how, out of context, tweeting such remarks was “hurtful,” and that she would not do it again. When the Times opted to stand by Jeong, apparently accepting her explanation, conservatives were quick to declare a double standard, pointing to the demise of Roseanne Barr’s show following her racist Twitter attack upon Valerie Jarrett and other incidents. Last year, CNN fired the commentator Jeffrey Lord for tweeting “Sieg Heil” at a critic—he also argued that the tweet was meant satirically. And, earlier this year, the Times itself rescinded its hiring of Quinn Norton, for posts on social media that included a reference to a reputed neo-Nazi as “a terrible person, & an old friend of mine” (Norton said that she thought it was important to engage with people and try to change their views) and the use of slurs in referring to gay people (she said that this was language she used within the queer community, with which she identifies, and when interacting with hackers). The invective directed at the Times for its decision to support Jeong is driven by people who see the Barr, Lord, and Norton firings as part of pattern. Fair play, they argue, demands a zero-tolerance policy for anything offensive said by any person of color, too.

Jeong’s satire defense is, indeed, not entirely sound. Her words may well have been satirical, but they are a form of satire with a high risk of collateral damage. The most devoutly bigoted figures of our era, such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Donald Trump, have used the satire loophole as a way to gerrymander the boundaries of acceptable conversation to contain their most inflammatory comments. And, as Ezra Klein pointed out, Twitter specializes in the comforting deception that we are communicating with a group of insiders who share our own reference points, when in fact we are making public statements accessible to a large swath of the world—in this sense, Jeong’s assertion that there was no “general audience” for her tweets doesn’t hold up. (She is a journalist with tens of thousands of followers.) A person who lacked Jeong’s particular context might reasonably conclude that her words represented a form of bigotry, and wonder why that would be socially acceptable. Donald Trump has reaped incalculable political benefit by exploiting the apprehension that white people have become societal punching bags. In his rhetoric, Trump is not missing the context but deliberately erasing it, contriving a misunderstanding that is profitable on multiple levels for its architects. They understand the current debate around free speech and social media not as an attempt to create parameters of decency around public dialogue but rather as part of a board game in which each side attempts to remove valuable pieces from the other’s team.

This has played out regularly enough for us to recognize the bigger objectives. The dishonestly named Project Veritas has attempted a number of outlandish schemes meant to entrap journalists or distort their words into some fireable offense. Sam Seder was released and then rehired by MSNBC following a campaign that deliberately misinterpreted a tweet he made ridiculing support for Woody Allen and Roman Polanski to make it appear that he was actually supporting them. This is not novel: a decade ago, Breitbart published a deceptively edited excerpt of a speech by Shirley Sherrod, an Agriculture Department official in the Obama Administration. Sherrod was made to appear as if she were disparaging white people when she was actually making a plea for people to recognize their common humanity. She resigned under pressure from her colleagues before the full video of the speech was made available.

But there is also an even greater effort at work, aimed to strip away the moral authority of people belonging to a vulnerable group, in order to make the spurious argument that they’re too compromised to hold anyone outside that group accountable. This is the off-brand cousin of Trump’s method of responding to the Mueller probe: strip away the credibility of those who are making the accusation, and you diminish the weight of the accusations themselves. Thus, in the fitting order of these matters, the conversation in the past week has focussed entirely upon Jeong’s reactions to racist and sexist assaults rather than the fact that she was subjected to them in the first place.

Jeong’s comments can also be seen as expressions—if flawed ones—of the frustration common to people who deal with chronic unfairness. People in these communities might well voice such sentiments in their homes, or among associates who share a common burden, but wisely avoid doing so on social media. Her comments were reckless, inflammatory, potentially hurtful. But all things are not equal. White men in this country have been, largely if not universally, exempt from the default demand that we look askance at their claims to humanity. Filter past the hypertensive indignation and a thing becomes clear: the idea of reverse racism serves as a blunt instrument to facilitate the actual kind.