If l’affaire Jeong has taught us one thing, it’s that the people who claim most vociferously to be anti-racist are nothing of the sort. On the contrary, they’re obsessed with race, seeing almost everything through the prism of ethnicity. They’re in favor of categorizing people according to racial criteria. What they object to is not racial discrimination, but racial discrimination against the wrong groups.

Sarah Jeong is a journalist who was hired by the New York Times last week as an editorial writer. As has now become traditional, her social media history was pored over (or, as Donald Trump might put it, “poured over”). Some pungent Tweets showed up. Those that have attracted the most attention are the straightforwardly racist ones — “white people are bullshit,” “#CancelWhitePeople,” and so on — though, to my mind, her assertion that free speech is a conservative dog whistle is far more alarming in a journalist than any of these.

[Opinion: New York Times newest editorial member is unfit to work for the Times, according to the Times]

Anyway, some conservatives began noisily to demand that Jeong be fired, prompting some leftists to leap to her defense on grounds that there can be no such thing as anti-white racism, because racism is all about power and privilege and oppressing minorities.

The Times is standing by its hire, and rightly so. I have complained often enough in this column about the stupidity and cruelty of online mobs, their refusal to consider context, their insistence that nothing other than a sacking will do. I have especially criticized the unwillingness of institutions to stand up to lynch mobs. If it was wrong for the Atlantic to unhire the brilliant Kevin Williamson because of an earlier Tweet — a far milder one, by any definition, than Jeong’s — then it would be equally wrong for the Gray Lady to cower in the face of anonymous Twitter belligerence.

Far more interesting is the attitude of Jeong’s online defenders, their aggressive insistence that it’s OK to be rude about whites, because “punching up” is different from “punching down.” Here, to pluck an example more or less at random, is the liberal journalist David. S. Joachim:

Dear white people:



1. Racism is abt the powerful keeping down the powerless



2. We (generally) are the powerful



3. "White ppl" isn't a slur



4. "Fag" and the N word are slurs, because they subordinate



5. Your moral equivalence is nonsense



6. "Reverse racism" isn't a thing — David S. Joachim (@davidjoachim) August 2, 2018

The most obvious observation to make about this attitude is that it is emphatically not anti-racist. On the contrary, it explicitly endorses treating people differently for no reason other than their ethnic background.

The essence of racism is collectivism. It defines people, not according to their honesty, their kindness, their intelligence, or their opinions, but according to their physiognomy. To argue that someone should, in effect, get a free pass because she comes from a group that is designated as underprivileged is precisely to define her by physiognomy.

Even in its own terms, this strikes me as a bizarre argument. It’s insulting, as well as tendentious, to treat Asian-Americans as a victim group. On most criteria — income, education, longevity — they are ahead of the national average. So much so, in fact, that they are now arguably victimized by the racist admissions policies of certain universities.

But even if these things were not true, even if Asian-Americans en masse were downtrodden and oppressed, no one would be able to make that claim of Jeong, an obviously articulate writer who is about to land a plum job at the most famous newspaper in the land. Why define her, not by her writing skills, her professional background, or her ability, but purely by her appearance? If that’s not racism, what is?

Let me break this down for some of my liberal friends. Identity politics is identity politics whoever it comes from. The alt-right look down upon certain groups on genetic grounds, and now notice that the “woke Left” does the same thing. We are dealing not with two opposed attitudes, but with two expressions of the same attitude — an attitude, incidentally, that flies in the face of a mountain of evidence that differences within racial groups outweigh differences between them, thus sustaining the commonsense view that we are all primarily individuals.

Until recently, the notion that we are all private citizens, equal before the law, was both the liberal and the conservative ideal. That it should need restating says nothing good about the state of our present debate.

[Also read: Trump discussed 'fake news' with New York Times publisher]