Sarah Jeong (XOXO Festival/YouTube)

I don’t like outrage mobs, and I think David French enunciates a sensible line in these cases — past tweets shouldn’t be a firing offense, but things you say while working for your employer are fair game. But the hypocrisy in the Sarah Jeong case is off the charts. There is no way that the Times stands by a writer who expressed such animus against any other group. And the idea, advanced by the Times in its explanation of why it is keeping her, that she was simply adopting the language of her online harassers, is completely dishonest. Who says racist things for years because they get nasty messages on Twitter? These tweets weren’t isolated instances — Andrew Sullivan pointed to a thread that walks through them all:

This thread is AMAZING. Jeong is OBSESSED by hatred of white people. HUNDREDS of racist tweets. https://t.co/MuwsLx3qHa — Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) August 3, 2018

But what is most galling about this episode is that, in almost exactly the same circumstance earlier this year, the Times preemptively fired a new hire for past tweets. And it seems that Quinn Norton really was adopting the language of people she was directly addressing.

I’ve been a queer activist since 1992. But when I speak to communities, I used their language to do it. I talked about the Anonymous usage of “fag” and “faggot” here: https://t.co/1hdDvcrBB6 — Quinn Norton (@quinnnorton) February 14, 2018

Certainly, her use of the n-word was completely innocent. She retweeted someone using the word to troll racists:

I retweeted @JPBarlow using offensive language in a sarcastic tweet that was meant to slap back at racists after Obama’s first election. Eh, not my best retweet, even if the intentions, both mine and Barlow’s, were in the right place. — Quinn Norton (@quinnnorton) February 14, 2018

If any rational person had to decide whether to keep Sarah Jeong or Quinn Norton on the basis of past tweets, it wouldn’t even be a close call — Norton would stay and Jeong would go. The Times reached the opposite conclusion, via a dishonest account of Jeong’s tweeting. Again, this doesn’t mean that Jeong should be fired. It does mean that the Times and Jeong should be more forthcoming, and that the paper owes Quinn Norton an apology.

As for whether this episode leads to a pause in the firing wars, don’t bet on it. It’s more likely to be a step toward entrenching the view among the elite that racial animus isn’t so bad, so long as it’s directed at the group that was the long-running target of Jeong’s contempt.