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This morning news broke that the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, Rachel Dolezal, misrepresented herself as African-American. Twitter made fast work of Dolezal. Some tweets were brutal, some were funny, and at least one called for empathy. GQ’s Jon Ronson, author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, tweeted: "Feeling incredibly sorry for #RachelDolezal and hope she’s okay. The world knows very little about her, her motives." In Ronson’s book he discusses the consequences of shaming people whom the Twitter tribunal has decided are worthy of vitriol. In the book Ronson seeks to understand the shamed, and he hopes that we will do the same for Rachel Dolezal.

GQ: I’ve just been looking through your tweets about Rachel Dolezal. What kind of responses have you been getting to what was essentially an expression of empathy?

Jon Ronson: An awful lot of "well you must be a racist too." That’s happened to me on a number of occasions since my book came out. For thirty years I’ve been writing stories about the abuse of power, over there in the pharmaceutical industry or the military. Then as soon as I say, "we are now the ones abusing our power" all hell breaks loose. We love to find fault in other people but we can’t handle finding fault in ourselves. None of this is me attacking the social justice movement, because I consider myself part of that movement. I write about this all the time. I am attacking this cold, hard rush to disproportionately judge people under scantest evidence.

Can this kind of response be a good thing?

I was just saying to my wife, last week it was the McKinney video. Which was a truly horrific thing, a truly terrible thing. Social media on that video was a force for great good. This week, the eye has been turned on this woman, and she seems to be being treated with a similar level of derision and hatred. People are not distinguishing between serious transgressions and unserious transgressions—what in this woman’s case is obviously a strange sad story.

So where the McKinney incident is deserving of public shaming, Rachel Dolezal requires more understanding?

Absolutely. The thing somebody said about my book is that when you shame somebody like Justine Sacco, that’s not social justice, it’s a kind of cathartic alternative. And this woman, Rachel, I saw that story this morning and I thought god, what a sad, strange, complicated story. What a mysterious, strange, sad story. Maybe she’s very troubled and messed up. What is going on there? So I go on Twitter and see hundreds of people yelling at her. "Blackface." Statements like that close doors. All I’m doing is calling to light understanding about this woman. She’s not a racist cop in the McKinney video. So don’t treat her with a similar level of ferocity.

Who in your book do you most liken Dolezal to?

She’s different from the people in my book. This wasn’t like a stupid joke that came out badly. She’s a con artist, but I’m not convinced that that’s the beginning and end of her story. It’s obviously a really complicated drama that’s playing out in her life and in her head and in her world. She’s not like anybody in my book, but I do think she’s somebody who needs to be understood and not condemned, like most of the people in my book.

You mentioned a catharsis through social media, but what else do you think people are getting from the vitriol they are throwing at her?

Well I think some people are genuinely angry. There is genuine anger. I’m not going to say that the people attacking her are doing it for impure reasons. And some people are just being funny. Funny is good. Satire is good. What’s not good is kind of severe, cold, hard judgment and punishment. Some people are doing it from their hearts, other people just enjoy the mutual approval machine that is Twitter. And then when someone comes in the middle of it and offers an opposing view, they don’t like to have that good feeling challenged so they scream you out. That’s the opposite of democracy. A lot of people have been saying to me, "just shut up, just shut your Twitter down." The great thing about social media is it gives a voice to voiceless people, and we’re now creating a society where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.