FTW editor alleges a bunch of stuff after USA Today fires her over tweet

[User 150927]

Obviously mass shootings can be defined in different ways, but generally speaking it's black men -- not white men -- who commit a disproportionate number of them.

So not only was her tweet racist, it was wrong.

If she had said, "it's always a man," she would have at least been accurate, because except in extremely rare cases, it is a man.

Generally speaking, when horrific mass shootings occur in malls, schools and other public places, the shooters ARE white men. Columbine, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Charleston, Vegas and the Gabby Giffords shootings come quickly to mind.
Her tweet was inexcusable for someone in her position... but the stuff she wrote still rings true about how she was treated. And I do think that brown and Black people suffer greater consequences for stuff like this than a random white dude or woman would.

 

[The Big Ragu]

I understand having an editor who handles race.

But when you then add "inclusion" to it, you kind of tip your hand. You are no longer covering something -- like the old notion of simply objectively reporting what you see -- you are proactively doing something. Inclusion is an action, not an adjective.

Once you make that action part of your mission, you inevitably are going to have the position filled by someone like her. At least that is the experience of a lot of places that have felt pressured to create those types of positions.

I'd start with my old crank observation that a lot of how she comes across in that essay is indicative of people her age -- speaking in generalities (which I normally hate).

But to intentionally stereotype her further, she strikes me as someone who sees their victimhood (legitimately or illegitamely) in every action, innocuous or otherwise, that someone of a different race takes in interacting with her. She finds "micro-aggressions" every day in things that happen to her.

She always starts with a narrative and there is no questioning it, because to her it is gospel -- she is going to "call out" your "white privilege." She is not afraid to "publicly name whiteness as a defining problem," and then when she is flagged for it, it's not a problem with her, it's because of course they are "subservient to white authority."

She is free to be that person if it stokes her need to be constantly outraged at others and act self righteous. The unfortunate thing is that unless she can find a way to step outside of herself, she's never going to understand how so many others see her.

 

[JimmyHoward33]

I think people who play Twitter police with everyone else tend to get more blowback when they screw up. Its taste your medicine not racial.

There's no upside to carrying oneself on social media the way many of these folks do. Nothing to gain and as we see here everything to lose

 

[The Big Ragu]

I think people who play Twitter police with everyone else tend to get more blowback when they screw up. Its taste your medicine not racial.

There's no upside to carrying oneself on social media the way many of these folks do. Nothing to gain and as we see here everything to lose

This is a really good observation. I suspect there is a degree of what you are saying. She has probably annoyed enough people with her self righteousness and certitude of racism in everything that the first chance others had to aim and fire at her. ... kaboom.

Unfortunately, I also think a fair degree of what she got was racially motivated too. Apparently her tweet spread to some of those "alt-right" sites and the idiots who are the yang to her yin came running in.

 

[Adam94]

I followed this saga earlier in the week, including the blowback to her ORU column, and noticed when she privatized her Twitter account. But I just learned that she was fired. I've got a ton of thoughts on it, many of them conflicting.

This section of Hemal's Medium post is striking:

"USA TODAY, like so many other newsrooms, has been vocal about trumpeting its commitment to diversity, equality and inclusion. And yet, doing the actual work of diversity, equality and inclusion necessitates engaging with complicated structural issues that should make white audiences uncomfortable. In this case, after I made one mistake, the company contradicted their commitment to DEI and wilted upon criticism."

She has a point. Last summer Gannett did a "workplace diversity and inclusion" survey, committing themselves to making their workforce reflect the country's demographics. To the best of my knowledge, they ran the results for each individual paper as front-page news. I saw at least two examples of that. The average reader of a small-town paper probably doesn't care how many reporters and editors of a certain race were working there, but Gannett decided it needed to be transparent about it. Furthermore, you can argue that most papers don't have a "race and inclusion" editor for their sports sections. The very position Hemal held there was designed to be progressive, as The Big Ragu nodded to before.

So it's quite something that Gannett would wring its proverbial hands and set up this infrastructure to become more diverse -- then when a sticky topic pertaining to race and violence emerges, it would choose not to back up its editor, a woman of color, and jump straight to a firing rather than a talking-to.

Hemal definitely was the subject of some racist-ass tweets in light of the week's events. They didn't always tag her name, but I saw one that tagged USA Today's e-i-c Nicole Carroll calling Hemal a pet on Carroll's leash, and it made me shudder. None of that shirt is remotely acceptable.

Finally, a lot of the topics Hemal wrote about and the points she made were really important, imo. I didn't agree with her all the time, but as with any individual opinion writer, your mileage may vary.

All that said...

And honestly... if one of her white colleagues had tweeted "Probably a Muslim guy" and it turned out to be a white guy and then deleted the tweet and apologized.... would she think that was enough?

She wouldn't think it's enough, and that that white colleague needed to be fired, because racism. It's clear Hemal shares the view of many anti-racists that white people by definition cannot be the target of any sort of prejudice or discrimination, because of the "prejudice plus power" equation. (But in individual scenarios at a more granular level, you may find yourself with a white person or a man who doesn't have any power and becomes the target of prejudice. But I digress.) So "probably a Muslim guy" is disgusting and "probably a white guy" gets a pass, because, after all, she believes the latter to be factual from the get-go.

I get the objections to ORU's policies. Fine. Pouring cold water on a basketball team's finest moment for something it has no control over is tone deaf and lame. There are plenty of real targets out there. ORU in the Sweet 16 is not one.

I asked on Twitter, in a neutral voice, if Hemal's opinion that the NCAA ought to drop ORU until they remove the anti-LGBT language from their honor code should logically extend to every Catholic school in the NCAA because of the Church's views on gay marriage. Got immediate blowback for being homophobic (I'm not) and speaking over people of color (I wasn't - Hemal's platform (at the time) was much bigger than mine as an unemployed bloke off the street, and there was no way I could stifle her freedom of speech). Serves me right for looking for a nuanced dialogue on Twitter, though.

As the OP said, we should ask if there's more to the story than only what Hemal shared. Still, whatever your opinion of her, on principle I really don't believe Gannett should have fired her -- and optically it's a dumb move for a company that wanted so badly to appear to be solving racism via its hiring practices.

 

[dixiehack]

It doesn't make her tweet a good idea, but she was right about the race of the shooter. I realize most Americans don't think of Arabs as white, but the Census Bureau disagrees.

 

[The Big Ragu]

It doesn't make her tweet a good idea, but she was right about the race of the shooter. I realize most Americans don't think of Arabs as white, but the Census Bureau disagrees.

In this case, that is kind of a disinction that doesn't give much of any difference. When she tweeted that, to her a "white shooter" was someone very specific, and it would never have included someone with the name of the actual shooter. We all know what she meant. Just as we know what anyone who immediately keyed in on his ethnicity meant, when they made it the focal point of what he did.

 

[Tighthead]

I've followed her on Twitter. She's pretty outspoken about women's hockey and diversity issues in the sport. She's also been through the ringer that happens when you call out Barstool and Portnoy's army responds.

I like her, but you just can't tweet stuff like this. From a pure risk management perspective, there isn't even any upside to being right.

I'm not in the business, but I appreciate the model of using Twitter solely to highlight your articles/appearances, and ignore all the responses and have zero engagement.

 

[cake in the rain]

In this case, that is kind of a disinction that doesn't give much of any difference. When she tweeted that, to her a "white shooter" was someone very specific, and it would never have included someone with the name of the actual shooter. We all know what she meant. Just as we know what anyone who immediately keyed in on his ethnicity meant, when they made it the focal point of what he did.

The whole debate really is an illustration of the absurdity of all of this....The Census definition of "Asian" begins at the Afghanistan border for reasons that are unsurprisingly not very scientific, so everyone on the other side of that line is, by default, white/Caucasian. Someone was joking on Twitter recently that Jalalabad is on the frontlines of waging white supremacy. AAPI is a made-up Census term. "Person of color" is a made-up American term. Yes, race itself is a social construct, but to call these distinctions social constructs is almost giving them too much credit. They're just invented.

 

[dixiehack]

The whole debate really is an illustration of the absurdity of all of this....The Census definition of "Asian" begins at the Afghanistan border for reasons that are unsurprisingly not very scientific, so everyone on the other side of that line is, by default, white/Caucasian. Someone was joking on Twitter recently that Jalalabad is on the frontlines of waging white supremacy. AAPI is a made-up Census term. "Person of color" is a made-up American term. Yes, race itself is a social construct, but to call these distinctions social constructs is almost giving them too much credit. They're just invented.

Right. But it also speaks to the idea that "whiteness" is a form of social currency, no matter how much we try to insist otherwise. And as an out group, Arabs and Persians (and Muslims more broadly) are having the lines redrawn around them so that they aren't considered "white." Same thing that was done to Jews, Greeks, Italians, Irish, etc. before them. We've come nowhere near as far as we like to pretend.

 

[cake in the rain]

Generally speaking, when horrific mass shootings occur in malls, schools and other public places, the shooters ARE white men. Columbine, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Charleston, Vegas and the Gabby Giffords shootings come quickly to mind.

Not to go back and forth on anecdotes, but nine or ten of the 23 deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history were committed by non-whites*, which is already disproportionately high.

I think there could be a very interesting study on why so many people have the incorrect perception that whites commit a disproportionate amount of mass shootings. Media coverage -- or lack of media coverage -- undoubtedly plays a large part in it. A story like this, even though it cites academic studies and appears in a liberal journal, might never get published today:

(What the White Mass-Shooter Myth Gets Right and Wrong About Killers' Demographics)

*usual disclaimer applies about the challenge and occasional absurdity of such labels, but since this is the discussion I will use it.

 

[cake in the rain]

Right. But it also speaks to the idea that "whiteness" is a form of social currency, no matter how much we try to insist otherwise.

I would say the exact opposite.

If you're familiar with South America or spend much time on college campuses, which is where I now spend most of my time, you'll meet many people who are "white" in their home country and suddenly become "people of color" in the United States. Why? There are enormous advantages to doing so.

Can you imagine anyone in the United States in 2021, when having a plausible option between those two choices, selecting white? It's almost incomprehensible, especially within an academic context.