The Leftward Land of Media Silliness has gone completely addlebrained.
Kirsten Powers, a leftist CNN senior political analyst and USA Today columnist, tried to lecture author Thomas Chatterton Williams, a black man, who writes for Harper’s Magazine and New York Times Magazine, about how, when, and how not to use the “N-Word.” She did this even though she started out saying that white people shouldn’t lecture black people on the use of the derogatory word.
The discussion started when Powers, who is a white woman, took to social media to tweet out the question “What is so hard about listening to Black people and respecting their view?”
Virtue signaling is a personality disorder commonly found in people who subscribe to liberalism. Some known symptoms of this disorder are rare public outbursts intended to express the sufferer’s personal notions that they are the most moral person in the room, nastiness against disagreeing viewpoints, and the unexplainable need to make an a$s of oneself regardless of being proven wrong. Side effects are permanent Resting B*tch Face, irritable bowel syndrome (for those who have to listen to it), a job at CNN, and the belief that one can break their own rules on morality when making a point about their own rules on morality.
By the end of the thread, Powers told Williams, a black man, that his view doesn’t belong in her conversation about white ppl who argue with black ppl about when it’s ok to use the N-Word.
The squabble began when Powers tweeted out an article about a white person who talked about the use of a racial slur and lost his job over it. Mike Pesca was suspended from his podcast which is hosted on Slate because he defended New York Times science writer Donald G. McNeil Jr., who recently was forced to resign from his job when he was accused of saying the racial slur to a student when they were doing a field trip years ago when holding a conversation about the word’s appropriate usage and non-usage.
I told you that the Left would eventually run out of people to cancel and they would start to eat their own. Here we have a guy who is being canceled because he talked to a student about the appropriate usage or non-usage of a racial slur… because he used the racial slur in the teachable moment.
Powers tweeted, “Another day, another news story quoting white men saying they can say the N-word bc ‘context’ + that ‘nothing should be beyond debate.’ WHAT IS SO HARD ABOUT THIS? What is so hard about listening to Black people and respecting their view?”
Another day, another news story quoting white men saying they can say the N-word bc "context" + that "nothing should be beyond debate." WHAT IS SO HARD ABOUT THIS? What is so hard about listening to Black people and respecting their view?https://t.co/VEvskonDn3
— Kirsten Powers (@KirstenPowers) February 23, 2021
The conversation about if O’Neil should have been fired was made public when a number of posts from a private, New York Times Facebook chat were made public. That stemmed a bigger conversation on whether it was ever appropriate for a white person to say the word, even in the context of discussion over whether or not it’s okay to even say the word. Sure, it’s a cockamamie conversation that on the surface everyone knows the N-Word is not a nice word to say out loud, but when using it to explain that it’s not a nice word to say out loud it should be overlooked by the Woke language police because the intent in that context is not to hurt anyone, but just the opposite. Instead, these are the types of conversations that leftists are having in private chatrooms around the world wasting so much time and effort to constantly change the rules. To keep up with it is exhausting. Maybe we should just ban the word altogether, and remove it from the dictionary if it’s even in the dictionary. But think about what that would do to rap lyrics. And I’m a huge fan of Hip Hop!
In a Slate Slack exchange, Pesca allegedly said that “he felt there were contexts in which the slur could be used,” reported the Times. “Slate’s chief executive, Dan Check, stepped in to shut down the discussion.” For those of you who don’t know, Slack is an app and a website that is a chat room where you can create a series of separate rooms inside the same chat dwelling for different things. Slack is an app that is used by a lot of newspapers and other professionals who write for a living. We have a Slack and it’s very convenient for internal communications and organizing our stories. The difference is most of our writers don’t go toys-in-the attic bat-guano crazy inside it.
Powers believes that Pesca being fired, and O’Neil being forced to resign were justified and that it is fitting for white people to be prohibited from saying the word even in conversations tackling the question of whether or not it’s appropriate to say the word in certain contexts.
A Twitter user who identifies himself as a Philadelphia lawyer, with under 500 followers, chimed in, saying “Most of those offended are over-educated and relatively young white liberals rather than AAs. The focus should be on substantively addressing inequality, injustice, and discrimination as opposed to ineffectual symbolic gestures that amount to nothing more than virtue signaling.”
Powers responded, “Wrong,” quoting from the Times piece, saying “From article: Joel Anderson, a Black staff member at Slate…disagreed. ‘For Black employees, it’s an extremely small ask to not hear that particular slur and not have debate about whether it’s OK for white employees to use that particular slur,’ he said.”
Wrong. From article: Joel Anderson, a Black staff member at Slate…disagreed. “For Black employees, it’s an extremely small ask to not hear that particular slur and not have debate about whether it’s OK for white employees to use that particular slur,” he said. https://t.co/qg3Gn77FYq
— Kirsten Powers (@KirstenPowers) February 23, 2021
So, then that’s it. The law has been determined and set into stone. A black staff member from Slate has spoken and the world must now bend the knee. How ridiculous this whole thing is. When someone says that word around me I say, “Language!” and it’s done. Most people at that point would feel shame or would say “sorry” and we’d all move on with our lives. Leftists get into arguments over it and want to individually show their powers (pun intended) virtue-signaling until someone either backs down or another member of the Woke gives a response that bests them into silence.
This was the time when Williams got into the debate where he pointed out to Powers, who quoted him, that he himself has used the word in a conversation, tweeting, “I mean, Joel Anderson has used that term in reference to me on this website.”
Powers replied, “What’s your point? Does that mean white people should be saying it?”
Williams then tweeted back, “I think a while [sic] person mentioning it not derogatorily is not as bad as a black person using it derogatorily.”
That’s when Powers went in for the virtue-signaling kill shot.
“ok not sure why you are trying to change the subject. Feels like whataboutism which i don’t entertain. my tweet was about white ppl who argue with Black ppl about when it’s ok to use the N-word”
ok not sure why you are trying to change the subject. Feels like whataboutism which i don't entertain. my tweet was about white ppl who argue with Black ppl about when it's ok to use the N-word
— Kirsten Powers (@KirstenPowers) February 23, 2021
And Williams then replied for the win, “I hate to break this to you, but right this very moment a ‘white’ person (YOU) is arguing with a ‘black’ person (ME) about when it’s okay to use that term!”
I hate to break this to you, but right this very moment a “white” person (YOU) is arguing with a “black” person (ME) about when it’s okay to use that term! https://t.co/qkbUd8767j
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) February 23, 2021
So, Kirsten Powers, white liberal, virtue signaled that white people, her included, should listen to black people when they talked about how they feel when the N-Word is used, and she wound up at the end of the debate refusing to listen to a black man who told her how he feels when the word is used.
Erica Carlin is an independent journalist, opinion writer and contributor to several news and opinion sources. She is based in Georgia.
