When a society, in order to be “non-racist,” admits nonwhites, it instantly becomes “racist”

Once there is a mass immigration of nonwhites, followed by their admission into universities and their hiring as employees—once visible minorities become a conspicuous presence in a society, then the most ordinary, unobjectionable statements become fodder for complaints of discrimination. If a reasonably homogeneous and harmonious society does not want racial discrimination—whether the reality of it or the false charges of it—to become its obsessive preoccupation, it must, very simply, maintain its homogeneity. But if it has already made the dread error of allowing itself to become conspicuously diverse, as most of the nations of the West have done, it must at a minimum recognize the mistake it has made and stop making it worse.

The story is in the October 3 New York Post:

Martha sued over firing

A former art director for Martha Stewart’s magazine “Martha Stewart Living” was fired for complaining about an Asian stereotype set to appear in print, according to a $3 million suit.

Pei Hsieh, a Chinese-American, says she flagged the phrase in an e-mail to a supervisor after seeing it in a description of a lampshade that resembled “the Southeast Asian conical-shaped hats traditionally worn by laborers for sun protection.”

“It is fraught with derogatory connotations, and its usage perpetuates negative stereotypes of Asians,” Hsieh wrote in the August 2007 e-mail to a boss, according to her Manhattan federal suit.

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October 5

Ken Hechtman writes:

I must be missing something. What did Pei Hsieh do wrong? The story doesn’t say she criticized her employer in public or even threatened to.

The way I read it, she sent her boss a private communication letting him know about a potential PR liability—one he could have found out about in a minute just by looking up the word “coolie.” Her boss responded by firing her. He could have said “Thank you for your input, but ‘coolie hat’ is a phrase in common use and I’m keeping it.” But he fired her instead. Presumably, that’s what she’s suing over. Not the use of the word.

LA replies:

I think it’s overwhelmingly likely that there was more going on than that one note to her boss, and that she was not fired over that one note.

My point did not have to do with her being fired, but with her bitter “bias” complaint over a perfectly innocent statement, and how this is an instance of a general phenomenon that surrounds us and that has transformed Western society immeasurably for the worse, thanks to the diversity that you champion.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 04, 2009 09:23 PM | Send