Our Days of Rage: What #CancelColbert reveals about women/of color and controversial speech

In such cases, every perpetrator of the online harassment sired by such opinions acts like intercepting antibody meant to obliterate the offending feminine virus. They seek not to argue, but destroy.

What Park’s travails this past week illustrate, as well, is how vaporous women of color’s “right to free speech” really is; when our exercise of speech begets not discussion, discourse, or reasoned debate, but a fungal proliferation of hate speech, serious questions need to be asked.

Civilization for Me; None for Thee

When tech evangelist Adria Richards controversially photographed men making lewd jokes behind her at the PyCon tech conference last year, she was deluged with racist, misogynist, pornographic threats — the latter being some of the most vulgar I had ever witnessed, up to and including pictures of a dismembered black woman with captions suggesting that this was an ideal fate for Richards, herself a woman of color. Her former company’s clients were similarly inundated, in a bid to enlist their pressure in firing Richards, which ultimately came to pass.

At the time many argued that publicly shaming the men in question (one of whom was also fired) was not the right way to deal with their locker room-ish lack of decorum. While this was not an entirely unreasonable argument, it rang painfully hollow as its boosters were largely silent on the question of how best to engage with what they viewed as Richards’ problematic behavior. If they criticized her vitriolic attackers it was only as a parenthetical to the meat of chiding her at length.

Civility and reason for the men; barbarism for Richards.

This serrated cognitive dissonance — which maps neatly onto easily identifiable patterns of discourse around Park, her fellow travelers, and the #CancelColbert hashtag — should worry us all. There was no shortage of people demanding civility and sensibility from Park, but precious few making the same claim upon her most vicious attackers — once again, any mention of it was as a disclaiming aside, “No one should be personally attacking Suey Park, but…”

“But” indeed.

The tacit conceit that Park (and every other woman/of color so vituperated) brought this hellfire upon herself underlies the shameful public shuffling on this question. Her treatment on HuffPost Live by Josh Zepps illustrates how even mainstream media decorousness could not restrain the impulse to publicly punish and shame a disobedient woman of color. In calling her views “stupid” to her face — to the rapturous approbation of many online — Zepps adopted the internet’s idiom (the very thing he was criticizing) and dispensed with all politesse in a bid to give Park what for. It is difficult to imagine Zepps saying the same thing to Lindsey Graham, John McCain, or Mark Zuckerberg, even though all of these men have espoused views worth a throatily impolite challenge.

Park, by dint of her womanhood, her activism, her race, and her youth, is accorded no such respect. To hear her critics tell it, this is because she was rude and impetuous, throwing Molotovs with glee and alienating all around her. During a different HuffPost Live segment, also hosted by Zepps, discussing the #CancelColbert hashtag, a blogger named Joslyn Stevens opined “and then she was getting all these threats. I mean, she asked for it.” Stevens, a woman of color who identifies as a feminist, makes clear how pervasive this attitude of learned helplessness against online hate mobs really is. It is easier to blame the target(s).

Indeed, Stevens herself became a part of the mob, in a sense, when she began writing blog posts attacking Park with amateur psychoanalysis, seeking more to prove that she’s “crazy” than substantively engaging with anything she has said or done (which was, of course, feted by Park’s attackers as a courageous exercise of “rationality” and “logic”).

The Tonal Red-Herring

But Park’s aggression, and the forceful demand of the (itself satirical and not literal) #CancelColbert campaign, merely provided a pretext for which any purported sin could have been substituted. This is the nub of the invidious notion that Park “brought it on herself” because of her rage. Park’s tenor had nothing to do with the noxious rape threats she received, nor the mounting piles of expressly racist/sexist tweets she was inundated with since the moment her campaign took off (culminating in the spawning of antagonistic hashtags like the unbelievably racist #ChopSuey). It was her claim to the public square and her audacity of expression — by which I mean her taking on a popular liberal comedian and using him to springboard into a difficult soul-search on the question of media racism among liberals — that made her a target, just as Adria Richards’ challenge to the cosy clubhouse of male impunity in the tech industry made her a target, irrespective of the merits of her methods.

This fact, that the much-vaunted issue of “tone” has next to nothing to do with this, is deftly illustrated by this case’s similarity to the experience of feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, who infamously became the target of unending hordes of bigoted gamers for trying to crowdfund her online film project Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. Her activism, while radical, is the polar opposite of Park’s in tone. She is conciliatory, and even placating in her Feminist Frequency series, deconstructing the role of gender in media. She is earnest in her desire to educate, and sympathetically laboring to cultivate allies with her work.

She speaks softly, while Park carries the big stick. Yet the online reaction to both was identical, each burst of outrage having the scope of a biblically apocalyptic pestilence.