These women must not get away with it. Here’s the link to the article.
Spread it like wildfire!
I think they thought this was a how to article.
I live in Kansas City and watch that news station. My family noticed she disappeared but of course it wasn’t until recently that we learned why.
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Well, that article definitely is a “conversation starter”
If I never hear the phrase “strategic tears” again it will be too soon.
That said, no one should have gotten fired over it.
We COULD have had a standard that off-the-job behavior and beliefs are irrelevant and you shouldn’t be fired for them… We could have.
But instead we have culture total war.
The problem with that is “Sue keeps saying Jewish people should be violently ethnic cleansed, but she waits until 5:01 pm to mention it, so we can’t do anything.”
I do think there’s some sort of sane middle ground where people can have controversial opinions in their downtime and in contexts where they don’t exist as A Representative Of [Company] but as a private individual, but where even in your off time horrifying displays of hate speech can lead to your boss deciding you’re not a good fit for the company.
I mean, there’s a pretty significant difference between saying “when this certain group of people does this certain behavior it pisses me off” even if there are legitimate issues that some people have with your take, and “this certain group of people should be killed off and/or enslaved and/or generally punished for existing”.
True. I just thought that “either we have the idea that off the job beliefs don’t matter at all or we have culture total war” was oversimplified.
On-air talent has a position of power within a TV station. As we’ve seen, people notice their absence, unlike some intern or editor or production assistant. That means she has a certain responsibility to avoid making a statement that says, in effect, that a whole class of people lacks valid feelings and only displays emotion as a cynical manipulative tactic aimed at her.
Now clearly she doesn’t have quite as much institutional power as she thought she did, seeing as she got fired, but she still had a wide set of tools with which to put those white women under her in their place. We really don’t know how many careers she stifled and human beings she immiserated by living out this bankrupt, self-flattering ideology.
The concept of “white women’s tears” is gaslighting: your feelings aren’t real, I’ll tell you what you actually feel. In romantic relationships, we can see how that can be toxic. In “discourse” it’s cheap point-scoring, especially in an online environment that rewards performance of pain. It’s an assertion free of content used to manipulate and belittle, which is why it’s so popular with Tweeters who build personal brands with over-the-top clapbacks at people who can’t or won’t clap back in turn.
That’s exactly how you don’t want someone with some power over people below her to think.
But I still don’t think it was a fireable offense.
First off: people shouldn’t be fired for private posts on Facebook. Social media has blurred the line between public and private action as it relates to your job, but we should reinforce it. This even goes for celebrities, for if we don’t see forgiveness practiced with celebrities, then who will we model it from?
Second off: These critics actually have something resembling a point wrt “white women tears.” They mangle it badly, but still, there’s a point.
The SJ-critical types have long noted that there is a certain power dynamic to someone being a “better victim” than you. If they are better at performing pain and sadness, and have other traits that make their sadness look narratively correct, rather than evidence of weakness and disgusting, then political fights with them can be frustrating and even scary. They can hurt you and you’re supposed to laugh it off, do the same to them, and you’re a criminal, etc. While many critics who have brought up this argument have been distasteful (because sometimes they were quite eager to harass people), it’s a phenomenon we should at least recognize and has explanatory power even over non-harassing disputes.
Articles like this are just people within SJ noticing that power dynamic too. However because you can’t really call out the pitfalls with a victim mentality in that movement, well, it has to be re-framed into identity-groups with aspects like “punching up” added. So it becomes a problem to be concerned about… but only for white women. And while the critique is originally about specific behavior, now it gets transmuted to being another group-trait, and treated with the viciousness of all arguments starting with “Group X does this bad thing…”
Third off: Critique of this behavior fails though when it assumes “because this is inconvenient and serves a purpose for my opponent, therefore it is fake and their feelings aren’t real.” All of the people people are reporting in the culture wars – right, left, fear of harassment, fear of social outrage mobs, even fear of immigrants and black helicopters – is real pain that can not be analyzed away by dismissing it as cynical and performative.
So none of y’all read the original article huh
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Mooncustafer 