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Notes -
Washington Post v. Karen Attiah
An arbitrator has asked and answered:
Mrs. Attiah is the Washington Post writer who rather famously and falsely claimed that Charlie Kirk had said "Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously" in the immediate aftermath of Kirk's murder. I was going to say ex-, but that's not the case anymore. It's now established rule that the Washington Post can not fire someone merely for dancing publicly in the blood of a recently murdered man to disparage people on the basis of race and gender, and making false claims while doing so.
In this case, at least.
There's a legal formalist perspective where this is defensible. The Post may have included all of Attiah's post-shooting posts in the strict text of the termination letter, but they only quoted a couple posts, so maybe the arbitrator felt that the rest weren't sufficiently plead. Though she does spend enough time to repeat, without noting as false, the false attribution of the quote to a dead man. The Post did argue 'security concerns' at length, and the extent that rhymes with a heckler's veto isn't a great policy matter to rest on. The comparisons to Dave "Ratfucker" Weigel and a random contractor not covered by the stated policies might be pretty nakedly different conduct given context, but perhaps if you squint hard enough and there's no other comparisons, you get stuck with the bad approximations. Attiah isn't a government employee, but she is a union one, so as tempting as the obvious Damore comparisons get, they do have limits.
But it's still the floor, now.
As best I can tell from reading the decision the incorrect quote of Kirk didn't come up in the firing context at all. There were two posts cited to, allegedly because they disparaged white men on the basis of gender or race, but the arbitrator ruled that was not supportable by reference to the post themselves (Page 30, Section C The Record Does Not Establish That the Grievant Disparaged White Men). The posts themselves are:
As a white man myself, I don't feel disparaged by either post.
The only other basis given for the firing was the alleged security threat due to other people threatening Attiah for her posts on the topic. I generally think it would be a bad precedent to set that you can get fired because other people communicate threats against you. If people had sent threats to Google over Damore, would they have been more justified in firing him?
More generally, I think this illustrates the advantage of having a union! If there wasn't a CBA I'm skeptical Attiah would have won a more general employment discrimination lawsuit from this set of facts.
I mean, I don't feel disparaged as such, I regard this kind of thing as so infantile that it's trivially beneath my notice. Attiah is so obviously an idiot that it's a waste for me to even take offense. But this kind of rhetoric is all part of a "Radio Rwanda" dehumanization campaign. It's all rooted in extreme racism against whites. Which is why, in the first place, she can't just say "a man who espoused violence," she has to emphasize his racial identity, she has to establish that he's white: What Kind of Man Is He?!? A White Man! It's really simply plain racism. Again notice her problem with America -- it's not that America "performs care" for people "who espouse hatred and violence", the problem is that America is too nice to white men! The implication is either that she wouldn't have a problem if espousing hatred was done by non-whites, or she doesn't consider it to be a problem in the first place. (Non-whites espousing hatred and violence is just a hypothetical.)
Notably, if I said something similar it would be understood as inflammatory (in a way that doesn't even add anything worth discussing). The problem with America is its insistent on catering to black men who practice violence and hatred... see what I mean
I'm not really going to get offended by this stuff, but I do take offense. How else am I supposed to react? She clearly wants to disrespect me, that's worth less than caring what she has to think but worth more than acting as if I don't know what she's really saying.
Would you say the same to right-wingers who complain about the race and national background of criminals/suspects being left out when they belong to a left-favoured group? Because this complaint really just looks like plain old culture war stuff that both sides run on to me: make bad acts by the outgroup and good acts by the ingroup stick, but insist on individuality for the converse.
Right-wingers generally know they’re racist
Right-wingers are in fact held to such high standards that extremely careful and specific claims are treated with extreme prejudice. (See John Derbyshire being fired from his op-ed job.)
Attiah is not making a careful remark at all. She is bringing race into something that was not racial at all (a white conservative getting shot by a white man). She’s doing this so she can inflame the situation, but also because she’s extremely stupid.
Attiah wants to say this because she has animus against white people. Even a lot of right-wing commentary doesn’t pass this threshold (and a lot of it does — but you won’t see it at the Washington Post). The point is that Attiah is given a national platform to say, basically, we need to disenfranchise white people.
And, yes, of course it’s about the outgroup. It’s really simple: Attiah is saying out loud that I am in her outgroup, and she intends to be in mine. Ok then! No need to make it more complicated than that. I’m not going to go out of my way to hold her to a higher or lower standard than I hold myself, because I don’t degrade myself like that for other people, but it’s not about standards at all: she hates me no matter what standards I have.
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