A sane response to a crazy accusation
I have written an entry in response to an old, dusty accusation from five months ago, when I had been participating in blogs for one week. However, my archives are so unreliable I have not been able to retrieve it. So, a brief summary of the most pertinent part of that entry and an update.
The allegation of an attack on Sharansky's wife? To anyone who has actually read the conversation, which started when Sharansky attacked Oliver Willis for saying blogging needs to be more diverse, the little snippet Natasha C. went to a Gene Expression site, copied and posted to her blog is taken completely out of context. Sharansky trotted out his wife to prove that his often bigoted remarks don't mean he has a problem with race. I responded that he was treating her like property, similar to what owners of slaves had done. You know, 'See, I have a loyal colored person of my own right here.' What he was doing was even more offensive because it was also treating females as property. If the woman had been white, I might have asked Sharansky (who more recently called a white teacher heroic for abusing black students by calling them niggers) if they had 'master' and 'slave' tee-shirts. Snarky, but it gets the point across.
After a couple of back-and-forths, I made the remark about ordering her to emphasize he was treating her as property. Obviously, since Natasha C. and Gene Expression were able to mangle the brief excerpt into something it is not, it would be better if I hadn't said it that way. However, to call that some kind of monstrous attack on Asians is ludicrous. I have written about injustices against Asian-Americans just like I do about other persons of color. In fact, I was the first blogger to say Katrina Leung should not be treated worse than her fellow espionage defendants because she is Chinese-American. Other blogs picked up their interest in the case from me. (Leung is still being discriminated against -- made the scapegoat for both her involvement and the others'.)
When I see a snippet of 'information' being used as an argument against anyone in any context, I ask: Where is the rest of it? I wish more people would do the same.
