When I read the post in question I have to admit I didn’t even notice the hashtag or at least not consciously. However I can totally understand why it might jump out at people and they might be offended by it. At the end of the day, it’s their website they can do what they want, but changing a hashtag would seem to be a very small and easily fixable item. I have a hard time understanding why so many (reasonable) complaints were just glossed over.
I can think of one of the possible explanations. For many people, being accused of racism is taken as an affront, like a personal attack, akin to calling them “a bad person”. The logic goes more or less like this: racism is bad; racists are bad people; I am not a bad person so I cannot possibly be a racist. In their minds, there is nothing to examine, no privilege to question, no attitude to evaluate because they are not “one of those people”. So, instead of apologizing for the mistake, changing the hashtag and taking the whole matter as an opportunity to learn something, they become even more determined in negating any wrong doing. I strongly suspect that some such mechanism is at play in many of Jezebel mistakes in racial matters.
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