Opinion | Don’t Assume Ilya Shapiro’s ‘Lesser Black Woman’ Tweet Was Racist

In the same way, “lesser black woman” easily can be read as meaning that there is something about being a Black woman that is automatically lesser. We read such expressions in this way especially when there is a prompt, rooted in negative stereotypes, to link the two things. Note, by contrast, that if someone had tweeted that a man divorced and then married a “richer Black woman,” we wouldn’t read the adjective “richer” as an insult and would simply think of a woman who is both rich and Black.

I think Shapiro meant that, one, Biden would choose a Black woman and two, that because Srinivasan is — in his view — the “best” of the judges that a Democratic president would consider nominating, any other potential nominee, including any of the Black women on the president’s short list, would be less qualified than Srinivasan. I don’t think Shapiro meant to say that a Black woman would be less qualified because she is a Black woman.

I may seem to be bending over backward here, but I sincerely am not. The question is: If Shapiro had wanted to say that Black women are inherently lesser, would he actually have written it for all the world to see? This, after all, would paint him as not just obnoxious, but as someone severely socially impaired. Given how carefully policed so much of our language is these days, why would he deliberately type out a line saying, in essence, that Black women are inferior, somehow missing that this would likely put his new job in jeopardy and draw a wave of social opprobrium?

To assume Shapiro would baldly, publicly assert this manifests the tendency to assume malevolence in those we disagree with, a means of dehumanizing people perceived as being on other side of an unbridgeable divide. I find the idea of him writing “lesser black woman” in the meaning of “Black women are lesser” psychologically implausible. Shapiro is by all indications intelligent; writing “lesser” and intending it as a blanket judgment would be stupid.

Rather, Shapiro screwed up. He phrased something unartfully. He has apologized for it (even if another tweet he sent Wednesday seemed somewhat less contrite), and yet is still being re-evaluated by his new employer.

Which brings us to the second reason he shouldn’t be suspended. A few years ago, Georgetown professor C. Christine Fair tweeted that some of those who defended then-judge, now Justice Brett Kavanaugh against accusations of past sexual misconduct were a “chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement,” and that “All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”

Georgetown responded with a statement that read, in part: “The views faculty members expressed in their private capacities are their own and not the views of the university. Our policy does not prohibit speech based on the person presenting ideas or the content of those ideas even when those ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable.” Fair remained in her job.