The fact that racists is in quotes in the title of this post (“Why so many “racists” at Manifest?”) when there have been multiple, first-hand accounts of people experiencing/overhearing racist exchanges strikes me as wrongly dismissive, since I can only interpret the quotation marks as implying that there weren’t very many racists. (Perhaps relevantly, I have never overheard this kind of exchange at any conference I have ever attended, so the fact that multiple people are reporting these exchanges makes Manifest a big outlier in this regard, in my view.)
Nothing in the post seems to refute that the reported exchanges occurred among attendees, just that the organizers didn’t go out of their way to invite controversial/racist speakers or incite these exchanges. In other words, I think everything in the post is compatible with there having been “so many” racists at Manifest, but the quotation marks in the title seem to imply otherwise.
This isn’t so much a stylistic critique as it is a substantive one, since I think the title implies that not a lot of racist stuff went down, which feels importantly different from acknowledging that it did, but, say, disputing that the organizers caused this or suggesting that Hanania’s presence justified it.
first-hand accounts of people experiencing/overhearing racist exchanges
Sorry, I still can’t seem to find any of these, can you link me to such an account? I have seen one report that might be a second-hand account, though it could have been a non-racial slur.
The fact that racists is in quotes in the title of this post (“Why so many “racists” at Manifest?”) when there have been multiple, first-hand accounts of people experiencing/overhearing racist exchanges strikes me as wrongly dismissive, since I can only interpret the quotation marks as implying that there weren’t very many racists. (Perhaps relevantly, I have never overheard this kind of exchange at any conference I have ever attended, so the fact that multiple people are reporting these exchanges makes Manifest a big outlier in this regard, in my view.)
Nothing in the post seems to refute that the reported exchanges occurred among attendees, just that the organizers didn’t go out of their way to invite controversial/racist speakers or incite these exchanges. In other words, I think everything in the post is compatible with there having been “so many” racists at Manifest, but the quotation marks in the title seem to imply otherwise.
This isn’t so much a stylistic critique as it is a substantive one, since I think the title implies that not a lot of racist stuff went down, which feels importantly different from acknowledging that it did, but, say, disputing that the organizers caused this or suggesting that Hanania’s presence justified it.
Sorry, I still can’t seem to find any of these, can you link me to such an account? I have seen one report that might be a second-hand account, though it could have been a non-racial slur.