So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She had, after all, been in the middle of a tech conference with eight hundred bystanders. “Sure,” Adria replied. “And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.” This seemed a weak gambit. Men can sometimes be correct. There is some Latin for this kind of logical fallacy. It’s called an ad hominem attack. When someone can’t defend a criticism against them, they change the subject by attacking the criticizer. “Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,” I said. “I know you didn’t call for him to be fired. But you must have felt pretty bad.” “Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him but it only goes so far. If he had Down syndrome and he accidentally pushed someone off a subway that would be different. . . . I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes I did.”