"To be clear, Sacco's tweet was racist, ignorant and unacceptable. Her cavalier disregard for the global impact of AIDS was offensive. In that regard, it was heartening to see that someone purchased the domain www.justinesacco.com and redirected it to Aid for Africa so that some good might come out of such a crass and careless remark. Justine Sacco's actions should not have gone without consequences. In her case, though, the consequences were severe and swift. She made a cheap joke and paid a steep price. She has since apologized, though it is hard to take the apology seriously because we have become so accustomed to this cycle of public misstep, castigation, apology. Nothing really changes.
We can excoriate Justine Sacco but we need to interrogate white privilege and the relative comfort Sacco felt in demonstrating such poor judgment. It seemingly did not cross her mind that it would be inappropriate to make that joke in such a public forum. We also need interrogate the corporate culture where an attitude like Sacco's was clearly not a deterrent to her success. As Anil Dash noted on Twitter, "That @Justine Sacco is offensive is obvious. The bigger problem is that her mindset is no barrier to corporate success."
At the same time, we are only outraged about Justine Sacco because we happened to hear about her tweet. She was, before this debacle, someone with only two hundred Twitter followers. She made her comments in public, but her public was quite limited. If someone hadn't tipped off Gawker, if thousands of people hadn't shared Sacco's tweet, if Buzzfeed hadn't latched onto the story, making it go ever more viral, we would have never known about Sacco's racism and ignorance. This does not excuse her words, but is Justine Sacco different from any of us? We like to think the best of ourselves. We like to believe we always say and do the right things. We like to believe our humor is always politic. We like to believe we harbor no prejudices. At least, that's the impression we give when we are so quick to condemn those whose weaknesses and failures are subjected to the harsh light of the Internet."
- Ikhide
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