So AsianWeek has fired Kenneth Eng. For those of you who haven't heard about this, the SF-based weekly paper for the Asian-American community had a columnist, Eng. His latest column, and the one that caused the stir, was a piece called "Why I Hate Blacks," and reading it (if you can find it; it's no longer on AsianWeek's site) you can see why it had everyone up in arms. AsianWeek professes to be shocked, shocked to find that there was racism going on in their pages.
Um, disingenuous. This wasn't Eng's first and only hate-based column. Hate seems to have been his stock in trade: look at articles like "Why I Hate Asians" and the equally cheery "Proof That Whites Inherently Hate Us." It's not like after several months of writing Heartwarming Stories About Heroic Collies he suddenly broke out in oozing sores on the pages of the paper.
For my money Eng's not a particularly good writer, and his arguments are based on sweeping stereotypes and it-happened-to-me-once-so-it-must-be-universal leaps. He bills himself as "God of the Universe." Does this sort of thing sound familiar to you? 'Cause as a veteran of GEnie and a decade of wandering the internet, I recognize his type immediately. He's a Troll. He's the sort of do-not-engage-the-Energy-Monster attention sink whose real currency is chaos. If he'd shown up on Making Light he'd have been disemvowelled within a nanosecond. Next time I read an article in the print media decrying the lowering of standards that bloggers represent, my first thought is going to be that these print media types should spend a little more time online and learn to tell the Trolls from the writers with legitimate dissenting views.
Oh, and Eng is also a science fiction writer. Which is depressing, but somehow (to one who reads the letter columns of the SFWA Forum) not surprising.
Um, disingenuous. This wasn't Eng's first and only hate-based column. Hate seems to have been his stock in trade: look at articles like "Why I Hate Asians" and the equally cheery "Proof That Whites Inherently Hate Us." It's not like after several months of writing Heartwarming Stories About Heroic Collies he suddenly broke out in oozing sores on the pages of the paper.
For my money Eng's not a particularly good writer, and his arguments are based on sweeping stereotypes and it-happened-to-me-once-so-it-must-be-universal leaps. He bills himself as "God of the Universe." Does this sort of thing sound familiar to you? 'Cause as a veteran of GEnie and a decade of wandering the internet, I recognize his type immediately. He's a Troll. He's the sort of do-not-engage-the-Energy-Monster attention sink whose real currency is chaos. If he'd shown up on Making Light he'd have been disemvowelled within a nanosecond. Next time I read an article in the print media decrying the lowering of standards that bloggers represent, my first thought is going to be that these print media types should spend a little more time online and learn to tell the Trolls from the writers with legitimate dissenting views.
Oh, and Eng is also a science fiction writer. Which is depressing, but somehow (to one who reads the letter columns of the SFWA Forum) not surprising.