Key Words: Positive Discrimination — Another Way To Say Affirmative Action — Even Makes Victims Of White Guys: Noah Rothman

“Positively discriminating,” alternative phrasing for affirmative action, really only fosters “negatively discriminating,” even against those traditionally in power, conservative MSNBC contributor Noah Rothman, who’s pushing a new book on race (and gender) this week, said Thursday.

Fellow panelists on the “Morning Joe” program, some of whom had read the Rothman book, others who had not, found this between the lines: White guys now get the shaft, intentionally or not. And doesn’t that hurt everyone?

Rothman may have been pushing individuality and arguing that affirmative action strips away individual merit that risks keeping “victims” perpetually victimized, but it’s that viewpoint that fellow panelists and social media jumped all over: Rothman is writing about individuality from a position of privilege that affords him the luxury of thinking about individuality.

Rothman, the associate editor of Commentary magazine and a regular on the “Morning Joe” program, is promoting his book, “Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America,” released this week. He tweeted a video of the 30-minute television segment — eons in screen time and an exchange that instantly kicked up a Twitter barrage. Yes, from both sides. Rothman himself was encouraged by the level of debate, which included Anand Giridharadas, Reihan Salam, Holly Harris and Tiffany Cross.

According to Rothman, social justice, and one of its byproducts, affirmative action, is “a philosophy that views not individuals as individuals, but as people who inhabit tribes who inhabit a matrix of persecution in which they might not even be aware of it, but this is a very powerful philosophy taught mostly on campuses, embraced by things like the women’s movement, exemplified by things like intersectionality, which demonstrate, for individuals who may not be aware, that they have varying degrees of prejudice that they either suffer from or benefit from, and that is a sort of philosophy that I think is toxic because it makes you think of yourself and the people around you as not master of your own destiny.”

Cross, co-founder of political platform The Beat DC, had a response: “Many people are not master of their own destiny. I think it’s an accurate philosophy. With respect, I think your outlook on this is a bit myopic and based solely on your experience, and doesn’t extend the intellectual debate with people who haven’t had your history.”

She agreed that many white people lived in poverty, but said, “...I think the reasons why they’re socially and economically disadvantaged are very different from the reasons why some communities of color are disadvantaged, and think it’s really dangerous to look at the current state this country without looking at it through the context of historical systems that put those people in that position.”

“You call that victimization, but I call that reality for a lot of people,” she added.

Princeton University African-American studies professor and “Morning Joe” regular Eddie Glaude Jr. missed the panel so weighed in on social media, stressing in particular his charge that Rothman wrongly “tethers social justice to grievance and revenge” and rejecting the overall premise that identity politics — the idea that race or gender shape a view as much or more than other status measures — has imperiled political idealism in the U.S.

Rothman took a jab, not at Glaude but at Twitter in general, telling syndicated conservative commentator Ben Shapiro — who tweeted that the Left finds any Conservative “evil” no matter how nuanced the argument — that counter arguers in the television debate were amenable. “Twitter TWTR, +3.84%   reinforces our worst impulses. The real world is more navigable,” Rothman said.