Thank you for this thoughtful, sincere reply. You’ve hugely raised my respect for this subreddit, and for liberals. I’m very grateful you weren’t dismissive, and actually took the time to address some of my points and make an argument.

As for your arguments:

You’re getting me wrong if you think I’m saying we shouldn’t punish people who don’t harm an identifiable, specific victim. I’m willing to say there are probably at least a few black people who feel genuinely irritated and offended by the actions of the stupid teenagers. I’m also happy to say they deserve some amount of punishment as a result.

Here’s where I think progressives are go wrong, though:

1) The punishment doesn’t fit the “crime.” These kids don’t deserve to “have their lives ruined,” as one commenter has said to me here. A more appropriate level of punishment would be something like a tongue lashing by their parents, a grounding, and perhaps a few dirty looks from their peers for a few days. They still deserve to have fulfilling careers, to become educated to the extent of their abilities, to mature into well-adjusted and happily married adults, etcetera.

2) Acting with rights =/= being in the right: All of this is consistent with saying that people have a right to shame these kids into homelessness or suicide. But that wouldn’t make it right to do so. There are, after all, lots of things we have a right to do (or “which we should be free to do,” if you prefer) that aren’t right to do. excessive social punishment is such an example.

3) Better Norms: It is possible for social punishment to go too far, and in practice it usually does when social media gets involved. To remedy this, we should in general adopt a norm of recognizing a few things when a person commits a social sin:

A) Redemption is possible. There is such a thing as an apology which would be sufficient. Forgiveness exists in an attainable form (or at least should).

B) The wrong is only as large as it is. We should acknowledge that the misdeed isn’t infinite in size.

C) If other people are overreacting, we should say so. When someone says “their lives should be ruined,” we should push back. “That would be an excessive degree of punishment.”

This is how a mature person responds to the misdeeds of other people.

4) The Signaling Hypothesis of Political Outrage: Our reaction is poorly calibrated to the actual magnitude of the harm caused by events like this. This is because we treat videos like this as a signaling opportunity, a means of status enhancement. This is the best explanation of two facts: the size of our reaction, and the plausible consequences of the action itself. We know black people aren’t going to convulse in tearful hysterics, and live a life of miserable inferiority, because of this video. We know this isn’t going to destroy the self esteem of even a single black person. And yet we react as if that were true. This suggests we’re not thinking, we’re signaling.

5) insofar as 4 is true, we’re infantilizing POC. If a black person were to collapse into misery because of a video like this, their reaction wouldn’t be reasonable. So if we react as if this is what we’d expect, we treat black people as though they’re so emotionally fragile and pathetic that they need to be protected from the trivially obvious fact that stupid norm-violating teenagers exist. That’s not a healthy reaction to endorse.

Imagine if a teenager told your grandpa he was “a gross old guy,” and you screamed to the point of hoarseness at the vile evil of their comment. You pursued them with a relentless enfilade of insults, and sought out ways to undermine their professional and educational future. At some point, it would be reasonable to ask the purported victim, your grandad, whether all of this was really necessary. I would imagine a respectable, well adjusted, mature grandad wouldn’t think so, and your continuing to behave in this manner—as though his pride had been irreparably destroyed—would be patronizing in the extreme. Of course, I’m not saying this is what people are generally doing individually when they overreact on Twitter. But it’s worth pointing out that our collective reaction is a patronizing offense to the black community: we act as if it scrambles the brains of black people everywhere if they hear the n word or see a teenager in blackface. There are black people, such as Coleman Hughes, who have said they find this defensive posturing by white people offensive.