"We’ve seen incidents like this before—Gamergate and the spate of hacked nude photos of celebrities that made the rounds a few years ago come immediately to mind—but something about the attack on Jones seems to be both reaching new levels of online aggression and echoing deep-seated, centuries-old criticisms against black women. It’s an example of the worst kind of backlash, as it represents how people respond when their supremacy is supposedly under threat, writes Mark Shrayber: “Make no mistake: What happened to Jones wasn’t ‘trolling.’ It was a hate crime.”...
Jones is also alone—or at least that’s the perception—which makes her especially vulnerable to attack. While there are myriad talented, smart, funny black women in Hollywood, how many of them do we see on a daily basis? Whatever the number, it’s not nearly enough to counter the image of Leslie Jones as an exception rather than a rule. Uniqueness is not a fault; however, it is a slippery slope on the road to tokenism...
Until there’s more than one black character thrown in “for good measure,” we’re not going to see contempt of the likes Jones is experience go away anytime soon."
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