“The New York Times..forced out its lead pandemic reporter, 45-year* newsroom veteran Donald McNeil Jr., because the Grey Lady’s management, under public pressure from more than 150 employees, decided that when it comes to speaking certain radioactive words, not only does intent not matter, any utterance is potentially a one-strike offense.
“We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joe Kahn explained bluntly in a memo Friday.
McNeil, 67, went as a representative of the Times on a 2019 trip with American high school students in Peru. There, according to his farewell note to colleagues—which, tellingly, was the first time the context of his career-ending comments had ever been reported during the 8-day life cycle of this journalism-world controversy—McNeil “was asked at dinner by a student whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur. To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself.”
After receiving complaints back then from at least six parents or students—one of whom said “He was a racist….He used the ‘N’ word, said horrible things about black teenagers, and said white supremacy doesn’t exist”—the Times “conducted a thorough investigation and disciplined Donald for statements and language that had been inappropriate and inconsistent with our values,” according to a company statement January 28. “We found he had used bad judgment by repeating a racist slur in the context of a conversation about racist language.”
Added Baquet in an internal memo: “During the trip, he made offensive remarks, including repeating a racist word in the context of discussing an incident that involved racist language. When I first heard the story, I was outraged and expected I would fire him. I authorized an investigation and concluded his remarks were offensive and that he showed extremely poor judgment, but that it did not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious. I believe that in such cases people should be told they were wrong and given another chance.”
That’s what Baquet believed last week, anyway.
This week, the newsroom revolted via a remarkable group letter in which more than 150 staffers at one of the country’s leading newspapers argued that word-choice intentions are “irrelevant,” because “what matters is how an act makes the victims feel.” Signees, declaring themselves “outraged and in pain” and “disrespected,” demanded a reinvestigation of the 2019 incident, an apology to the newsroom, and an organizational study into how racial biases affect editorial decisions. They also alleged that the controversy had surfaced new internal complaints about McNeil demonstrating “bias against people of color in his work and in interactions with colleagues over a period of years.””
“For a good chunk of the 20th century, American towns offered grand community swimming pools as symbols of leisure and civic pride. They were testaments to public investment.
But then desegregation happened and the pools had to be integrated. Rather than open them up to everyone, town after town simply shut them down. And not only did they close the pools, they nuked their parks departments and effectively abandoned public investment altogether. So in the end, Black Americans didn’t get to enjoy the pools, but neither did white people who were motivated by self-destructive racial ideologies.
This, McGhee argues, is the story of American politics in microcosm. The entire country is now one giant drained pool. Too many Americans have too easily accepted the lie animating so much of our history, namely that politics is a zero-sum contest in which one group’s gain must be another group’s loss.”
“Consider the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act, a $5 billion monstrosity that Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock snuck into the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. The bill aims to provide payments to “Black farmers, Indigenous farmers, and farmers of color.” It includes $1 billion to address “systemic racism” at the Department of Agriculture.
The bill never says explicitly that blacks, Native Americans, or farmers who are immigrants from Latin America or their descendants should receive benefits; instead, it uses the term “socially disadvantaged famers.” For example, it instructs the secretary of agriculture to “forgive the obligation of each socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher who is a borrower of a farm loan made by the Secretary to repay the principal and interest outstanding as of the date of enactment of this Act on the farm loan.”
Warnock’s bill explains that “the term ‘socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher’ has the meaning given the term in 19 section 2501(a) of the Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 1990.” As that law explains, “The term ‘socially disadvantaged group’ means a group whose members have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities.” Department of Agriculture regulations also “define socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers as belonging to the following groups: American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Asians, Blacks or African Americans, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, and women.”
In other words, membership in any of these racial, ethnic, or gender categories automatically entitles a farmer to benefits, “without regard to individual qualities.” As University of Maryland professor George La Noue has written, “social disadvantage is, as a practical matter, established at birth, and cannot be challenged by evidence of a successful life.” These are the makings of a rigid caste system in America.”
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“These and other bills in the works create entitlements based on race or ethnicity, not need. If the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, were to turn part of her California estate into farmland, she, too, would get federal money, as could former President Barack Obama, NBA legend Michael Jordan, and Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. It is that absurd.”
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“All of this is likely unconstitutional, violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, as well Titles VI and VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
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“Will the courts strike down these laws? Or will they use them to build on the illegitimate new “constitution” of racial preferences? We will see.”
“The four executive orders President Joe Biden signed on Tuesday on advancing racial equity marked the new administration’s first major address of systemic racism. They signal that Biden plans to attack the problem with sweeping policy changes mandating cooperation across multiple federal agencies — a bold departure from previous administrations which rarely tackled racial inequities head-on.
The executive orders direct the Department of Housing and Urban Development to dismantle Trump-era housing discrimination policies, end the Department of Justice’s contracts with private prisons, reestablish tribal sovereignty and combat xenophobia against Asian Americans, which is on the rise since the start of the pandemic. It’s the latest round in a series of swift, aggressive actions undertaken by the president since he took office last week.”
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“Biden administration officials say the executive orders are but one of several steps the president plans to take to battle racial disparities. It’s why both Biden and racial justice advocates demanding change view the executives orders the same way: as a good first step.”
“This is not the first time that a group of Americans decided that winning an election was more important than maintaining a democracy. In fact, it’s because of those other examples that we know which sociopolitical trends to beware of.
On Nov. 10, 1898, following a municipal election that had installed an integrated city council, white elites from the city of Wilmington, North Carolina mobilized a mob that burned down the town’s Black newspaper, killed hundreds of Black residents and forced the newly elected council members to resign at gunpoint. It was a riot, organized and planned in advance, and aided by people in charge of the government so they could stay in power — pesky electoral outcomes be damned.”
“the whiteness of the insurrectionists acted as a shield — protecting them from being seen as a threat before, and while, they stormed the Capitol. For activists who endured violence at the hands of police when they were merely asking for them to stop executing Black people, this inequity is why they protested in the first place.”
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“As I reported in September, research from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project found that out of 7,750 Black Lives Matter protests across 2,400 locations across the country, 93 percent of them were peaceful — yet images of burning and headlines of looting were plentiful, with the president referring to the protesters as “thugs.”
New research from the organization compares the difference in law enforcement response between left-wing protests (anti-Trump, pro-Biden, Count Every Vote, Black Lives Matter, Abolish ICE) and right-wing protests (pro-Trump, anti-Biden, Back the Blue, QAnon, Stop the Steal, etc.), finding that law enforcement was more than twice as likely to use force against liberal demonstrations between May and November.”
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“What’s evident is that the organizers of Wednesday’s rallies were not taken seriously, as white extremists are often infantilized and given room to work out their feelings and blow off steam. We are told we need to listen to them, to try to understand their plight and psychology.”
“In 2016, white voters propelled Trump to the presidency, with 54 percent voting for him and 39 percent voting for Hillary Clinton, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center study. And though the end result might be different in 2020 — exit polls are by no means comprehensive or exact — early evidence shows that white people’s voting patterns look much the same: 57 percent of this group voted to reelect the president while 42 percent voted for Democratic challenger Joe Biden, according to Edison Research’s exit polls of 15,590 voters conducted outside their polling places, at early voting sites, or by phone. That makes white people the only racial group in which a majority voted for Trump”
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“Trump appears to have gained about 3 percentage points each with Black, Latinx, and Asian American voters since 2016 (exit polls appear not to have broken out Indigenous voters, instead lumping them into the category of “other”). And pointing out that none of these groups are monolithic is an important corrective to the inaccurate idea that “people of color” are homogenous or always vote as a bloc.”
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“the majority of white Americans voted for Trump, even after a recession and a botched response to a pandemic that has left more than 200,000 dead.”
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“The focus on voters of color started on election night. Trump took Florida, one of the first states to be called, creating the impression among many liberals that Biden was on the edge of losing. Many were looking for answers, and one that got a lot of attention was the fact that Biden had underperformed Hillary Clinton in Miami-Dade County, home to many Cuban-American voters.
In the last two days, we’ve seen numerous examinations of what happened in Miami-Dade, as well as lots of focus on Trump’s gains among Black men nationwide. The fact that Trump appears to have picked up votes since 2016 with every racial group except white men also got a lot of attention (though what appears to be a small gain among white women has been less remarked upon).”
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“But an increasingly clear picture is also emerging of Black voters in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania helping push Biden to victory — and of Latinx and Indigenous voters in Arizona and elsewhere making a big difference as well. And while much attention has been paid to the minorities of voters of color who cast their ballots for Trump, there’s been less acknowledgment that according to exit polls, the majority of those voters — 87 percent of Black voters, 66 percent of Latinx voters, and 63 percent of Asian American voters — chose Biden.”
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“Despite his gains among voters of color, Trump’s base has always been white people. That didn’t change in 2020, when a majority of white voters backed him. And since white voters comprise the majority of the electorate — 65 percent according to Edison Research — they make up by far the largest bloc to support him. Black and Latinx voters, meanwhile, make up 12 and 13 percent, respectively.”
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“Trump actually lost some ground with white men in 2020 relative to 2016. However, he still captured a majority, with 58 percent of this group voting for him compared with 40 percent for Biden.”
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“white youth were the likeliest to support Trump, with 43 percent of white voters between ages 18 and 29 voting for Trump, according to exit poll data analyzed by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. By comparison, just 9 percent of young Black voters, 13 percent of young Asian voters, and 21 percent of young Latino voters backed Trump.”
“In the middle of a pandemic that has killed roughly 1 in every 1,020 Black Americans — a disproportionate death toll likely to worsen as coronavirus cases spike in much of the country — it’s not just lives that are being imperiled. Racial wealth gaps are worsening, and progress towards economic equity is being undone.”
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““When the pandemic translates into a disproportionate burden on low-wealth households, that is correlated with race,” says Jones. “The median wealth of white households is between 9 and 10 times as much as the median black household. And during this pandemic, the people with the lowest level of the wealth don’t have the emergency savings to hold themselves over.”
At the same time, Black and Latino workers are more likely to have “frontline” jobs that put them at heightened risk of Covid infection. For many, it’s a bind: You have less of a financial cushion to fall back on and need the work. But the job itself puts you at heightened risk of Covid infection, your health insurance is generally tied to your job, and if you lose it and catch Covid, you face potential financial ruin. Even when the pandemic ends, Jones expects that Black and Latino households will be “worse off, relative to white households, than when it began.””
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“For years, workers have had a continually eroding level of leverage in the workplace. The ways companies have redefined labor as “external contractors” basically causes more and more people to not be covered by workplace protections. During this pandemic, those people couldn’t get unemployment insurance at all. It’s indicative of a larger problem: The labor market is being reoriented in a way where workers have less and less power. One reason that’s important is that if you don’t have a lot of say, you’re going to be stuck between a rock and a hard place: forced to either not work, or to go to work under far less-than-ideal circumstances in terms of protections from Covid infection and other health problems. Do they have the right protective equipment? Do they have sick leave? Probably not.
Related to health care, we have health insurance driven by where you’re employed. During a time like this — a pandemic with acute and chronic health implications and high rates of unemployment — going in and out of access to health care is particularly devastating. In the long run, we need some form of universal health care access to offset this problem of people losing their access to health care if they lose their jobs.”
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” We found that people are sensitive to changes in their paychecks from month to month, and that’s particularly true for Black and Latinx households and households with a low level of liquid assets. What I mean by liquid assets are savings and other assets that are either cash or which can be quickly converted into cash — so your bank account, your savings account, and some investments you can quickly cash out. The households with the lowest level of liquid assets had the most vulnerability. When there were changes in their income, they had to make bigger adjustments, or adjustments that were going to be more painful. Relative to white households, Black and Latino households were more sensitive to those fluctuations, and that seems to be a result of the fact those households generally have less in terms of liquid assets, which is related to broader racial wealth gaps driven by a number of factors”
“As to why the Trump administration is suddenly up in arms about racial bias training and critical race theory — a framework that’s existed for about 40 years — the OMB memo cites press reports as factors in Trump’s decision. In July, Fox News began airing segments featuring conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo, who in mid-August told Tucker Carlson that he was “declaring a one-man war against critical race theory in the federal government, and I’m not going to stop these investigations until we can abolish it within our public institutions.” He tweeted on August 20, “My goal is simple: to persuade the President of the United States to issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory in the federal government.”
Rufo appeared on Carlson’s show once more on September 2, just two days before the memo’s release. Conservative media celebrated the document as a win; in response to a Breitbart article about the memo, Trump tweeted on September 5: “This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!””
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“critical race theory rejects the belief that “what’s in the past is in the past” and that the best way to get beyond race is to stop talking about it. Instead, America must reckon with how its values and institutions feed into racism.
Critical race theory was also a lens through which these legal scholars could analyze policies and the law, accepting that “racism has contributed to all contemporary manifestations of group advantage and disadvantage along racial lines,” like differences in income, incarceration rates, health outcomes, housing, educational opportunities, political representation, and military service. The ultimate goal was to eliminate racial oppression as part of the broader mission of ending all kinds of oppression — including that based on class or sexual orientation. According to the authors, it’s not enough to just make adjustments within established hierarchies; it’s necessary to challenge the hierarchies themselves.”
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“According to Crenshaw, at the foundation of many of these theories is a psychological insecurity on the part of white people who fear their racial status is being threatened. Historically, the tendency has been for white people to align with whiteness, even across class lines, Crenshaw noted. “What remains to be seen is whether the resistance to it is nearly as powerful as the tendency toward it.”
Trump drove the tendency home in his address at the White House Conference on American History, acknowledging that he plans to take this fight beyond federal contractors and into America’s schools with an executive order that bolsters “patriotic education.”
“Critical race theory is being forced into our children’s schools, it’s being imposed into workplace trainings, and it’s being deployed to rip apart friends, neighbors, and families,” Trump said. “Teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.”
Trump wants his critics to accept the status quo — that we already live in a fair and just America — Crenshaw said. Yet critical race theory remains relevant as people in cities and small towns across the country lead ongoing protests for Black lives following the death of George Floyd in late May. Americans and organizations have pledged to become anti-racist, to actively recognize how silence or inaction amounts to complicity. Activists are also pushing for anti-racist education in schools and anti-racism trainings in workplaces”