An End to Soul

 

Back in the day a slow coastal freighter carried me from the border of Panama to Colombia’s main Pacific port, Buenaventura. 

The Pacific side of Colombia is, basically, the hood—it’s the Afro part of the Andean country where generations of slaves escaped from the Spanish and took refuge in the forests and swamps and eventually built towns and cities like Buenaventura itself. That small freighter down the coast was like the boats that the U.S. military has been attacking recently, actually, for alleged involvement in the drug traffic. We won’t get into that here although it seems a lot like murder to me. 

These vessels also carry passengers from Colombia’s largely-roadless Chocó Province, that borders Panama, to the more-populated south of the country and even as far as Ecuador. For a few years personal business kept me coming and going along that route and—not liking airplanes but loving the sea—a slow boat to Buenaventura seemed to be the best way to travel. So, like, once there was this brother on board with me who was also headed from rural Chocó to the big city, apparently to a party or a dance. In order, you know, to boogie down if one uses the vernacular. 

Passenger accommodations were a single large room with bunk beds—it cost $60 for the twenty hour trip south—and during the night, every time my eyes opened, due to music at 2 a.m., music at 3 a.m. or even 4 a.m., this particular Negro traveling to Buenaventura was in the middle of the floor practicing the same dance move. Where he went from doing one thing with his quite athletic-looking body to doing something else? Not an entire dance, like to a particular song, but just a move that would take less than five seconds to execute and would doubtless appear completely effortless in a club but had actually been practiced up the ass, for hours on end. With me as an unwilling witness. 

Anyway, this anecdote tells you everything you need to know about black people’s “natural rhythm” that white people have commented on for hundreds of years. There is nothing natural about it. Our legendary skill on the dance floor doesn’t come from genes. It comes from practice. And the bad news? It’s disappearing. 

Back in the day during my Black Childhood in America which lasted, oh, from the 1960s to the 1970s, one of the worst things you would hear African Americans say about white people—a really vile insult—was that Caucasians are lame. Which meant they can’t dance. Which was a big deal, to peeps of color at least, that you were reminded of every time you watched American Bandstand on TV. American Bandstand was, fyi, white people’s weekly music and dance show, with live acts performing the latest singles, and it could be pretty scary, actually. Watching white young people dance, that is, could be scary—that anyone could be that stiff and out of tune—like 99.999% of the Bandstand dancers were? And still are, mostly, white people that is, lame. But, and unfortunately, increasingly, so are black people. 

Are white people really constitutionally unable to move their limbs in tune to a beat? Not to be racist or anything—but that is the question we will address here. Not because it’s critically important but because of how the answer relates to black people’s dance skills, which are important. Let’s consider who can boogie down and who can’t but instead of relying on old tropes, like natural rhythm, we can instead turn to science—kinesiology, actually. One hint: It’s not about having ancestors going back generations who boogied down around the village fire at night, while hunting gazelle during the day. It’s actually about practice. That would be my whole hypothesis, really. It’s about who puts in the time on the dance floor and who does not. White people are not lame, as one likes to say using the black argot, because they lack natural rhythm but because they are not as experienced in the medium, whatever the medium is/was. Because they didn’t do the due diligence, so to to speak. 

The great Miles Davis, king of the blues, was once asked about white people’s inability to keep time and his answer was that Caucasians always seemed to be a step or two behind the beat. Davis was then asked if black people’s ability to stay with a tune had something to do with the lingering effects of discrimination and Miles, you could tell, thought the white guy asking the questions was crazy. But suppose he wasn’t?

Let’s start with a few foundational principles. One is that white guys are worse dancers than white chicks. It has something to do with a leg. Not both legs but a single leg. And sometimes a head. 

Elvis Presley was a wonderful performer (who among many other white artists ripped off black music) and his rendition of “Return to Sender” in one of his movies features an errant leg, perhaps he was keeping time but to what song is unclear because it wasn’t the one he was singing. The movement looks more like a nervous ailment. And in his official video of “I Shot the Sheriff,” Eric Clapton (another white guy who has made a good living doing black music) does better with his leg—he’s clearly keeping time—but he has the benefit of a black guitarist and a black backup singer to keep him in tune. But from there the Clapton video gets scary. The camera pans to a white guy (the one with a hat, if you’re following along) in the crowd, busy nodding his head to some song other than the one playing, and then pans to a member of the Rolling Stones (another group that benefitted greatly from black music) also in the crowd and he’s just as clueless in his movements. It may have been difficult for Caucasians because both songs, “Return to Sender” and “I Shot the Sheriff” were by black songwriters but if we reject the “natural rhythm” hypothesis, for songwriting or dance, there has to be another reason. For example in the Clapton video the song may have been “I Shot the Sheriff” but the audience footage may have been from another part of the Clapton set, another song, and was just used for the vid. It’s happened before, certainly.

You never got mistakes like that with Soul Train, by the way, which was the black version of American Bandstand. The dancing was in tune to the music, and more. For a couple of generations, Soul Train was the apotheosis (the peak, you feel me) of African American cultural life which meant African American life, in general, because we were mostly about music and sports. That was all there was. It was there, on dance stage at Soul Train, which in my family like most other black households we rose to without fail every Saturday morning, that the myth of natural rhythm was reinforced. Whites talk about life being “a marathon not a sprint” but black life at the time, in the United States, was a rhythm, because your movement didn’t mean progress, because you didn’t really move forward.

While black people had more time on our hands, historically, because we may not have been employed, and because we were restricted from entering certain endeavors, notably anything that was not music or athletics or domestic service. So, like that’s where our efforts at self-expression tended to be directed, entertainment or sports, while whites did not live in a segregated world. They could spend their time doing what they wanted to do and that was not restricted to music/athletics. This isn’t rocket science, bro. This is the research thread were pulling here.

And this has an analogy in the Asian argument against affirmative action in college admissions, actually, made before the Supreme Court a year or two ago. The Chinese argument is that they have put in the time and gotten the grades. They've practiced. And isn’t that a critique of African Americans, in many of the areas of endeavor where Asians/Caucasians have said that we traditionally do poorly? Hello! The Chinese are not good at academics because of their physiology, or their cerebrums, one assumes, but because they burn the midnight oil on differential equations. That may be a lesson for black people too. In fact a lot of black people have begun to burn this midnight oil on differential equations too, as disappointing as that may be tour dance skills. The result has been less time boogieing down, that would be my whole argument, actually. 

        Black medical school admissions are down recently, after the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, but are still light years ahead of what they were in past decades. African-Americans have through recent decades, as segregation has lessened and other opportunities beckoned, found a lot of other fish to fry than being able to look cool on a dance floor, which was inordinately important at one time but today is of less dire consequence. In fact, if one graphs out the numbers, there is a perfect inverse relationship between the rise of African Americans in professional positions and decreasing ability on the dance floor. It’s quite shocking, really.

The only area of dance where black people have maintained our game, it would be my contention, is the horizontal variety. In fact there is a very common belief, held by members of the black intelligentsia, that white women and Chinese chicks and even Indian girls are practically begging black guys to show them how that particular rhythmic movement is done right, in a horizontal plane, because their own boyfriends are too busy coding or writing algorithms to learn the necessary skills. Does that make sense? Which takes black men away from our own time with differential equations but black guys are too polite and feel too much sympathy for these women, who have never been sexually fulfilled, to say no. Dance moves have an analogy, then, to moves/ability in the boudoir although, luckily, African American men, although willing to let their dance floor moves deteriorate, have resolutely been unwilling to let slide our horizontal game in bed. If that day ever comes, however, we may see the end of the black race. 

Not to be alarmist or anything. 

This may sound like sacrilege but the end of black dance hegemony was the mid-1970s, not during the 2000s as the N.Y. Times ( aka the White Lady) recently claimed. Specifically, the three important years were 1975, 1976 and ’77. We’ll start with 1977 but the first question to ask is do you know your Civil War history? Because the War Between the States has an analogue in the War Between the Races, so to speak, the Pennsylvania battlefield versus the dance floor. 

Have you heard of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg? 

It was a great failure for the Rebel Army and is called the high water mark of the Confederacy for good reason, because after that it was all downhill—not in a good way—for the Southern states. The Confederates had been punching well above their weight and had the Union on the ropes until that afternoon. Something similar happened in American dance on a Saturday morning in 1977, on a sound stage in Los Angeles, which was the high water mark for black people shaking their booties and boogieing down. 

That was when Marvin Gaye appeared on Soul Train to perform his hit “Got to Give it Up,” specifically “Got to Give It Up (Part 2).” It was all downhill after that, and again not in a good way. We’re not talking about Beyoncé here, you’ve noticed, and her intricately-choreographed moves, because like the brother on the Colombian freighter the whole idea on a black dance floor is to look cool and natural doing it, which Queen B, no matter her mastery of the routine, does not. In fact, like ballet, there’s nothing natural about dance when it’s Queen B. Instead in the case of Soul Train—except for the performers, who may have been more Beyoncé-like, with intricately-planned routines, and were very often not really singing but lip-synching? The Soul Train dancers on the other hand were otherwise ordinary black people who had normal low-paying jobs and practiced their moves at basement parties at night during the week and for whom getting down on Saturday, on camera, was not a pleasant pastime but a raison d’être. Which means “reason for being” in French, not to get all pretentious. 

And that day, not to be a downer, Marvin Gaye only had a few short years to live and like the Confederate Army at Gettysburg he was at the top of his game. But unlike General Pickett’s men who also only had a short time to live, who you can look back on and be happy that the motherfuckers got beat? With Marvin and his band—and the dancers out on the Soul Train floor—we can only look back sadly, with nostalgia, because that was kind of the end of African Americans knowing as a peep what we were doing on a dance floor. Again, sadly. 

The first thing you’ll notice about the “Got to Give It Up” performance btw is that the Afros were perfect. Everybody looks good, from the band to the dancers to, of course, the Brother Man himself, Marvin Gaye. 

As part two of “Got to Give It Up” begins, Gaye goes into the audience and starts to boogie down near a chick with bouncy hair (“good hair,” as Beyoncé said famously in a song of the devilish Becky, was a big thing at the time, good hair that is, whether Afros or curls, because the product “Afro Sheen” was usually Soul Train’s sponsor). Again, Marvin on the dance floor is not a guy who’s displaying professional chops, he’s just another party dancer who has been to a lot of clubs. That’s the conceit of this famous Soul Train appearance. Just like the couples around him, who had high tight well-practiced skills. The song “Got to Give It Up” was, you’ll be surprised to learn, about dancing at a party, not having sex which was the theme of most of the rest of Marvin Gaye’s oeuvre. 

Even the regular Soul Train dancers were not paid, btw, but did sometimes get a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, per report, for what were very long sessions under hot lights. These were amateurs who were as good as it gets and who you wouldn’t see on any American dance floor today, because even at clubs today people are busy with their phones. Or they’ve been working on Wall Street during the day and are doing a podcast during their leisure time, not practicing like the brother on the boat to Buenaventura. Anyway it was all downhill from there, that day in 1977, not to repeat the obvious. 

But if you look to the prior year, 1976, you see something interesting. White people as they began to up their game, while black people were about to lose ours. White people soon topped out too—there was only so much time they were going to spend practicing on a dance floor—but for a while they were at least improving. Because the myth about black people’s natural rhythm had been exposed. 1976 was the year when Abba came out with “Dancing Queen” and it was a revolution. (Again this is mostly about white women because the men were and remain pretty fucking lame.)

The idea that not just white people but European white people could boogie down was mind-blowing in the extreme, because Europeans at the time, and Koreans—North and South varieties, not to sound all racist—were the only people who could make white Americans look soulful up until that point. Again, not to sound all racist or anything but the only thing giving white American culture any kind of claim to coolness, like dancing—unlike the general lameness of Europeans and Asians—was exposure to Negroes. That’s how our music got stolen by the likes of Elvis and the Stones, Clapton and the Beatles. Everybody, in fact. The only factor that has made our white people any cooler than their white people, that is Europeans, has been being around black people. That would be my entire point, actually. 

In the U.S. for example there was the long-running American Bandstand but from a skill-on-the-dance-floor standpoint it could still be painful to watch. Black people watched American Bandstand too, btw, but often only to jeer the competition. Not to sound mean-spirited. But if you watch the official “Dancing Queen” video, you suddenly saw something amazing. There’s this little white chick, maybe 17 years old. Brunette or dirty blond, in a red top? This chick could boogie down. She had game, most def.

Her moves are, once again, like someone who has taken the time and effort to learn how to dance, while clubbing, not with a choreographer like Beyoncé has. And not like club dancing is a pleasant pastime but like it’s serious work, serious as a heart attack, actually, which it is, if you want to be any good. 

This white chick in the Abba video doesn’t look effortless but, somehow, she still looks cool. And practiced. It is because that’s actually what Abba’s great song is all about, chicks going out dancing. In “Dancing Queen” the guys are completely disposable, as in the lyric, “any one will do,” meaning any guy is good, you just need a male body, a Dancing Queen just needs a partner like a queen in a beehive needs a drone. Anyone will do, literally. 

        And when one song is over the queen is already looking for another guy to boogie down with. It is, in other words, a women’s liberation tract as well as pop. Which is also true of quite a few soul hits, btw, preaching the revolution through soul or R&B that you could dance to. And this little white girl in the video, she has game that most sisters today could only dream of. How sad is that? And she’s Swedish! That’s my whole point, actually. And kind of blonde! This little Swedish chick could more than hold her own among the brothers and sisters who were regulars back then on Soul Train and she is better than 99% of dancers, black or white, or Korean, that you see today. Why is that important? Because Sweden is, less we forget, where white people were invented. Ipso facto, bro. It’s the last place you would expect to find girls who know how to shake their booties, if you believe in the black “natural rhythm” myth. Or, so you would think. Not the Sweden part, but the white girl part. In other words there is no natural ability. It’s all about practice. 

There’s a strikingly similar case in music. Several years ago Gwyneth Paltrow, a woman who in her public life at least has no pretensions to soul or coolness—although she is hot. Paltrow recorded a version of the  Temptations’ great “Just My Imagination” with Babyface. Have you heard it? And Gwyneth does a really credible job on this soul standard, in fact probably better than the Negro singer with her. And Paltrow is blonde! What does that tell you, “dead lay” claims about blondes notwithstanding? She practiced. You could give her another Motown hit to sing and she would probably fall flat but she knew “Just My Imagination,” because she devoted the time to a song she clearly loves. It’s also said that Jay Z was her coach for a time. A question that has been asked in the blackosphere—this is not totally relevant—do you think Jay Z was getting any of that, like, on the side? Did he get the box in exchange for singing lessons and, more importantly, did Beyoncé know? And, you know, just because this is a scientific examination and all, and certain issues must be addressed, was Gwyneth Paltrow really “Becky with the good hair” of Beyoncé’s complaint, not some Indian chick who everyone has pointed at? That is something we may never know, even as science advances. 

This is going to seem outrageous but the best booty-shaking in history—caught on film—was actually a year or so before “Dancing Queen” came out. The year is in dispute but appears to be 1975. Black people were headed down, like General Pickett’s army, but didn’t know it yet. While Caucasians—white women, specifically, not the guys—were moving up in the dance world. And it was a white chick, not no sister, who was the proof. And there’s film of the performance.

We actually know something about the white girl involved. Her name is Lisa. The song in this early music video was the wonderful standard, “Hang on, Sloopy” about—this time—a chick from the wrong side of the tracks. To set the scene. So, like, the plot of the video, not the song, is a hot white girl just walking down the street, minding her own hot business, when she hears a song being played up the block and she follows the music and stumbles upon Rick Derringer & the McCoys, white boys all, with Derringer on vocals, singing about a girl named Sloopy. To set the scene.

Derringer and his group are awesome. And the white girl in the video, the aforementioned Lisa which is her real name—this will blow your mind—she’s blonde too! 

You know the reputation American blondes have, of course. The only coordinated movement they know is swiping Daddy’s credit card, have you heard that one before? Not to sound all sexist/racist. Even the blonde herself of music fame—Debbie Harry of the group Blondie—despite producing some of the greatest music in pop/rock history, including dance music, had all the moves on stage of a nun teaching Sunday school. Not to stereotype or anything but Debbie Harry needed to take a slow boat to China, not Buenaventura, to give her time to practice boogieing down. Not to be critical but she just stands there when she sings.

But so, like, this blonde in the “Sloopy” video—Lisa Leonard Dalton is her full name—not only performs immaculately but also shows herself to be master of what is considered the hardest routine in club dancing—the twisting booty shake, known by its initials, TBS—when a woman is moving her body on two distinct axises simultaneously, but still in time to the music. And looks good doing it. 

What’s amazing about Lisa Dalton is that she hasn’t even been gifted with booty africanus, like so many black girls have and the very rare white chick, an asset which would have made Lisa’s movements easier to execute. She has just a normal white girl butt. But even Beyoncé with all her coaches and more God-given assets couldn’t shake it like this, bro. And as a black woman Beyoncé genetically has more to shake, does that make sense? This is science, bro. But it’s like the pundits have long opined: “It’s not what you have. It’s what you do with what you have.” Truer words have never been spoken, at least on a dance floor. 

It would be my thesis in fact, having seen booty-shaking at all levels, throughout a long life, that this performance in the “Hang On Sloopy” video is the best ever. Even better, on a difficulty scale, than what you saw on Soul Train on Saturday mornings back in the day, because those dancers had the protection of the group—which is always helpful in nature, including human nature. Except the rare line-dancing contests, most of the boogieing down was not really isolated on camera on the Soul Train sound stage. It was more a group endeavor. Even line dancing, on the other hand, the country and Negro versions both, involves a different and safer dynamic than dancing alone in a spotlight, so to speak, like Lisa.

In the Snoopy case it’s all about Rick’s voice and Lisa Dalton’s body. She even ends the performance by doing an archetypical white girl twirl. 

Have you ever seen little white girls, maybe in the six to nine year old range, who suddenly just raise their arms above their heads and start to spin? Lisa Dalton does that too at the end of the song and, speaking as a critic of dance and of music—who is nonetheless aware of racial and gender identities—one can see that spinning as an unconscious effort to stamp the performance with the authenticity of blonde-girl soul. Does that make sense? 

Lisa Dalton has said in interviews that she began dancing as a kid, and it’s always been part of her life. That’s called practice too, bro. 

Lisa Leonard Dalton shakes it:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBxtqo05ovI

In Praise of Bill Broyles

 

 Everyone wants to praise Texas’s dead literary titans like Larry McMurtry but how about a few words for the living? McMurtry was kind of a shit, actually, and a racist but he was successful. That’s why in a place like Texas where, as you may know from television and films—not so much from books—right and wrong don’t matter, only success. But, as it turns out, it's true in the Lone Star literary world too. Especially in the literary world. 

So, like, for once, how about mentioning someone who did the right thing and was successful and is still writing? That’s William Broyles, Jr., the first editor of Texas Monthly. The magazine which just had its 50th birthday a year or two ago is kind of a bump on the highway now—whitebread and unoriginal despite last week’s Pulitzer for coverage of the Camp Mystic floods, an award which was, for once, deserved. But you can’t underestimate how groundbreaking it was at birth, founded by Dallasite and Wharton School graduate Mike Levy. 

Before getting into Broyles’ bio, Levy’s is also pertinent. Wiki says Levy's father was a plumber, and Mike himself worked as a taxi driver and a jail guard before putting together the financing for a magazine, headquartered in Austin but not of Austin, and designed to be the Texas version of the New Yorker which like TM today is whitebread and also increasingly unoriginal. Before being picked by Levy as the first editor of the magazine, Broyles had famously been a Marine in Vietnam (he said that he decided at the last minute that deploying maybe was not such a great idea but his wife told him that he had to go) and, like Gatsby, attended Oxford University, although he was a Rice University grad like many of TM’s early folks who in fact were all on the student newspaper together. Paul Burka, the magazine's longtime political editor, for example, had been sports editor at the Rice University rag.

Broyles taught at West Point too. He was like Gatsby in one other respect. That smile, when he looked at you and gave you the treatment there was just no saying no. But unlike Gatsby he was real and his achievements were real. From Wikipedia again: He created the television series China Beach, and Six, and wrote such films as Apollo 13, Cast Away, Planet of the Apes, Unfaithful, the Polar Express, Jarhead, and Flags of Our Fathers. You don't have to be a fan of these movies to respect his run. In today's media-centric world, it's faint praise to say this but Bill Broyles is a good guy. And like his publisher Mike Levy, he knew something about the world beyond the written word. Which you can’t often say about journalists today. 

Broyles had a poor run as Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek with the fictitious “Hitler Diaries,” that's true, but he picked himself, dusted off his backside and moved to Hollywood. He has had courage through his career, not the manly-Marine Corps kind of courage although he had that as well, but as a writer. And at TM as an editor. This is the point where someone talking about Bill would mention his first meeting with his subject. 

The year was 1981 and me working as a cop reporter at the now-defunct Houston Post where owner Oveta Hobby had decreed that everyone who met a violent death in the Bayou City merited a couple of paragraphs in the newspaper. Which meant writing a lot of shorts because, then as now, a lot of people get capped in Houston. But, wanting to spread my wings, and writing a letter to Broyles, asking if he would like to hire “a hip young black reporter”? No lie. 

There was a call a few days later inviting me to an interview in Austin, just Broyles and then-executive editor Greg Curtis, another member of the Rice mafia. They offered me the job, at a very good salary. The trick is that Broyles had hired an African American woman, Gwen Craddock, as his assistant. She opened my letter, she told me later, and put it under his nose. 

Like a lot of great men, Broyles knew what he didn’t know. He didn’t consider himself the white expert on black people either, a white savior in other words, who are so common in today's journalism. He was also ex-military, who actually tend to be a lot more race-friendly than are may liberal whites because blacks and Latinos are not abstract concepts to other soldiers but instead people who they have worked with and died alongside. 

Contrast Broyles with one of his Monthly successors as editor-in-chief, the great liberal Jake Silverstein who is best known as a punk-ass bitch, to use the black argot. Silverstein did not publish a single black writer during six years in the big chair in Austin, early in the century, much less hire black people, and, as editor of the New York Times Magazine he criticized and forced out a young black female writer who had the temerity to sign a petition calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. 

Even in the 1990s long after Broyles split, Burka, the political editor, had described TM as "more honored than read." If that’s been true, it’s all about leadership. There's really been no comparison between the founding editor and his successors. 

At the Monthly, Broyles also put Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan on the cover, wearing a crown, the kind of praise for a black woman—one not involved  in sports or entertainment—that was unheard of at the time and still mostly unheard of now. You also have to mention when you saw the guy last. It was twenty or twenty-five years ago, at Deep Eddy in Austin. 

A lot of people in River City are swimmers and that's where you tend to run into folks, doing laps at a pool. Bill still had that Gatsby smile. He still looked good. In retrospect, as a man, he still looks good now.

Prosemitism & the New York Times

 

    Note to readers: This piece has been censored at the insistence of Google/Blogger.

Today in the premier newsroom in the world—the NYT—blacks and Latinos are both far below their percentages in the population while Jews who represent 3% of the US are, according to some estimates, ten-fold too highly represented among the White Lady’s ranks. What’s up with that? The Times doesn’t track its Jewish percentage or at least doesn’t publicize it but historically the major editors, columnists and investigative types, to say nothing of the publisher—which is the Sulzberger family, actually—have been Jewish. With a sprinkling of WASPs. 

The peculiar position of the Sulzbergers is that the same diversity standard pushed in its reportage on industry & government has not applied to its own hires. This is actually not news but is instead something that we see every day among the higher ranks of American journalism. Reporters at the Washington Post, National Public Radio, ProPublica, the New Yorker el al want to complain about the decline of diversity due to the Trump administration—ICE attacks or what have you, erosion of affirmative action on college campuses and in the hallways of government—but the journalists doing the complaining are almost invariably white, disproportionately Jewish—the so-called “white saviors” who are so common among reporters in recent years. On-air correspondents of the various networks appear more representative, actually, even at Fox News, because a lack of diversity is clear on a screen. While the most discriminatory practices in hiring are radio and the purveyors of print media. Nowhere is that more true than the New York Times, aka the White Lady. And includes her reportage which operates under a well-defined double standard. 

“Making our journalists know that we will stand up for them in the moments when they come under attack,” Executive Editor Joseph Kahn said last year in an interview with the news site Semafor, “that the institution is behind them, their safety but also their integrity, is a very important thing to do and also allows us to communicate with readers about the actual facts of a story.” Mr. Kahn’s comments were in the context of a question about Elon Musk’s criticism of the White Lady but are also pertinent to the newspaper’s sins against minorities which are related to condescension, theft of narrative and false narratives that unduly attribute black liberation in America to the efforts of Jews. But before going there—and yes we will go there, despite the risk of being labeled antisemitic—a few details. 

The Kahn interview was by Semafor’s editor-in-chief Ben Smith who was previously the White Lady’s main media critic, who worked for Joe Kahn in other words, which is a pretty glaring conflict of interest itself for the interviewer but was merely the subject of a joking exchange between the two men before the first softball questions were asked. Smith like Kahn also identifies as Jewish, btw, and that is important. The interview as it turned out was a blowjob which is the journalistic term for a story that is so positive that the person or entity that is the subject of the piece couldn’t have written anything more positive him or herself. 

There’s no one to call bullshit on the NYT in other words. Joe Kahn says everything about how the newspaper of record deals with criticism except what happens when the criticism is accurate, because the White Lady admits few inaccuracies. Mostly just her occasional correction notes about misspellings and wrong dates in stories. But what if the whole piece is a crock, like the false reporting that led to the War in Iraq and eventually led to a White Lady white paper, a mea culpa from the newspaper of record, promising to do better in the future? 

Which was actually followed by the Times getting rid of its ombudsman entirely, and more recently by editorial page leadership forgetting about Iraq and pushing a war against Iran, once again at the urging of the "the world's most moral army," per Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israelis. The White Lady is in the strange position of condemning our attack on Tehran but having pushed for the war, predominantly but not solely by Bret Stephens, an opinion columnist who was previously editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post. He is perhaps best known for an eugenics-themed piece suggesting that ashkenazi Jews, an ethnicity that includes him and about half of Israel, is a superior form of humanity. (Stephens' recent column titles in the Times related to the Iran War include, “For Once, We Fight with an Equal Ally,” meaning Israel, “Yes, This is Your War Too,” “The War is Going Better Than You Think”, and “The Iranian Advantage Is an Illusion.”) But on to race in America, which is our subject here. 

The Times’ credibility problem with black people just manifested itself twice in ugly and wholly discriminatory ways, first with coverage of the death of civil rights icon and former presidential candidate the Reverend Jesse Jackson of Chicago. To set the scene. Over the course of three days the Times published some 20 pieces on Jackson’s death, 17 of which were written by whites, overwhelmingly Jews, including the main story by Peter Applebome who is a former White Lady columnist and Atlanta (“the Black Mecca”) bureau chief, a self-promoting Caucasian expert on African Americans who chose as the first person to quote in his story—about this Negro civil rights icon—a Jewish political organizer from Chicago named Rose. 

A more accurate and far shorter take on Jesse Jackson’s racial trajectory will be presented below but it’s useful to note first that the center of the Jewish universe can be viewed as the New York Times, not Israel. The pages of the so-called White Lady have constituted the cultural homeland of the modern Jewish peep, even more so in recent years than before. Israel has the land, and wants more, but the Times has the readers, and wants more. As a consequence the view of other peoples/ethnicities by the White Lady's staff is not as sophisticated as you might think. 

Beliefs about black people for example are often based upon ignorance and upon a delusional view by some American Jews that they are somehow owners of the black narrative in this country. Wrong, bro. Just because you read it in the newspaper of record, for instance, doesn’t mean it’s true. As Elon Musk, who is also Jewish, has complained. Suffice it to say that white people don’t “know” us—black people—despite protestations to the contrary, any more than anyone from any race or culture knows any other race or culture. 

That’s ordinary humanism although cultural humility often clashes with the Times editors' belief that African American culture is part of the Jewish field of expertise, even to the exclusion from that field of blacks ourselves. Jews are tourists in the hood, really, just as American black people are when, for example, we visit the beach at Tel Aviv. But you can’t tell the Times that, or the New Yorker for that matter where Editor-in-Chief David Remnick, who is Jewish and has been accused by his own editorial staff of racism in hiring, nonetheless considers himself another expert on the black peep, having published four books—depending on your count—on the American Negro, including a biography of Barack Obama. And which leads to the second incident to be discussed, after the Jackson obit, another recent story by a poorly-informed White Lady which actually spotlights an unethical practice common to the New Yorker as well. 

In which mainstream liberal media are caught running a game, just like a bad boy in the hood, in order to downplay Jewish affronts to blacks and instead stress the White Lady/New Yorker’s complaints of antisemitism. To set the scene. 

Interestingly, just a year or two ago black intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates said—while mentioning his desire to write about Palestine and the Palis’ struggle with the Israelis? He said he was warned off and told that he didn’t have the knowledge base to question Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. That hasn’t stopped Jewish “experts” at the Times or New Yorker, bro, who are more than willing to opine on African Americans whom they apparently know very little about. A recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography Jonathan Eig, a Jewish sportswriter from Dallas who is now the white press’s go-to foremost authority on Martin Luther King Jr.? 

Mr. Eig also has a series of children’s books written in the person of a little black girl. This certainly has nothing to do with cultural appropriation or any wish on Eig’s part to exploit the black narrative for his own profit. God forbid. How do we know that? Because the principal Times book reviewer Dwight Garner wrote in his very positive commentary on Eig’s MLK biography that the tome is now “the authoritative biography” of Martin Luther King Jr. 

Without actually explaining how the white guy Garner is in a position to make that judgment about the white guy Eig on the subject of the black leader MLK. What Eig's work does do—his children's books for example—is keep a black author from getting a contract from a publisher to write about black people. 

Just as the Times' plethora of white “experts" on blacks and race in America, like Peter Applebome, late of the the White Lady’s Atlanta bureau, keep African Americans and Latinos from being hired in the White Lady’s newsroom. Some might call that exploitation or theft of narrative, actually. The Times has frequent coverage of blacks, the stories are just not often by blacks ourselves. Accuracy of the narrative can be just a detail to the White Lady in other words. The black peep are merely on the page to increase subscriptions and make the newspaper of record appear more inclusive than it is. 

Doubly interesting is that Mr. Coates was at The Atlantic, where the editor-in-chief is former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg. Who is a very likely source of those opinions that blacks shouldn’t write about Palestinians/Jews. (Coates now writes for Vanity Fair.) 

And speaking of conflict of interest in journalism—and the primacy of one cultural narrative over everyone else’s—in a recent broadcast of PBS’s Washington Week in Review convened to discuss the American-Israeli attack on Iran—in a roundtable chaired by none other than Jeffrey Goldberg, formerly of the Israeli Defense Forces—three of four of the guests were Jewish journalists with ties to Israel, including the White Lady’s Peter Baker and the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser. Who are husband and wife, actually, not that there's anything wrong with that but maybe it should have been mentioned at the start of the commentary? 

No need for a Muslim, for example, to join a roundtable to discuss a war with a Muslim nation. Jewish journalists can do it all, just as is true in any discussion of African Americans, like Reverend Jackson. Enough said, except there has been another complaint that blacks should not write about Jewish affairs and the Palis. Directly from the White Lady herself, actually. 

The work that Coates eventually produced called The Message pointed to what he saw as similarities between the Palestinian experience under Israeli rule and what blacks have experienced in America. This was a Jim Crow-like analogy that the White Lady objected to, however. The Times reviewer of Coates’ book was Jennifer Szalai who is the newspaper’s chief white-expert on black nonfiction and has previously written that it is “banal” to think that black people are more knowledgeable on our own history than are whites. No shit. 

In the review she dissed Coates’ work for lack of a traditional factual basis: “He is using his position of prominence and moral authority to draw attention to the plight of Palestinians. Having lived the life of the famous Black writer in mostly white professional spaces, someone who has been both venerated and vilified, he finds in his new community ‘the warmth of solidarity.’” There’s nothing wrong with solidarity, actually, in the authentic black view. It’s what freed black people in the U.S., according to our view of our history. But we're not the experts, according to this particular White Lady. 

Ms. Szalai also leans heavily into two racist tropes in her review. One being that blacks “feel” but don’t use facts, which is something often heard in white academic circles—black people emote, while whites reason. And that a successful black writer owes his success to the aforesaid white professional spaces. Gee, isn’t that kind of demeaning and/or patronizing? Not in the pages of the Times where it can be pretty standard fare.  

The factual discussion that Jennifer Szalai prefers would have to include the fact that American Jews love nothing better than to recall their efforts to help African Americans during the civil rights era, including two Jewish Freedom Riders who got their tickets cancelled in Mississippi alongside countless blacks. But Jewish historians and journalists somehow ignore those hundreds of black G.I.s who died in Europe during World War Two while liberating concentration camps. The Tuskegee Airmen for example were not flying over Mississippi, bro, although those missions might have been useful.

Instead they were flying and dying over Germany, in order to free Jews. It’s remarkable that a people like our Jewish brothers and sisters—who have promised never to forget the past—are so quick to ignore what has been done for them but not to them. That is how the White Lady’s reportage works as well. And there’s actually a trick involved in her coverage—a sleight of journalistic hand you might say—that is being employed.

So, like, on the third day of Times reporting on Reverend Jackson’s death, the subject finally became something that black people might have found more meaty. In a piece by the Jewish journalist Jonathan Mahler who is another of the Times’ white experts on black people, the story was called “How a Stray Quote of Jesse Jackson’s Led to a Rupture Between Black and Jewish Voters,” did you read that? 

During his 1984 run for the presidency Jackson infamously referred to Jews as “Hymies” and New York City as “Hymietown.” Which was clearly inappropriate (brought to light by a black Washington Post reporter, fyi) but was also indicative of African American dissatisfaction with the Jewish narrative of blacks in this country. Which includes the proposition that any disagreement with Jews is unacceptable. It wasn't actually a stray quote, in other words. It spoke to black frustration. 

Our Jewish friends spend a lot of time in our business—telling us what to do and what to think, to say nothing of what is “best” for us—without being invited. Part of the reason is financial. Once we accept contributions, whether of the political variety or to our educational institutions, the camel’s nose is under the tent. But whither, exactly, the hymie epithet? It’s part of history, too, and long before "Hymietown." 

In the 1960s and 1970s Jews were forced out of some civil rights organizations—by angry black activists—for being patronizing and attempting to run black groups. That is what led to the expulsion of Jews, for example, from SNCC (popularly called “snick”) the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of which Jesse Jackson was once a member and which began to criticize Israel during another preemptive attack on Muslim nations, the Six Day War. (In 1967, bro, when President Johnson refused the Israeli request to join an attack on Egypt, does that sound familiar?) Which the Times did not mention in its exploration of Jesse Jackson’s sins, even though Jackson was openly suspicious of the prominent Jewish role in black civil rights. 

The Mahler piece continued, as background: “A natural alliance between two largely liberal minority groups, each with a history of discrimination, had come under pressure from the country’s changing political dynamics. In New York City, a 1968 struggle over the control of public schools in largely Black neighborhoods prompted the firing of a group of predominantly Jewish teachers — spurring a citywide strike led by the Jewish head of the teachers union.” One point of contention is that African Americans are arguably not that liberal. We believe in fairness but also in many of the same traditional values as conservatives, including faith and family, and we are less and less attached to what is called, in the black podcast world, “the Democratic plantation.” 

And forgive one for wondering why Jewish teachers were in charge of black instruction in the first place? Why didn’t black teachers have those jobs? Why the Jim Crow treatment in a northern city? And why was it so disconcerting that black teachers wanted the task of educating black children? 

What’s also interesting about the Mahler piece is that any break in black-Jewish relations can be solely attributed to actions by black people, never errors by Jews. Who are only victims in this perspective. Let’s see if that’s true. The Times has, almost singlehandedly, just ignominiously ended the mayoralty of an African American in New York’s City Hall, who got too close to Muslim Turkey, and Jews contributed significantly to the recent reelection losses of two black Democratic members of Congress who had the temerity to criticize Israel. And the Times has blacklisted at least one African American journalist for supporting Palestinian liberation. 

But if blacks who are such a key demographic of the Democratic Party—as we are reminded endlessly by the White Lady—if we question or criticize Jewish politics/action—we automatically become antisemites. Or we’re “ungrateful.” Or we are confrontational. Very often it’s just a scam, b.s. in other words, a way of trying to bring independent black thought to heel. And here again the White Lady offers a very good example. 

Late last year the newspaper of record ran an “investigative” piece on the newest Supreme Court Justice, Katanji Brown Jackson, saying directly that she is “confrontational” and should not strike out on her own opinions but should find consensus with the Court’s liberals, particularly Jewish jurist Elena Kagan. Literally. 

This dialectic was presented as an investigative piece in the news section detailing liberal aims and how best, according to the reporter, to achieve those. And how the African American Justice Jackson was guilty of some kind of betrayal or stepping out of line. The story was written by Jodi Kantor, perhaps the Times’ best known journalist today, half of the team that produced the influential #metoo coverage and who is now on the Supreme Court beat. To set the scene. 

Kantor who was previously in the White Lady's Washington bureau wrote that her conclusions in the Supreme Court article were the result of interviews with clerks and court-observers but it certainly seemed that Justice Kagan, who was portrayed as a long-suffering Solon-in-a-skirt, may have had more than a passing role in writing this copy. It was a crock of shit, in other words, published as unbiased investigative journalism that seemed really intended to remind a black woman of her place. Jodi Kantor’s story did not go over nearly as well as #metoo. 

A few days later Kantor was quoted in a followup behind-the-scenes explainer on the black Supreme Court justice’s failings. She pointed out the virtues of the white female judge instead: “Justice Kagan, appointed in 2010 to be a diplomat and strategist, is capable of punching hard, but she shows her frustration only in flashes.” Laying it on a little thick, no, in order to repay a source? That doesn’t seem like objective journalism, much less investigative. And betrays her personal familiarity with the Jewish justice. Like, they know each other. And this isn't even original journalistic sin, bro: NPR's Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg had a longterm non-disclosed friendship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg whom Totenberg wrote, after the fact, she had leaked the subjects of upcoming NPR stories to, in order to give Ginsberg a heads up, and regularly praised the judge on air—just two Jewish ladies of a certain age—like Justice Kagan and Jodi Kantor, scratching each other's backs. 

Speaking of the facts, when President Obama appointed Justice Kagan he did describe her as a consensus-builder. But he said nothing about her being a diplomat or a strategist who others on the Supreme Court must follow. Indeed it wouldn’t have mattered if he had because the eight associate justices of the court are on the bench in order to interpret and apply the Constitution, each having equal responsibility and power. When President Biden appointed Justice Jackson, for example, who is the heavy in the White Lady’s reportage—as African American officials often are in the pages of the Times when we dissent from liberals—he described her “as someone with extraordinary character, who will bring to the Supreme Court an independent mind, uncompromising integrity, and with a strong moral compass and the courage to stand up for what she thinks is right.” Somehow none of that made it into the story. 

Per Ms. Kantor: “Ever since Justice Jackson arrived in 2022, friction has been building: between her and Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, who are more aligned strategically, and between her and the rest of the court, according to more than a dozen associates of the justices, including both liberals and conservatives. They spoke on condition of anonymity, in order to share sensitive details about closely held conversations.” Oh please. Dollars to donuts, Jodi Kantor got marching orders from Elena Kagan as two women of the same background, descendants of Holocaust survivors lest we forget, sat down to devise an approach, in the newspaper of record, to go after a minority justice in order to bring her to heel. (Times’ editors refused comment when asked if Kantor met with Kagan for this piece.) Justice Kagan should have shared the byline. This is the Democratic plantation, btw, where black officials are forced to hoe a particular row, or take a whipping. 

In fact Kantor used the female version of the “threatening black male” trope—the “confrontational black woman” in this case—which Jodi Kantor is familiar with because she also went after Michelle Obama early during the Obama Administration, in a book that the President and First Lady did not much appreciate. In Kantor’s introduction to her Obama work she informs us, “This book is dedicated to Hana Kantor, who grew up poor in Poland, did not attend school beyond fifth grade, survived the Holocaust as a teenager, losing nearly everyone and everything, built a life in the United States, and is still selecting the best tomatoes and playing kalooki in Florida and the Catskills. As her granddaughter, I’ve tried to help write the happiest ending to her story, to make good on the promise of America. I never once walked up the driveway of the White House without thinking of her.” 

Ms. Kantor’s relationship to her grandmother is stirring but, actually, who gives a shit? What does any of that have to do with the Negro First Family from Chicago? Kantor also wrote in her Obama book: “Michelle Obama was the great-great-granddaughter of slaves, but she did not discuss that legacy: the closest the Obamas got was the annual Passover seder they held, the guests mostly Jews or African Americans, the holiday a rare chance to safely discuss oppression and liberation.” This is striking as a perfectly condescending and false passage in modern American journalism, all the more incredible because it came from a Times White House correspondent, in fact the main correspondent covering the Obamas. 

Michelle Obama graduated from Princeton University with a minor in African American studies and from Harvard Law School. If Ms. Kantor can look at Michelle Obama either in person, as Kantor tells the reader that she did—up close and personal—or even in a photo or news clip, and believe that the only time the First Lady had discussed her legacy as the descendant of slaves, or discussed issues of “oppression and liberation,” was during Passover while sitting seder with Jewish friends, Ms. Kantor missed her calling—which is any profession other than journalism. The Times as an institution continues to see black people through a Jewish historical lens. 

But we’re not an extension of Jews or part of the Jewish narrative. We have our own narrative. And that becomes clear when the newspaper of record needs to cut somebody loose—needs someone to throw under the proverbial bus—like Justice Jackson. Or Mayor Adams. Just as Southern whites did, actually, Times journalists come looking for us. 

And if they criticize us, remember, it is because they are smarter or more upright morally/ethically. Really? Does that include faking investigative journalism in order to score political points for a prominent Jewish judge? We do know that same standard applies in Hollywood, btw. 

During the uproar over the Gaza War as American blacks began to stand up for Palestinians—and correctly so—television star Julianna Margulies who is Jewish said we were “brainwashed.” It’s actually Jews who may have been brainwashed, in part by the White Lady herself, to believe the decades of pro-Israeli b.s., which only now is coming to light as a wide swath of the domestic public belatedly questions our lock-step support of the Jewish State. Cue the war with Iran. But enough of Gaza and the Hormuz Strait and onto Chicago, and later back to New York, the aforesaid “Hymietown.” Let a black person opine briefly on his own peeps for a change.

 Chicago was the black melting pot that has formed so many ambitious black leaders including Oprah, Michael Jordan, Reverend Jackson, Elijah Muhammad and, most famously, Barack and Michelle Obama. In this black context too the newspaper of record doesn’t know what it’s talking about. One might say, if one wished to be ghetto, which is occasionally called for, the White Lady is a lying ho. A much more credible Jesse Jackson narrative is not that difficult to recount or understand if the source has cultural competence which white people at the Times do not have on this particular story, race in America. But which doesn’t stop the newspaper of record from trying. 

The White Lady, btw, just ran an opinion piece by a black writer and two Jews that the term “African American” should be phased out, in favor of exclusive use of “black.” Now we know, because the Times has told us our role/responsibilities yet again. At least a black person had a hand in writing the column, which is not always the case in White Lady opinion pieces on race. But on to Illinois. 

My mother and father were both born in Texas but grew up in Chicago after their families migrated, part of the mass movement of blacks from the South to northern states and the Midwest during the early 20th century, in order to escape Jim Crow. They followed the train tracks north, the “Katy” line, literally. To set the scene. For example Jesse Jackson himself went north from his birthplace in South Carolina. Chicago was where so many escaping black families ended up. 

       My father used to recount being a kid in Chicago in the 1920s and watching as an expensive car pulled up in the black hood and the back door opened and sitting there was Al Capone. With a  large bank bag of coins in his lap, which he threw handfuls of at passing Negroes. Who scurried to pick up the money. Capone was insuring that if he came to trial and any blacks appeared on the jury—because unlike in the South blacks were possible on Illinois jury pools, one of the benefits of being a registered voter—they knew to vote not guilty. Mr. Gold—the political operative who the Times chose to explain black Chicago—isn’t going to tell you that. Because he doesn’t know. 

And my mother, who was a gifted observer, had a favorite saying about the Windy City where she spent her childhood. “Chicago has,” she liked to repeat, “the meanest niggers in the world.” 

What she meant by “mean nigger” is what black people often still mean today, formidable. Like Michael Jordan, or Oprah. Ambitious. Smart. Capable. But white people don’t know what a mean nigger is unless they’re told by us. Chicago has created a lot of mean niggers thru the years, actually, with and without the assistance of Jewish political operatives. What Times coverage also failed to note at the time of Reverend Jackson’s death is that Jesse Jackson was part of the generation of black people who first grew tired of Jewish efforts at control of our narrative and their occasional condescension towards us, like Ms. Margulies, or Justice Kagan of the U.S. Supreme Court. But back to New York City. 

And back, actually, to the public education realm where the Times noted that Jews feel they have been dissed by blacks in the past. But where Jews have actually been doing the dissing recently. 

So, like, a week after Reverend Jackson’s death the Times carried an astounding story. The piece centered on a videoconference regarding a New York City public school that might be shuttered. Let the White Lady tell it from here because she does a very good job, up to a point. It’s what she doesn’t say, in this case, that is highly racist and unjustifiably prosemitic. Which is the opposite of antisemitic. Has a ring to it, no? 

“As one student, who attendees said was Black, spoke out to praise her teachers and lament the potential shutting of her school, another attendee — identified as Allyson Friedman, an associate professor at Hunter College who was attending as a public school parent — cut in. “They’re too dumb to know they’re in a bad school,” Dr. Friedman said, according to a recording of the meeting. She was attending virtually and was unaware that her microphone was turned on, per the Times. 

‘If you train a Black person well enough, they’ll know to use the back,” Dr. Friedman continued. “You don’t have to tell them anymore.” According to the White Lady, “[Dr. Friedman] appeared to be referencing a comment made earlier in the meeting by the local school district’s interim acting superintendent, Reginald Higgins. He had mentioned Carter G. Woodson, the scholar known as the father of Black history, who said, ‘If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told.’” So far, so good. Or so bad, actually, but well reported nonetheless. 

The Times followed up with a piece a day or two later that Professor Friedman had been suspended by Hunter College. What was not reported in either story, and is quite telling both about the professor and the newspaper of record, is that Dr. Friedman, like the White Lady herself, is Jewish. When Jews do great things the NYT calls out culture/ethnicity, but otherwise, not so much. The newspaper of record’s attention to detail is very selective, especially when Jews fuck up. For instance as part of the coverage of Henry Kissinger’s death a few years ago, the Times was not much interested in the secret bombing campaign that Dr. Kissinger helped orchestrate that killed tens of thousands of Cambodians, but was very interested that, at one point, Kissinger was boning actress Raquel Welch. 

Jesse Jackson’s “Hymie” rhetoric is important in Reverend Jackson’s obit in the Times, but not war crimes in Dr. Kissinger’s. When it’s something as horrific as Professor Friedman’s comments there’s no mention of Judaism or the fracturing of bonds between blacks and Jews. What Professor Friedman said was actually far worse than “Hymie” or “Hymietown.” But in the newspaper of record we read about the full extent of black racism but not Allyson Friedman’s. We read about black assaults on Jews but not Jewish assaults on African American civil rights. One of which took place in my hometown, Austin, Texas, actually. Literally. 

Again, the White Lady falsified the account by very selective use of facts not included in the story.

So, like, during the George Floyd protests that rocked the country and coincided with the pandemic, an Army sergeant at nearby Ft. Hood, who had a side gig driving Uber, came to Austin during an anti-police demonstration. Austin cops have killed a lot of minorities through the years, many of them unarmed, and the protest was well-attended despite COVID. To set the scene. The sergeant had a plan to kill a participant of the march, which he did. 

The protestor was armed but not threatening and the sergeant’s idea, which he communicated in text messages before shooting the guy, four times, was to kill an armed protestor and claim self defense. Long story short, the soldier was convicted of murder and sentenced to up-to-life in prison but was almost immediately pardoned on the instructions of Governor Greg Abbott. 

The White Lady covered the case of the sergeant—Daniel Perry is his name—who is actually Jewish. Without ever mentioning in reportage that the attack on the Floyd protestor was committed by a Jew, although local reports had mentioned Perry’s culture/ethnicity and that information was obviously available to the newspaper of record as well. The murder trial and the dispute over Sgt. Perry’s pardon both came at the height of the Gaza War when the White Lady was running news stories and opinion pieces about the “special relationship” between blacks and Jews in this country and the subliminal question of why African Americans were criticizing Israel. 

A story about a Jew who killed a pro-civil rights protestor doesn’t go along well with the particular view of race relations favored by the NYT. Sgt. Perry texted to someone, btw, evidence from the trial showed, “I am a racist” and he described Black Lives Matter activists as “monkeys.” He’s an anti-black Jewish terrorist in other words but you won’t read that in the New York Times. 

You will read, however, about antisemitism by blacks and everybody else. But in the White Lady’s view, Jews are victims, not perps. The Times is a wonderful publication on many levels but its primary mission is prosemitism, that is, pushing a pro-Jewish narrative and ignoring anything that doesn’t jibe with that. 

Whether it’s Israel, Hollywood or the proverbial hood, the White Lady offers what the Times likes to call “a nuanced view” but others might call, simply, bullshit. 

One of the only on-the-mark comments in the Times coverage of Reverend Jackson's death, for example, those 20-odd stories, was by the black writer Michael Eric Dyson who recounted that among Reverend Jackson’s economic campaigns was getting CBS to desegregate and hire blacks. One likes to think that if Jackson were still alive and in his prime he would have taken on the newspaper of record too. Because, specifically, the Times has a race problem. Evidenced by its nickname “the White Lady,” used by the black intelligentsia. 

Today she finds herself in the peculiar and embarrassing position of pushing a diversity narrative on others that has not been much applied in her own newsroom. Or in the pages of the newspaper, actually.

According to the Times’ own numbers, last updated in 2024, the news staff is approximately two-thirds white in a country where Caucasians are in the lower 50s and declining. Times leadership is 70% Caucasian. This is actually an improvement because in past decades the newspaper’s white staff has been closer to 90%. Go back beyond that and the Times didn’t really hire blacks or Latinos at all, except as window dressing—like, to point out the lone black person at a typewriter in the back of the newsroom, when the mayor or another dignitary was taking a tour. 

As in “tokens,” you know? 

The White Lady’s management was also busted just a few years ago by the newspaper guild for uniformly giving lower evaluation scores, for promotion, to minority news staff. That was under then Tom-in-Chief Dean Baquet. The features of the “peculiar institution,” as slavery was known in years past, have been adopted by a different peculiar institution, American mainstream journalism, in other words the New York Times.