The New York Times has a race problem. The Times is known among the black intelligentsia as “The White Lady,” who today finds herself in the peculiar and embarrassing position of pushing a diversity narrative for others that has not much applied in her own newsroom. Or in the pages of the newspaper, actually. According to the Times’ own race 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 rapidly. This is actually an improvement because in past decades the newspaper’s white staff has been 90%. Go back beyond that and the Times didn’t hire blacks or Latinos at all, except as window dressing, like, to point out the lone black person at the typewriter in the back when the mayor was taking a tour of the newsroom. The “peculiar institution,” as slavery was known in years past, has been transformed into a different peculiar institution, American journalism.
Today in the premier newsroom in the world—the NYT—blacks and specifically Latinos are both far below their percentages in the population while Jews who represent 3% of the US population are, according to some estimates, ten-fold too highly represented in 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, have been Jewish. The peculiar position of the Sulzberger family is that the same diversity standards the Times pushes in its reportage do not apply among its own hires. This is actually not news but is instead something that we see everyday among the higher ranks of American journalism. Reporters at the Washington Post, National Public Radio, 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—but the journalists doing the complaining are almost invariably white, often Jewish—the so-called “white saviors” who are so popular among reporters in recent years. Nowhere is that more true than the White Lady herself.
The Times’ credibility problem with black people just manifested itself twice in an ugly and wholly discriminatory way, first with its 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 20 pieces on Jackson’s death, 17 of which were written by whites, overwhelmingly Jews, including the main story by Peter Applebome, former White Lady columnist and Atlanta bureau chief, a self-promoting Jewish expert on African Americans who wrote the main obituary and who chose as the first person to quote in the story, about this black civil rights icon’s death, 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 Jewish beliefs about black people are often based upon Jewish ignorance and racism. Which is on permanent display at the Times. And that leads to the second incident to be discussed, another recent story by the White Lady. But suffice it to say that Jews don’t “know” us, despite their protestations, any more than anyone from any race or culture knows any other race or culture. Jews are tourists in the hood, in other words, just as black people are when we, for example, visit Israel. 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 of racism in hiring by his own staff, yet considers himself another expert on black people, having published four books on the black peep, including a biography of Barack Obama.
Interestingly, just a year or two ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates said that—mentioning his desire to write about Palestine and the Palis’ struggle with the Israelis—he was told by Jewish journalist/friends that he didn’t have the knowledge base to write about Jews and the Middle East. That hasn’t stopped Jewish “experts” who are more than willing to opine on African Americans.
Last year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography Jonathan Eig, the Jewish sportswriter from Dallas who is now the press’s go-to foremost authority on Martin Luther King Jr.? Eig also has a series of children’s books written in the person of a black girl. This certainly has nothing to do with cultural appropriation or any wish on Eig’s part to exploit the black narrative for profit. God forbid. How do we know that? Because the principal New York Times book reviewer Dwight Garner wrote in his White Lady review of Eig’s MLK book that the tome is now “the authoritative biography” of Martin Luther King.
Without actually explaining how the white guy Garner is in a position to make that judgment. Anyway, doubly interesting is that Mr. Coates, who at the time of his pronouncement wanting to write about the Palestinians was a staffer at The Atlantic, where the editor-in-chief is former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg. Coates now works at Vanity Fair. Enough said.
American Jews love nothing more than to recall Jewish efforts to help African Americans during the civil rights era, including two Jewish Freedom riders who got their tickets cancelled in Mississippi, but somehow totally ignore those hundreds of black G.I.s who died in combat in Europe during World War Two, while freeing Jews. The Tuskegee Airman for example were not flying over Mississippi, bro, although those missions might have been useful too. Instead they were flying and dying over Germany.
Anyway, on the third day of Times coverage of Reverend Jackson’s death, the subject finally became something that black people might have found more interesting. In a piece by the Jewish journalist Jonathan Mahler, who is another of the Times’ 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.” During his 1984 run for the presidency Jackson 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 dissatisfaction with the Jewish narrative of blacks in this country, which includes the proposition that disagreement with Jews is unacceptable. 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.” Forgive one for wondering why Jews were in charge of black instruction. It was a different time, leave it at that.
The Times has, almost singlehandedly, just ended the mayoralty of an African American in New York, and Jews contributed significantly to the recent reelection losses of two black Democratic members of Congress, who had the temerity to criticize Israel, but if blacks who are such a key demographic of the Democratic Party, question Jews or criticize Jews we becomes antisemites. This also occurs in Hollywood, btw. During the uproar over the Gaza war, as blacks began to stand up for the Palestinians, and correctly so, television star Juliana Margueiles who is Jewish said we were “brainwashed.” It’s actually Jews who have been brainwashed, in part by the White Lady, to believe decades of Israel b.s., which only now is coming to light as a wide swath of the American public is questioning support of the Israelis. But enough of Gaza and onto Chicago, and later New York, the aforesaid “Hymietown.” Chicago was the black melting pot and has formed so many ambitious black leaders including Oprah, Michael Jordan, Revered Jackson and, most famously, Barack and Michelle Obama. In this context too the newspaper of record doesn’t know what it’s talking about. The White Lady ain’t nothing but a lying bitch, in other words. And Times Square is where she sell her ass, not to be judgmental.
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