The New York Times has a race problem. The Times is known throughout 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 been 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 a typewriter in the back of the newsroom when the mayor or another dignitary was taking a tour. The features of the “peculiar institution,” as slavery was known in years past, have been adopted by a different peculiar industry, 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 Jews. With a sprinkling of WASPs.
The peculiar position of the Sulzbergers 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 every day among the higher ranks of American journalism. Reporters at the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Pro Publica, 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—but the journalists doing the complaining are almost invariably white, often Jewish—the so-called “white saviors” who are so common among reporters in recent years. Nowhere is that more true than the White Lady herself. And includes the publication’s reportage.
In fact 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 some 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 ignorance and upon Jews’ own delusional view that they are somehow owners of the black narrative in this country. Wrong, bro. Although it is a belief that is on permanent display at the Times. But just because you read it in the newspaper doesn’t mean it’s true.
And that will lead to the second incident to be discussed, another recent story by the White Lady. But first, suffice it to say that Jews don’t “know” us—black people—despite Jewish protestations to the contrary, 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 American black people are when, for example, we visit 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 staff of racism in hiring, yet considers himself another expert on black people, having published four books, depending on you count, on the black peep, including a biography of Barack Obama.
Interestingly, just a year or two ago, veteran black journalist 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 by journalist/friends that he didn’t have the knowledge base to write about the Middle East. That hasn’t stopped Jewish “experts,” bro, who are more than willing to opine on African Americans they know very little about.
A recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography Jonathan Eig, the Jewish sportswriter from Dallas who is now the white 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 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 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 about the white guy Eig on the subject of the black leader MLK.
Anyway, doubly interesting is that Mr. Coates, who at the time of his pronouncement about wanting to write about Palestine was at The Atlantic, where the editor-in-chief is former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg. Coates now writes for 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, alongside countless blacks, but Jews 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, in order to free Jews. It’s remarkable that a people like the Jews, who have promised never to forget the past, are so quick to forget what has been done for them but not to them.
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,” did you read that? During his 1984 run for the presidency Jackson famously 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.
Jews spend a lot of time in black business without being invited. Part of the reason is financial, once we accept contributions, whether political or to our educational institutions, the camel’s nose is under the tent. But wither, exactly, the hymie epithet?
In the 1960s and 1970s Jews were forced out of some civil rights groups, by black activists, lest we forget, for being patronizing and attempting to run black organizations. As if we are their inferiors and needed their direction. Which the Times did not mention in its exploration of Jesse Jackson’s sins, even though Jackson was very suspicious of the 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 family ad faith. And forgive one for wondering why Jews were in charge of black instruction? And why it was so disconcerting to Jews that black educators wanted the task of educating black children? It was a different time, leave it at that. What’s interesting in the Mahler piece is that any break in black-Jewish relations can be attributed to actions by blacks, never anything that Jews have done.
Let’s see. The Times has, almost singlehandedly, just ended the mayoralty of an African American in New York, 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. 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 Jews or criticize Jews we automatically becomes antisemites. Or we’re “ungrateful.” Please.
If on the other hand they criticize us it is because they're smarter or more upright morally/ethically. Really? This standard also applies to 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 herself, to believe the decades of Israeli b.s., which only now is coming to light as a wide swath of the American public questions support of the Jewish State. But enough of Gaza and onto Chicago, and later New York, the aforesaid “Hymietown.” Let a black person opine briefly on our own peeps, for a change.
Chicago was the black melting pot and has formed so many ambitious black leaders including Oprah, Michael Jordan, Revered Jackson, Elijah Muhammad and, most famously, Barack and Michelle Obama. In this context too the newspaper of record doesn’t know what it’s talking about. One might say, if one wished to be crude, the White Lady is a lying bitch. And Times Square is where she sells her ass, not to be judgmental.
This white publication attempts to portray itself as an expert on all things African American, which is simply not true. A more credible Jesse Jackson narrative, for example, like many other black Americans’ stories, is not that difficult to understand or recount if the source has culture competence, which Times people mostly do not. (The White Lady, btw, recently ran an opinion piece by one black writer and two Jews that “African American” should no longer be used, in favor of exclusive use of “black"; now we know because the White Lady has spoken.) But on to Chicago.
My mother and father were both born in Texas but grew up in Chicago after their families migrated, part of the move of blacks from the South to the northern states and the Midwest during the early 20th century, in order to escape Jim Crow. To set the scene.
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 bag of coins, 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, they knew to vote not guilty.
My mother who was a gifted observer and storyteller had a favorite saying about the Windy City where she spent her childhood, before moving to California like so many others. “Chicago has,” she liked to repeat, “the meanest niggers in the world.”
What she meant by “mean nigger” is what we often still mean today, formidable. Like Michael Jordan, or Oprah. Ambitious. Smart. Capable. White people don’t understand that, unless they’re told by us. Chicago has created a lot of mean niggers with and without the assistance of Jewish political operatives. What Times coverage also failed to note at Reverend Jackson’s passing is that Jesse Jackson was part of the generation of black people who first grew tired of Jewish efforts at control and condescension towards us.
One of the only telling comments in the White Lady’s coverage, 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 White Lady too.
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