Tag: race

The Wokest News Stories of 2020

The year 2020 will be remembered in the real world for a terrifying pandemic, mass unemployment, a nationwide protest movement, and a historically uninspiring presidential race. The year in media, meanwhile, was marked by grotesque factual scandals, journalist-cheered censorship, and an accelerating newsroom mania for political groupthink that was equal parts frightening and ridiculous.

The tiniest violations of perceived orthodoxies cost jobs. Reporters and editors were whacked en masse in uprisings at the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Wall Street Journal, Vox, the Miami Herald, and countless other places.

Some of the purges were themselves amazing news stories. A contractor named Sue Schafer was fired after the Washington Post published a 3,000-word expose about a two-year-old incident in which she attended a Halloween party dressed as Megyn Kelly, who herself had been fired from NBC for defending blackface costumes. Schafer, in other words, was fired for dressing in blackface as a satire of blackface costumes, in an incident no one heard of until the Post decided to make an issue of it. This was one example of what the New Yorker recently exulted as the “expensive and laborious” process of investigative journalism, as practiced in 2020.

Raymond Chandler once said that when he ran out of ideas, he just had a character burst into a room with a gun. 2020 op-ed writers in the same predicament could insert random nouns into a MadLibs template: “Is _____ Racist?” Everything from knitting to Jesus to women to botanical gardens to dieting to mermaids to  Scrabble and perhaps a hundred other things made the cut, to the point where it became a bottomless running gag for inevitable cancel targets like the satirical Twitter personality, “Titania McGrath.”

Keep reading

This browser extension lets you view the race and pronoun data of companies as you browse the web. Because everything is racist.

It’s called Diversity Plug and it’s a free Chrome extension that allows you “to view diversity statistics as you cruise around the Internet. If the data isn’t available, tweet companies to join the share to care initiative to publicly disclose their diversity data,” according to their website.

So, I gather that the idea is this extension will help woke white ladies shopping on Target.com to shop there anyway, but feel guilty while they do.

Also, if companies don’t have that data publicly available, with just a click of a button you can harass them on Twitter with a pre-written tweet.

Keep reading

A Peculiar Kind of Racist Patriarchy

We are frequently told by commentators and theorists on the progressive and liberal Left that we live in a systemically racist and patriarchal society. The belief that Western societies privilege white men and oppress people of color, women, and LGBT citizens is especially popular within academic institutions, legacy media, the entertainment industry, and even sports. However, newly released statistics from the US Department of Labor for the third quarter of 2020 undermine this narrative. Asian women have now surpassed white men in weekly earnings. That trend has been consistent throughout this past year—an unprecedented outcome. Full-time working Asian women earned $1,224 in median weekly earnings in the third quarter of this year compared to $1,122 earned by their white male counterparts. Furthermore, the income gap between both black and Latino men and Asian women is wider than it has ever been. The income gap between white and black women, meanwhile, is much narrower than the gap between their male counterparts.

These outcomes cannot exist in a society suffused with misogyny and racism. As confounding to conventional progressive wisdom as these new figures appear to be, copious research finds that ethnic minorities and women frequently eclipse their white and male counterparts, even when these identities intersect. Several ethnic minority groups consistently out-perform whites in a variety of categories—higher test scores, lower incarceration rates, and longer life expectancies. According to the latest data from the US Census Bureau, over the 12 months covered by the survey, the median household incomes of Syrian Americans ($74,047), Korean Americans ($76,674), Indonesian Americans ($93,501), Taiwanese Americans ($102,405), and Filipino Americans ($100,273) are all significantly higher than that of whites ($69,823). The report also finds substantial economic gains among minority groups. Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute reports that from 2018 to 2019, Asian and black households had the highest rate of median income growth (10.6 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively) of all main racial groups (although she cautions that overall disparities remain “largely unchanged”). On a longitudinal scale, Hispanics, not whites, had the highest income growth in 2019 relative to the start of the Great Recession in 2007 (although many of these gains have been reversed by the pandemic).

Keep reading

San Francisco will give $5,000 to help your small business, unless you’re a white guy.

No check for the privileged.

At least that’s the plan in San Francisco where they’re passing out $5k grants to small businesses, but making sure only the right kind of people get the relief.

They say they are using this as an opportunity to advance the city’s “equity goals.”

In a press release from the mayor, she says they are prioritizing “minority-owned businesses including women-owned, immigrant-owned, people of color-owned businesses,” with the money.

Tough luck, white male business owners!

For those unfamiliar with history, this is a practice formerly known as “discrimination.”

Keep reading

NYU prof: What if White Americans’ taxes were investigated for ties to slavery?

A New York University professor suggested that White people should be forced to submit their taxes to be checked for ties to slavery.

On Nov. 18, the University of California-Berkeley hosted a panel titled “The Future of Freedom: Reparations after 400 Years.” The goal of the panel was to “consider what the question of reparations means for this freedom’s fulfillment and what kind of future could follow for African-Americans beyond 400,” according to the video description. 

The panel consisted of professors Bertrall Ross and Jovan Scott Lewis, both of UC-Berkeley; Katherine Franke of Columbia Law School, and Michael Ralph of New York University.

Each professor provided past examples of reparations given to marginalized people, and said these could be examples of how to pay reparations to African Americans for 400 years of “systemic and violent racism.” 

Keep reading

The New York Times Helped a Vindictive Teen Destroy a Classmate Who Uttered a Racial Slur When She Was 15

Jimmy Galligan is an 18-year-old college freshman from Leesburg, Virginia. He may also be cancel culture’s Count of Monte Cristo.

Some months ago, Galligan—who is biracial—posted a years’ old, three-second video of a white, female classmate using a racial slur. Galligan had sat on the video for a long time, waiting for the moment it would do the most damage. After the girl—a cheerleader named Mimi Groves—was accepted to the University of Tennessee, the time had come.

“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” said Galligan.

The video depicted Groves, who was 15 at the time, and had just obtained her learner’s permit, saying “I can drive, [slur].” The remark was not directed at anyone in particular. The brief video clip featuring it circulated on Snapchat until it was obtained and saved by Galligan, who had grown furious at how often he heard his white classmates using the N-word.

Galligan shared it publicly in June. In response, Groves lost her spot on UT’s cheerleading squad. Then the university pressured her to withdraw from the school entirely. The admissions office had apparently received hundreds of messages from irate alumni demanding blood. Groves is now attending a community college.

This story is a powerful example of several social phenomena: the militant streak in social justice activism, the naivety of today’s teens and their not-actually-disappearing Snapchat messages, social media’s hunger for mob justice, and even the capacity for elaborate cruelty that has always existed among high schoolers. But the wildest thing about this incident is that most people will learn about it by reading The New York Times.

“A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning.” That’s the title of the Times‘s article on the subject, published the day after Christmas. Reporter Dan Levin tries to add considerable context by detailing a history of alleged unpleasantness at Heritage High School, which Groves and Galligan attended. It sits in a wealthy, predominantly white county where “slave auctions were once held on the courthouse grounds.”

“In interviews, current and former students of color described an environment rife with racial insensitivity, including casual uses of slurs,” notes Levin. “A report commissioned last year by the school district documented a pattern of school leaders ignoring the widespread use of racial slurs by both students and teachers, fostering a ‘growing sense of despair’ among students of color, some of whom faced disproportionate disciplinary measures compared with white students.”

Levin connects the outcry from aggrieved students to the broader Black Lives Matter movement and protests that occurred this summer following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police. But nowhere does his article reckon with a very basic fact: The New York Times has opted to assist a teenager’s desperate quest to ruin the life of a young woman who said something stupid when she was 15.

Keep reading