TNR did not come to racism out of evil. Very few people ever do. Many of the white people working for the magazine were very young and very smart. This is always a dangerous combination. It must have been that much more dangerous given that their boss was a racist. (Though I am told he had many black friends and protégés.) Peretz was not always a regular presence in the office. This allowed TNRs saner staff to regard him as the crazy uncle who says racist shit at Thanksgiving. But Peretz was not a crazy uncle - he was the wealthy benefactor of an influential magazine that published ideas that damaged black people. A writer for TNR told me how, in the mid-90s, Peretz would come down to the office from Cambridge and lobby young writers to write what turned out to be the fictional Taxi Cabs and the Meaning of Work. The writer told me that the young interns and fact-checkers would squirm in their seats. But no one took a stand. And perhaps it is too much to expect writers in their mid 20s, with editors in their late 20s, to say to Peretz, Please stop shopping this racist bullshit. But the task was made infinitely easier by a monochrome staff that could view Peretzs racism as an abstraction, and not something that directly injured their families. If TNRs influence and importance was as outsized as its advocates claim, then the import of its racist legacy is outsized in the same measure. Things got better after Peretz was dislodged. The retrograde politics were gone, but the Whites Only sign remained. Ive been told that Foer was greatly pained by Peretzs racism. I believe this. White people are often sincerely and greatly pained by racism, but rarely are they pained enough. That is not true because they are white, but because they are human. I know this, too well. Still, as of last week there were still no black writers on TNRs staff, and only one on its masthead. Magazines, in general, have an awful record on diversity. But if TNRs influence and importance was as outsized as its advocates claim, then the import of its racist legacy is outsized in the same measure. One cannot sincerely partake in heritage à la carte. In this sense it is unfortunate to see anonymous staffers accusing TNRs owner Chris Hughes of trying to create another BuzzFeed. If that is truly Hughess ambition, then - in at least one important way - he will have created a publication significantly more moral than anything any recent TNR editor ever has. No publication has more aggressively dealt with diversity than BuzzFeed. And not unrelated to this diversity has been a stellar range of storytelling and analysis, that could rival - if not best - the journalism in the latest iteration of TNR. No one who works in magazines is happy to hear about writers and editors losing their jobs - even when those people have the enviable luxury of walking out on principle. And when I think of TNRs history, when I flip through Insurrections, when I examine the magazines archives, I am not so much angry as I am sad. There really was so much fine writing in its pages. But all my life I have had to take lessons from people who, in some profound way, cannot see me. TNR billed itself as the magazine for iconoclasts. But its iconoclasm ended exactly where everyone elses does - at 110th Street. Worse, TNR encouraged incuriosity about what lay beyond the barrier. It told its readers that my world was welfare cheats, affirmative-action babies, and Jesse Jackson. And that white people - or any people - would be urged to such ignorance by their Harvard-bred intellectual leadership is deeply sad. The in-flight magazine of Air Force One should have been better. Perhaps it still can be. tinyurl/otpv2nw
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 10:40:18 +0000