Nice catch, Pete.

For some time now I have felt compelled to voice my opinion as to why African Americans have not made the leaps and bounds necessary to close racial disparity gaps…

Don’t you think apathy to their [R. Kelly, OJ, and AI] character hurts you in everyday life? If you don’t, you should stop and smell the roses.

In summation, I think blacks should be more careful in deciding whom they choose to support…

Three lines chosen more or less at random, each of which singles out the author as deserving of a slap. Referring to a nebulously-defined African-American community, based on certain shared aspects of the, quote, African-American experience, is one thing. But how is your randomly-chosen black citizen to hold themselves accountable for R. Kelly putting it in some middle-schoolers? Isn’t the idea to get beyond treating every member of an ethnic group as a standard-bearer for that group? With deference to Pete’s choice of headline, this piece is to the point. (There’s a point to be made about OJ – McWhorter covers it at length in Authentically Black – but Williams doesn’t really get within five miles of it here.)

Williams isn’t a racist, at least not on this evidence, but he’s a shitty writer, and with phrases like the ones above virtually guaranteed to set everybody’s teeth on edge, it’s hard to imagine what else he hoped to accomplish with this godawful column.

However: firing the guy? To speak colloquially, bollocks. It’s a horrible piece of journalism, which they never should have run in the first place – but the responsibility for that rests with the editor. If resignations are going to be tendered or jobs are going to be lost, that’s the first one on the list. Choosing to run the piece and then hanging the writer out to dry is shameful.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2004 at 15:00 by olly and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.