Overton window

Last month, two 17-year-olds were arrested in New Jersey for harassing and urinating on four black middle school girls. The boys allegedly called the girls the n-word and now face charges of bias discrimination and lewdness. When the story broke, if you happened to be standing on Eight Avenue in Manhattan, the faint sound of rapturous panting you heard was probably coming from the New York Times building. However, there was one small problem, the ‘racist’ boys were of Indian descent, not white. Don’t worry, the Times has a fix for such meddlesome fiddle-faddle. Bring in some stately-looking quack with lots of degrees, in this case a historian and activist named Nell Irvin Painter, to write about how race is a social construct and ‘whiteness’ evolves.