Race

Friday

Chadwick Moore

The Buttigieg delusion

Referring to her imaginary victory in the midterm elections, the LARPing governor of Georgia, Stacey Abrams, delivered to Democrat voters a come-to-Jesus moment. ‘The notion of identity politics has been peddled for the last 10 years, and it’s been used as a dog whistle to say that we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the new voices coming into progress,’ she said to an audience last week. ‘I would argue that identity politics is exactly who we are and it’s exactly how we won.’ She didn’t win, for the record. But this is what they call in therapy a breakthrough. The Democrats seemed to have finally entered the fifth stage of grief: Acceptance, a time of adjustment, readjustment and resolve.

buttigieg

Wednesday

Jarvis Dupont

I embrace my White Guilt, and so should you

As a child, I was horrifyingly oblivious to what it meant to be a white male. I ignorantly assumed that skin color should never be an issue. I went around treating everyone the same regardless of gender or race. I look back on those days now and cringe. Thank goodness I ‘woke up’ so to speak! I was lucky to grow up on a moderately large 20,000-acre estate in a 23-bedroom Georgian house which had been in my family for at least six hundred years. For the first few years of my life, I was blissfully unaware of my standing within society. This glorious childhood utopia did not last long. At the tender age of 12, I watched a film which put it all into perspective: Ratatouille. I remember the impact this movie had on me as if it were yesterday. My mind was awash with confusion.

white guilt

Wednesday

Jesse Longman

The whitewashing of Jussie Smollett

Justice is blind. But, as it turns out, she’s not unwilling to negotiate. If it buys her some silence, she’ll play ball.Yesterday, Jussie Smollett was exonerated by the District Attorney for the state of Chicago. Like Trump, the celebrity victim has been cleared of all charges, though not cleared of wrongdoing. Whatever that means. Dead or alive? It’s Schrödinger’s cat.No one knows what to say exactly because the truth may be too damaging. After all, who knows what happens when you jail a young black gay celebrity? How much abuse would he endure? And if they do kill him, what will happen to our prison system? How much will all of this cost? Oh Jesus, make it go away!Or that’s what I figure happened. Closed doors won’t answer.

jussie smollett

Friday

Andy Ngo and Wael Taji

Black lives matter, until they’re ended by black people

On December 30, seven-year-old Jazmine Barnes was killed in a brazen drive-by shooting in Houston while in her family car, driven by her mother. Barnes’s teenage sister provided the sole description of the shooter to media and police: ‘He was white and had blue eyes.’ In interviews, the family expressed fears that they had been targeted because of their race. The response was immediate: national media, celebrities, politicians, and activists launched a crusade to find the racist white killer. Within days, activist Shaun King and his attorney Lee Merritt used social media to raise $100,000 as reward money for information leading to an arrest. Houston Texans star wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins committed one of his paychecks to the Barnes family.

jazmine barnes

Thursday

Taki

50 years after Bobby Kennedy’s murder, the ‘deep state’ still reigns supreme

New York This week 50 years ago saw the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a man I met a couple of times in the presence of Aristotle Onassis, whom some Brit clown-writer once dubbed Bobby’s murderer. (Bad books need to sell, and what better hook than a conspiracy theory implicating a totally innocent man?) I once witnessed Bobby, at a Susan Stein party, asking Onassis for funds — the 1968 election was coming up — and Ari showing Bobby his two empty trouser pockets. Bobby’s assassination did alter American politics. Violence, black anger and despair spilled out on to the streets of American cities.