YES. OUR SOURCE WAS THE NEW YORK TIMES: An Abomination. A Monster. That’s Me?

Shot:

It used to be that when someone called me an abomination, I was in the presence of a homophobe.

But a recent opinion column in Texas State University’s main newspaper damned me for a different reason. I’m abominable because I’m white.

The column wasn’t aimed at me personally but at my kind, and the Hispanic student who wrote it began by saying that “of all the white people” he had ever encountered, there were a dozen or so who rose to the level of “decent.”

The allowance that 12 of us passed muster was perhaps the most generous passage in a screed that had an unambiguous message for white people, be they “good-hearted liberals” or “right-wing extremists.”

“I hate you,” he wrote, “because you shouldn’t exist. You are both the dominant apparatus on the planet and the void in which all other cultures, upon meeting you, die.”

The headline: “Your DNA Is an Abomination.”

Yes, this was deliberate provocation. By a college student. And he’s obviously right that people of color have been systematically oppressed.

But what college newspaper would have published a column by a white student telling his black peers that they’re a wretched lot? What, beyond catharsis, did the column’s author accomplish?

—“An Abomination. A Monster. That’s Me?,” Frank Bruni, the New York Times, yesterday.

“What, beyond catharsis, did the column’s author accomplish?” Well, a shot at working for the Times, or at least greatly increasing the odds that his resume will be read there.

Chaser:

Not long ago, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the 41-year old publisher of the New York Times, was greeting people at a party in the Metropolitan Museum when a dignified older man confronted him. He told Sulzberger that he was unhappy about the jazzy, irreverent new “Styles of the Times” Sunday section. “It’s very”—the man—paused—“un-Times-ian”

“Thank you,” Sulzberger replied. He later told a crowd of people that alienating older white male readers means “we’re doing something right.”

—“Tumult at the Times,” New York magazine, November 16, 1991. It was during that era that former Timesman Peter Boyer described the atmosphere in Pinch’s newsroom as “moderate white men should die,” according to William McGowan in his exceptional 2010 book Gray Lady Down.

As with Jonathan Chait’s memorable 2015 freakout from the left over the corrosive nature of political correctness, Bruni’s mostly angry that a young fellow leftist thinks of him in the same way he and most other Timespeople dismiss half the country as unpersons. QED: Here’s NewsBusters from last year spotting “Anti-Trump NYT Columnist [Frank Bruni]: My Goal’s to Avoid the Truth About Trump Voters Until Election Day.”

Found via Christina Hoff Sommers‏, who tweets today, “Great article by [Bruni in the Times.] Just one thing he missed: Much of the current campus viciousness is inspired by a theory called intersectionality. Explained here:”

Earlier: Lorde of the Flies: Why College Students Reject Reason. Meet the poet who championed subjectivity and what is now called ‘intersectionality.’