STACY MCCAIN: Will the New York Times Ever Stop Slandering the South?
Nothing is more certain to convince a Manhattan liberal that black people are victims of white racism than to tell them a story set in a Southern locale. That’s why the New York Times didn’t devote 2,400 words to white teenagers who said the n-word in New Jersey or Ohio or anywhere else but Virginia, in a town whose very name invokes Confederate symbolism. Never mind the fact that Leesburg is now just part of the massive suburban sprawl surrounding Washington, D.C., and also never mind the fact that Mimi Grove was just throwing out some hiphop slang for her teenage friends on Snapchat. No, readers of the New York Times are supposed to assume that Miss Grove’s use of the n-word is reflective of the history of Loudon County stretching back decades or even centuries into the past. This is the time-proven method by which liberal media maintain the blood-guilt narrative of Southern wickedness as a permanent fixture of American journalism.
If the Times really had nerve, it would explore a pop culture that has made the N-word safe to use by countless rappers and Hollywood filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, pushing it into the mainstream. As the late Stanley Crouch wrote in 2011:
But there’s a larger point here. Anyone actually worried about the demeaning and dehumanizing effects of ethnic insults made about black people should leave “Huckleberry Finn” alone and turn their attention to the minstrel updates of hip hop. At least since the emergence of gangster rap in the early 1980s, that pop idiom has celebrated thugs and borderline whores known as “video vixens.”
This led to a black joke that says as long as there is hip hop of the most popular kind, all white bigots can relax and take a nap. All of their claims of violence and irresponsible sexual behavior have been taken over by rappers who claim to be “keeping it real.”
But that would mean taking a stand by the paper which famously adopted the motto “All the news that’s fit to print” to distinguish itself from an earlier era of gutter culture. Far easier to simply destroy a young student’s life instead.