It seems that all of the conventional opinion of America's chattering class is condensed and printed once a week in the pages of the New Yorker. In normal times, this process yields some good writing and reporting. In certain periods, the magazine has produced some magnificent work. But we have not lived in normal times for the past decade. The conventional opinions of the chattering classes have ranged from delusional idealism to racialist fever dreams, and worse.
The most recent illustration of this trend is an essay by New Yorker staff writer Doreen St. Felix, who penned a screed about the blonde starlet Sydney Sweeney. Sweeney, St. Felix mused, represents a fantasy "Aryan princess" to some of her fans, with her much-discussed breasts placed in dark contrast with "the Black man's hunger for ass."
This is not the New Yorker of the past; it is something different. What is it, exactly? Beginning a decade ago, the New Yorker, like many of its peers, jumped on the "diversity and inclusion" bandwagon and declared itself an "anti-racist" institution. The magazine, owned by Condé Nast, set explicit racial quotas in hiring and pledged to "talk about racism" at every opportunity.
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The magazine was capitulating to critical race ideologies. It snapped up writers, like St. Felix, who is Black, to provide "representation" not only of favored demographic groups but also of a certain flavor of opinion.
After St. Felix's Sweeney essay, a colleague sent me a link to one of her posts on X. "I hate white men," the post read in part. Out of curiosity, I searched her history for the phrases "white men" and "white people," and discovered a cesspool of bigotry: "Whiteness fills me with a lot of hate"; "Whiteness must be abolished"; "We lived in perfect harmony w/ the earth pre whiteness"; "White terrorism is a redundant phrase"; "White people['s] . . . lack of hygiene literally started the bubonic plague, lice, syphilis"; "It's tricknological, when white people invoke the holocaust"; "White people bring up the holocaust or 9/11 to affect a fake racial psychic burden." And so on.
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Most of these posts were written a decade ago, after St. Felix had graduated from Brown University and a few years before the New Yorker hired her as a writer. They are indicative of a fashionable ideology that, for the entire Black Lives Matter era, was seen as a credential for ascension into the cultural elite. For St. Felix, the credential seemingly worked.
I published screenshots of St. Felix's stream-of-hatred writing, sparking a media firestorm, with headlines in the Daily Mail, New York Post and other international outlets. Within hours, St. Felix had deleted her X account and the New Yorker had blocked me from engaging with its posts on the same platform, a rare move from a national publication.
The St. Felix affair raises an important question, summarized with characteristic acuity by the social critic Wesley Yang: "Should there be a single standard of civility, decency, and honesty that excludes this kind of poisonous racial vitriol and defamation from public life, or will we continue to give license to it so long as it is directed at white people?"
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Indeed. Publications like the New Yorker have long worn the halo of "antiracism." But "antiracism" has always had an exception, which can no longer be denied, for Whites and Jews - the "tricknological" oppressors who, in the minds of people like St. Felix, apparently deserve a steady stream of racialist vituperation. After all, the very term "tricknological" was coined by the Nation of Islam, whose leader, Louis Farrakhan, never concealed his hatreds in euphemism or intellectualization.
Some writers have called for St. Felix to make a public apology or even for the New Yorker to fire their "star writer." My preferred outcome to the Doreen St. Felix affair would be silence. Rather than engage in Kabuki theater, we should simply accept the fact that the entire premise of the BLM era was never about "antiracism." It was always a fraud, from top to bottom. If the New Yorker simply moves on without comment, none of us will have to pretend anymore or delegate our moral conscience to magazines, DEI manifestos and the rest of the rotten edifice. It is better to accept reality than to continue to live in the delusion.
The "racial reckoning" that produced writers such as St. Felix was not about helping minorities. It was about punishing the majority. All of the preening over the past decade was empty. It helped no one except grifters and hustlers who used it to vent their spleens and line their pockets.
For making this reality so plain, Doreen St. Felix deserves not our condemnation, but our gratitude. She revealed the truth for all of us to see.
This column first appeared in City Journal and also on the author's Substack.
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