Racism Has Become a Kind of Theory of Everything
30th April 2021
Biden’s presidency has done nothing to abate racial paranoia. On the contrary, it’s getting more feverish. We’ve seen the New York Times dispense with its star Covid reporter because he once used the ‘n-word’ in a private discussion about racist language. Teen Vogue ditched its new editor over jokes she made about Asians on Twitter as a teenager. And six Dr Seuss books have been withdrawn, never to be printed again, over ‘racist images’.
No issue, it seems, can be too silly or too serious to be left unracialized. After two horrendous mass shootings in March, in Atlanta and Boulder, the bodies were barely cold before they had been presumptively declared victims of ‘white supremacist domestic terrorism’, as that authority on extremism, Rosanna Arquette, wrote hours after the Boulder shootings.