Step Aside: A modest proposal to uproot systemic racism in the media

Ironically, repressive tolerance is now the overarching dynamic of the woke revolution. White people excoriating whiteness in the name of tolerating black claims of systemic oppression is the most effective way to consolidate white power. The white excoriators are beyond reproach for two reasons. Their prescriptions are unquestionably moral. Their power in their world is punitively absolute.

Now I don’t think that Silverstein should step aside as editor of the New York Times Magazine because he is white; it is Silverstein himself who is making that argument. He has published and defended a vision of American reality in which all white people are complicit in white racism. The more powerful a white person is, the more destructive the effects of his power, and the more urgent the necessity of replacing him with a black person.

Silverstein himself is not just any editor of just any publication. If you believe that the color of someone’s skin signifies a moral quality, then the representative power of a black person in the editor’s chair would be more effective in advancing the woke agenda than any essay Silverstein might ever publish.

Imagine the symbolic value of that. And it’s not just Silverstein. Imagine the symbolic value of David Remnick, who has published one article after another validating the woke vision of systemic racism, following his own magazine’s prescriptions and yielding his place at the head of the toweringly prestigious New Yorker to a black editor.

As I said, I don’t believe that either man should resign simply because he is white. But both have endorsed, again and again, a vision of American history and society that finds outrage and pain in the fact that white people continue to occupy the loftiest positions. How can these two powerful white men not see, by the logic of what they are publishing, the painful, unjust, outrageous irony of their sponsoring one article after another making the case for the dismantlement of a system dedicated to the preservation of white power? The situation cries out for moral clarity.