Christopher F. Rufo The New Yorker’s Racialism Problem Prestige media has turned “antiracism” into a farce. It’s time to move beyond it.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-yorker-doreen-st-felix-sydney-sweeney

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.

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.