On TNR
The last century of The New Republic has bestowed a rich legacy of lessons, both positive and negative, on race. At its best moments, the magazine has been a beacon of fact-based reporting and a forum for rich debate over racial issues. At its worst, the magazine has fallen under the sway of racial theorizing and crackpot racial lore. Moving forward, any reformation program should start by honestly acknowledging the past. The range of non-white voices in the magazine needs to expand, not just by having more nonwhite writers, but by having writers who aren't just talking to an imaginary white audience but are addressing readers who look like the world. The magazine has to avoid the temptation to be an insular insider journal for the elite and recognize that its finest moments are when analytical intelligence is joined with grassroots reporting. The magazine's well-stocked and complex legacy shouldn't be jettisoned, but it can be reformed, built on, and made new.
-- Jeet Heer on TNR
Likewise, before his fabrication of articles was revealed in 1998, Stephen Glass penned a 1996 piece about the Washington, D.C. taxi cab industry that seemed to cater to Peretz's appetite for melodramas illustrating black cultural pathology. The article drew an invidious contrast between hard-working, uncomplaining immigrants who believed in the American dream versus entitled black Americans who spurned honest work (and chased after white women). The piece included imaginary details such as, "Four months ago, a 17-year-old held a gun to Eswan's head while his girlfriend performed oral sex on the gunman." Glass also claimed to be in a cab when a young African American man mugged the driver, and celebrated the exploits of a fictional Kae Bang, the "Korean cab-driver- turned-vigilante" who used martial arts to beat up black teenagers who tried to rob his cab. It's fair to say that Glass's fabrications in this piece and others did more damage to The New Republic than any event in its history. And it's hard to accept a piece like the above would have been published in a magazine which wasn't already inclined toward a pernicious view of African Americans.
Sometimes, The New Republic's cluelessness about race was almost comic. A 1991 piece by David Samuels--under the headline "The 'Black Music' That Isn't Either"--assured the magazine's readers that rap music was neither black nor music, and would be a passing fad. "Whatever its continuing significance in the realm of racial politics, rap's hour as innovative popular music has come and gone," Samuels wrote. The issue's cover showed a white teenager as "The Real Face of Rap."
Peretz's New Republic did occasionally publish racially astute pieces, such as Caryl Phillips's 1996 essay on Trinidadian radical Marxist historian C.L.R. James, and Peter Beinart's 1997 piece on black-Latino tensions, but such contributions were the exception.
Whatever the problems had been with the early twentieth-century The New Republic, it published a spectrum of black voices, so readers (both black and white) had a sense of how black America thought about things. It published the conservative Washington, the centrist White, the militant Du Bois, and voices more radical than Du Bois himself, such as Du Bois's Marxist critic Abram L. Harris.
Under Peretz, with very few exceptions, the magazine printed only the more conservative end of black political discourse: Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Juan Williams, Stanley Crouch, Randall Kennedy, and Glenn Loury.
Consider, for example, the black intellectuals who didn't write for the magazine: Toni Morrison, Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, Nell Painter, Robin Kelly, Ismael Reed, and Brent Staples, to name a few. This didn't stop the magazine from trumpeting "The Decline of the Black Intellectual" on its cover in 1995; the accompanying 5,500-word essay by Wieseltier focused on exactly one intellectual, Cornel West. In fact, black intellectual life was vibrant at the time; it was just absent from The New Republic.Sometimes, The New Republic's cluelessness about race was almost comic. A 1991 piece by David Samuels--under the headline "The 'Black Music' That Isn't Either"--assured the magazine's readers that rap music was neither black nor music, and would be a passing fad. "Whatever its continuing significance in the realm of racial politics, rap's hour as innovative popular music has come and gone," Samuels wrote. The issue's cover showed a white teenager as "The Real Face of Rap."
Peretz's New Republic did occasionally publish racially astute pieces, such as Caryl Phillips's 1996 essay on Trinidadian radical Marxist historian C.L.R. James, and Peter Beinart's 1997 piece on black-Latino tensions, but such contributions were the exception.
Whatever the problems had been with the early twentieth-century The New Republic, it published a spectrum of black voices, so readers (both black and white) had a sense of how black America thought about things. It published the conservative Washington, the centrist White, the militant Du Bois, and voices more radical than Du Bois himself, such as Du Bois's Marxist critic Abram L. Harris.
Under Peretz, with very few exceptions, the magazine printed only the more conservative end of black political discourse: Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Juan Williams, Stanley Crouch, Randall Kennedy, and Glenn Loury.
Consider, for example, the black intellectuals who didn't write for the magazine: Toni Morrison, Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, Nell Painter, Robin Kelly, Ismael Reed, and Brent Staples, to name a few. This didn't stop the magazine from trumpeting "The Decline of the Black Intellectual" on its cover in 1995; the accompanying 5,500-word essay by Wieseltier focused on exactly one intellectual, Cornel West. In fact, black intellectual life was vibrant at the time; it was just absent from The New Republic.
