The New York Times today ran a demeaning Op-Ed about Tim Scott, the Republican Congressman from South Carolina who was just appointed to the seat being vacated by Jim DeMint.
The Op-Ed was written by U. Penn. Political Science Professor Adolf L. Reed Jr., The Puzzle of Black Republicans, and accused Republicans of engaging in tokenism by appointing Scott:
But this “first black” rhetoric tends to interpret African-American political successes — including that of President Obama — as part of a morality play that dramatizes “how far we have come.” It obscures the fact that modern black Republicans have been more tokens than signs of progress….
No number of Tim Scotts — or other cynical tokens — will change that.
In response to my post about the Op-Ed, SoccerDad suggested a look at The NY Times Masthead and Editorial Board. Here’s that look:
There is a profound lack of diversity.
I would never be so insulting as to accuse the NY Times of tokenism, not out of respect for the NY Times, but out of respect for the person.
Update: I would never be so insulting as to accuse the U. Penn Political Science Department of tokenism
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“…not out of respect for the NY Times, but out of respect for the person.”
Yeah, but you are a good man, Prof.
As opposed to the hate-twisted Collectivist Adolf L. Reed Jr.
Well, and the rest of the Times staff.
Diversity for thee but not for me.
Tokenism at the New York Times would be having even one notoriously conservative member of the editorial board.
Basically, you have to be a former president, cabinet member, or billionaire to get anything published in the New York Times that strays from Liberal Orthodoxy.
At least they didn’t call him an “Uncle Tim”
And these people wonder why those of us in flyover country have trouble coming up with any degree of give a shit when a hurricane hits New York.
My gaydar didn’t go off, either.
I will. they hired a token black person.
this allows them to feel morally superior as they hired based on skin color.
Most of us only care about character, they care about color.
What are you talking about? Using the Elizabeth Warren metric, I counted one black guy, one Asian lady, and fifteen Cherokee Indians.
My thoughts exactly.
I don’t know about Cherokee Indians, but certainly lots of members of a Tribe represented.
Which one of those pictured is the token evangelical? Or the token social conservative? Token libertarian? Token defense hawk? Token TEA partier?
The monolithic left deems to talk about the diversity of others?
Gotcha loud and clear.
Professor, I trust you will hear about this “racist” blogpost from directly from the NYT, if only as token retort unless they send a _____ _______-________ to do it for them.
What? A token black and token east Asian, amounting to under 6% of the editorial board for each demographic. Said another way, a mere 12% of non-white ethnicity versus the sum of 17% for both ethnic groups swithin gthe population. Kick that up to 33% if you include Hispanic demographics….versus 18% if one of the whiteys is Hispanic. Diversity is in the liberal mind, evidently, not in the actual performance. You must believe as I say, citizens; what I do is none of your business.
” … out of respect for the person”
Why would you have any respect for someone that would allow themselves to be associated with the New York Times? Seems misplaced to me.
Did I mention that I don’t buy the NYT any more? My hope is that enough people like me might make the same choice and starve the beast.
My understanding is that the beast is starving. The New York Times is losing money year after year, with very few exceptions, and it has not had the Wall Street Journal’s success with a pay wall.
The big hope for the MSM is to be “too big to fail” and get a big, fat gov’t bailout.
Instead of just being the government’s bitch for free, now they’ll be a full-blown whore and get paid for it!!!!
As Obama has preached to the nation, white people act stupidly. Only blacks have authority to speak on race or education.
Since race is so important to these guys, they should put full racial pedigrees in their bios. And maybe include their political pedigrees as well, to expose inbred liberals.
Inbred liberals huh? Kind of makes one wonder if anyone plays the banjo at office parties.
As an inbred conservative banjo player, I take great offense at that.
Worth mentioning again the memoir of the first black editor of WaPo. Who had a lot to say about his colleagues .
Not much off it complimentary.
Link please. I’d like to know more.
OK I have put my gypsy turban on & swivelled my crystal ball back in time.
The original post was on WaPo & I questioned their diversity. I proffered a NYT example but time has caught up & made me look a genius.
Gerald M Boyd
My Times in Black and White.
Race and Power at the NY Times.
Laurence Hill Books 2010 $27.
There is a review Online by NYT .
They are not even diverse as to sex. Six women and eleven men…seventeen liberal communists. Never bought this rag. I got a flyer asking for a subscription a few years ago. I sent it back with large black letters written on it “do not defile my mail box with this communist rag again”. I never heard from them again. Do you think they realized I was turning them down?
Hmmm….
10 old white men
5 old white women
1 tokan Asian woman
1 tokan Black man
Well, this seems pretty normative to me. A typical hypocritical liberal progressive gathering of the commune leadership.
Why yes it does….some folk are more equal that other folk.
I’m looking at the NYT’s Masthead and Editorial Board and I’m not seeing “signs of progress.” But I forgot. These are the cultivated elect. They have already “progressed” well above the rest of us.
[…] When they’re finished looking down their noses at Congressman Tim Scott, the editors at the New York Times may want to look into a mirror and examine the stunning lack of diversity in their newsroom. […]
[…] onto the op-ed page of the country’s most esteemed newspaper (whose editorial board is itself nearly lily white) tells you all you need to know about how mainstream the tactic is among liberals. As an antidote, […]
It must be so very comforting not to have to think about WHY some blacks are Republicans.
The fact of a predominately white, entirely leftist NYT board might be a good place to start that inquiry.
Pretty much all white board.
As a nonwhite American, I find the NYT to be one of the most racist newspapers in this country.
glad I no longer subscribe to their crap and race baiting.
I will add one other thing, as a former liberal myself, I find white liberals to be some of the most racist vile disgusting filthy people I’ve ever seen or read. They are so desperate to prove they aren’t racists, they are racist towards pretty any other nonwhite person who disagrees with them and their race baiting nonsense.
At least the KKK is open with their racism, liberals, especially white liberals, just like they to pretend they aren’t racists.
The head of the editorial board of the liberal rag here in town (Rochester) cited the NYT’s editorial, albeit on his own blog contained within their site:
http://blogs.democratandchronicle.com/editorial/?p=26645
The comments under Lawrence’s racist diatribe are interesting, black and white alike blasted him for his comments.
Rochester Conservative clued me into the Times’ editorial and Lawrence’s:
http://rochesterconservative.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=70359&sid=99cb2ce1eaae4652982ed4ae6ab81fc4
If I had a token every time the NYT used “tokenism”, I’d have enough of them to ride the subway free for life!!!
Everybody sing…..
One token over the line, sweet Jesus
One token over the line
Sittin’ downtown at the New York Times
One token over the line.
Okay, mow that’s funny!
What I find facinating is that of the males in the photo the men who know how to shave are outnumbered by the bearded ones. I guess the shaved one’s can pose as moderates.
When I’m driving and I see a political bumper sticker on a car, I always look inside to see “what one looks like”, whether it’s an environmentalist, an NRA member, Obama supporter, etc.
This year, I looked at a lot of drivers who had Obama/Biden bumper stickers. They were almost universally men in their 60s with facial hair.
I realized that they were men whose political values were forged around 1971. They had a filthy beard or moustache back then, and they never lost it. Those were their “good old days” when pot was plentiful and sex came without consequence. Problem is that 40 years later, they’re still stuck in that world.
And undoubtedly, the most important election issue for them in 2012 was making sure that we withdraw from Vietnam immediately.
This is the sort of thing that irritates me the most about the Democrats/Liberals. And I will never understand how we got to this place because its frankley more offensive to American blacks than an old white guy like me.
Liberals seem to believe they still own all the blacks in this country and any Republican black is treated about like a runaway slave..and heaven forbid the guy is a conservative Republican…now he is elevated to runaway having committed a “crime”.
What on earth can be more racist than advancing the fiction that because a Tim Scott or Justice Thomas doesnt agree with some imagined black “mob” he is not qualified to represent them in anyway?
Here is a great rebutt to the times piece
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/12/19/racism-at-the-times/
WONDERFUL, Professor J…!!
I’m forwarding this post and thread to 10-Liberal/Lefty friends to get their day started with irritation. NO editorial page diversity at Pravda? How’bout Izvestia & The Daily Worker..cough..I mean The WaPo and L.A.Times..?
Forget the NYT editorial board…check out the UPenn Polisci department…31 faculty, of which Reed is one of two TOKEN blacks. And not one single, solitary Guatamalan. An appalling lack of diversity.
I’m not sure what those things are in the pictures, but most of them need ironing.
It’s even worse than it looks – they all went to the same five schools:
Brown
Yale
Harvard
UC Berkeley
Columbia
Now that’s diversity for you!
“[This ‘first black’ rhetoric] obscures the fact that modern black Republicans have been more tokens than signs of progress. . . .”
Any time race is a factor in selection, it raises questions of tokenism vs. genuine progress. However, what evidence is there that Tim Scott’s appointment, in particular, was more a function of tokenism than genuine progress? What evidence is there that the GOP practices tokenism more than Democrats? I can name a LOT of instances in which the Dems could have been accused of engaging in tokenism based on the high-fives that greeted their “first Black this” or “first woman that.” Geraldine Ferraro, anyone?
And if Professor Adolf thinks “tokenism” is so bad, what does he have to say about affirmative action? With AA, there isn’t even the pretense that the person’s hiring, promotion, or enrollment into a prestigious institution was the fruit of genuine accomplishment. Even if Tim Scott WAS selected, in part, because he is black (which I am supposing just for the sake of argument), how can the party of AA criticize the GOP for this? It’s sheer hypocrisy.
When Jim Dement resigned from the Senate, he left a sizable conservative hole. Gov. Haley refilled that void with the appointment of another solid conservative in Tim Scott. This is not affirmative action and his race is irrelevant.
I am sure that Jayson Blair was a big a disappointment to the NYTimes as Øbama is to the country.
They were both elected for the same reasons, and are equivalent frauds.
Pardon me: I meant “selected”, not “elected”….
Both were certainly selected by the press.
IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE?
I suggest you do a photo array of Professor Reed’s own political science department at U. Penn. — the array will look quite similar to your array of the New York Times leadership. Photos of 30 of the 31 “Standing Faculty” members (all but Marie Gottchalk) are here: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/polisci/people. Here’s here photo: http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/volumes/v56/n31/sas.html.
The only two obvious candidates for “token” status — to use his word, certainly not mine — are Professor Reed and one of his male colleagues, both of whom appear to be African-Americans with scholarly records heavily focused on race issues (not unusual for African-Americans in liberal arts departments focused on “diversity”). (Here I exclude the two professors who appear to be Asian-American, as Asian students are now overrepresented at elite universities like U. Penn., in comparison to their percentage of the general population.) For all I know, these two professors are superb scholars, and better than most of their colleagues. Then again, it may be that Professor Reed has been quick to accuse Republicans of engaging in “tokenism” at least in part because it is a concept he is familiar with from his own experience.
Here are the urls to the photos and bios of these two faculty members:
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/polisci/people/standing-faculty/adolph-reed
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/polisci/people/standing-faculty/daniel-gillion
Good gawd… All of this proves that “diversity” is OK as long as it’s in someone else’s back yard..
[…] Nah. Who am I kidding? http://patterico.com/2012/12/20/adolph-reed-jr-racist/ Read also : 4.https://legalinsurrection.com/2012/12…s-of-tokenism/ comments 8.ESPN talking head Rob Parker (who is incidentally black) went on a crazy rant last […]
Yeah but, you completely forget the contention by most liberals that, if you can think like a black man, know their pain, it qualifies you to be known as black (or any other minority).
Are you forgetting America’s first black president, Prof, Slick Willy himself?
As far as liberals are concerned, if you are on the side of righteousness (yeah, sure.), it doesn’t matter your color to represent!
You really have to get with the program. 😉
Certainly the Times has practiced tokenism.
It coddled Jason Blair, a young black reporter who plagerized a great number of his stories. Even before his fraudulent writings were discovered, other writers and editors had challenged the authenticity of his articles — but all warning signs were ignored.
His editor in chief went to conventions, lauding the racial progress the Times had made, citing Blair’s reputation. It all came crumbling down when a former co-writer of Blair, then writing for a Texas newspaper, complained to the Times her writings had been purloined from an article she had previously written. When the Times finally looked into it, they found over half the most recently 50 articles Blair had written contained unattributed copy written by other authors.
Tne Times, along with rest of the liberal media, sees conservative black Republicans as a danger to black Democratic hegemony. They will demonize them as Uncle Toms, tokens or whatever. All you have to look at is the treatment Justice Thomas received at his confirmation hearings. Here was and is a truly honest conservative who happens to be black.
It is the Times that is dishonest, not Tim Scott
[…] you missed the unfair story on Tim Scott by the New York Times, it’s […]