reading: Bad News by Batya Ungar-Sargon 📚
Racism is still a blight on American life. But wokeness is not how we heal; it has simply redefined the problem to the benefit of educated elites. By focusing on immutable characteristics like race, the woke moral panic has allowed economic elites to evade responsibility for their regressive view that elites should not only exist but rule. And in presenting race rather than class and income as America’s deep and worsening divide, the purveyors of wokeness have ended up comforting white, liberal elites, even as they have called them white supremacists.
It pains me to agree with her because I really dislike her appearances on Real Time, but I bought this book to learn about opinions I don’t necessarily agree with.
A press that is so solidly on the side of that powerful few, so solidly of it, that afflicts the afflicted and comforts the comfort-able, will hasten our demise. And that should terrify us all.
She loses me here. The press, or at least every journalist I know, is not on the side of the elite.
They’re noble, fiercely curious people who insist on interrogating the powerful.
But that’s not to say they didn’t lose the plot in the last decade. I think a lot of journalists, because they’re largely all from an educated class, were imbued with certain ideals. Ideals that, as a gay man, benefit me personally.
But perhaps those ideals didn’t reflect those of the larger populace.
That’s a tough thing to realize. I am of the generation of journalists that grew up in this era, and I want to believe that what I knew was good and just and true.
But I can’t continue to live in a world that’s so painfully incongruent with this one I’m currently living in.
In other words, I was wrong.
There’s a lifetime of heartbreak in that admission.
But there’s hope, too.