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Time to cancel that Esquire subscription

Jill

Unless, of course, you subscribe to the view that “It’s time for ascended blacks to wish niggers good luck,” because “That which retards us is the worst of “us” … Them being niggers.”

See if you can stomach the rest of it. I’m sure Esquire’s white, wealthy, male target audience will really relate to what John Ridley has to say. Because after all, blaming gangsta rap and single mothers and welfare queens is so much fun.

Ridley also shows the appropriate sympathy for Michael Richards, who was goaded into calling a couple of out-of-control “n-words” what they actually are (“No, I’ll save my sympathy for some real victims. Not a couple of “N words” who walked into a comedy club.”).

Because, you know, hecklers deserve to be attacked for their race, not for their actions. And then we’ll pretend that their race doesn’t at all influence the perception of their actions. Over IM, the ever-brilliant Amanda adds, “The less right you have to talk in the eyes of the hierarchy, the louder you seem. Which is probably why black women are seen as the loudest people ever.”

Esquire article via Dave on the listserve for NYU’s Review of Law and Social Change.

18 thoughts on Time to cancel that Esquire subscription

  1. Oh, boo hoo blubber blubber. Those big nasty Negroes are so mean to accomplished black folks like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice. Why should Thomas and Rice get criticized, just because they side with a political party that wins elections by appealing to racists?

    Esquire hasn’t been relevant since Joe Namath retired. It’s been coasting on its reputation from the Harold Hayes years.

    As for this Ridley, he’s playing the same game as Bill Cosby: Tell the white man what he wants to hear.

  3. I think Chris Rock needs to sue this guy for plagiarism from his “niggers vs. black people” routine in a 5-6 year old comedy routine. Of course, Chris didn’t equate niggerdom with insufficient enthusiasm for the disastrous foreign policy of an incompetent expert in Soviet affairs and the guy gave an infamously inaccurate presentation before the United Nations who still hasn’t apologized for his role in enabling the current perpetual war.

    As for the sociological statistics at the start of his article, maybe he should consider the absolute atrocity that is the nation’s failed War on Drugs, where billions of dollars in futile law enforcement and contracts for prison construction are seen as the answer to human addiction.

  5. I read the article and was troubled by a lot of the language. But – and without returning to the article – I think I concluded that if you pared the article down to its central argument, it was reasonable. Perhaps I pare too much, in order to protect my subscription for the fashion commentary. But that, coupled with the revulsion at some of the cheap language shots, was my initial reaction.

  6. Well, yeah, it has a nice celebration of some, as far as I can tell, genuinely good work by Rice and Powell, stuck in the middle of an infuriating bunch of crap about niggers dragging upstanding black people down. As for Rice and Powell, well, I was gravely disappointed in Powell for providing cover for Bush’s disastrous war with Iraq, and have problems with Rice’s foreign policy role as well, but that doesn’t mean I can’t allow some positives to their record; actually, at one time Colin Powell was the potential presidential candidate who’d have been most likely to lure me across the lines to vote Republican.

    But, the rest of this article, even if you lose the cheap language shots, isn’t making a point about responsibility (which I suppose is what Ridley wants to think he’s doing); it’s making a point about how good, upstanding folks should just write off those other folks who are irresponsible bums. Which is a distasteful point any way I look at it, even aside from the convenient way it lets white people off the hook for any continuing racism.

  7. But, the rest of this article, even if you lose the cheap language shots, isn’t making a point about responsibility (which I suppose is what Ridley wants to think he’s doing); it’s making a point about how good, upstanding folks should just write off those other folks who are irresponsible bums.

    Exactly. And how wealthier, more privileged people should write off poorer people.

  8. He implies we should all respect Powell and Rice, but then calls them by their first names. “Dr. Condi” sounds like the name of a radio DJ, for crying out loud.

    The foreign policy of this administration is a disaster. Powell and Rice certainly bear part of that responsibility.

    Then there’s the assertion about giving Rumsfeld and Cheney “…seats at the otherwise progressive table?” Progressive? In what bizarro world has Dubya had a “progressive” anything?

    All the esquire article proves is that you get rewarded by telling overentitled white guys what they want to hear. Heck, Esquire magazine itself if proof of that.

    Having said that, he did have a point when talking about the Michael Richards incident. Those guys were heckling boors. At the same time, it’s stand up comedy–there *will* be heckling. If a comedian isn’t prepared to deal with hecklers without resorting to what Richards did, (s)he has no business being on the stage.

    I second norbizness’s assertion on the war on drugs. There’s so much wrong with that scenario. You could write a book. Many have.

  9. Um…hopefully I’ll have something interesting to say. Once I find my eyeballs and screw them back in my head. That article blew them right now. Two words: Sister Rand.

    Sister.

    Rand.

  10. Oh, Jesus H. Christ in a quilted handbasket. Look: I really, really like John Ridley’s work as a novelist and screenwriter myself, but that Esquire piece is full of crap. We’re talking serious stinky ass with a gross hairy crack.

    Setting aside the issue of his use of the n-word, his organizing metaphor – that black people reached the pinnacle of political and social power in 2001 when Rice and Powell were sent to China to secure the release of American airmen – is just completely bonkers. According to Ridley, this was a some or another watershed moment in black history and it was promptly spoiled by two groups of you-know-whats, one bunch being the black overseers of the so-called “liberal plantation,” and the other being the, well, niggers in Cincy who rioted just about then, thereby pushing Powell and Rice’s foreign policy coup off the cable news channels and front pages.

    Are we supposed to take anything built on the above historical fantasy seriously? I really don’t know where Ridley gets that “[f]or eleven days in 2001, two blacks ran our country,” as there’s no way to meaningfully construe the admittedly important dispatching of two (2!) black folks to a diplomatic hot zone as them running the country. It’s overblown bullshit, really, delivered by Ridley in his trademark, clipped, pulp prose, and as overblown bullshit it calls into question both his writerly instincts and his political judgement. As in the tossed off comment quoted below, Ridley seems most interested in bending events into shapes that strike him as “Ridley-ian” (sp?), truth and accuracy be damned. That suggests to me that he lacks genuine interest in the questions he claims to be considering – black empowerment, sucess and failure – all of which are really among the most serious questions a black writer and thinker can consider.

    About that tossed off comment I mentioned:

    Dick Cheney and Donald Rusted were, are, old-school relics. Political leftovers of the Nixon-Ford years, they are the Retro Guard, sporting metaphorical wide ties emblematic of the ’72 landslide.

    Sure, I guess that’s a neatly breezy slice of prose, excellent voiceover even dialogue for a P.I. standing under a bodega awning and pulling his collar close against the rain, but as a political analysis of the Bush White House? Ass, like I said.

    I know that it’s often confusing when two members of a group offer up radically different visions of their truth to outsiders, but there are broad sections of Ridley’s essay that plainly scan as ridiculous no matter who you are. If he’s wrong about China there’s a good chance that he’s full of it on the proverbial nigger shit, too.

  11. That suggests to me that he lacks genuine interest in the questions he claims to be considering – black empowerment, sucess and failure – all of which are really among the most serious questions a black writer and thinker can consider.

    You know, unless it’s his own empowerment and success at the expense of hyperbolizing “failures” of monolithic poor black America.

    In the overall scheme of this statement here:

    In the forty years since the Deal was brokered, since the Voting Rights Act was signed, there have been successes for blacks. But there are still too many blacks in prison, too many kids aggrandizing the thug life, and way too many African-Americans doing far too little with the opportunities others earned for them.

    I’d characterize this as an example of African-Americans, in Ridley’s words, “doing far too little with the opportunities others earned for [him].”

    Dr. Condi and Colin personify what niggers have forgotten: All that matters is accomplishment. The very pinnacle of ascendancy is the ability to live and work without regard for the sentiments of others and with, as Sister Rand would tell us, a selfish virtue.

    Way to misunderstand many different intellectual and ethical conceptions — including Objectivism — in a very short paragraph!

  13. The perverse thing is that this strain of black neocon blather is invariably produced under precisely the same conditions of white-approved mediocrity, racial nepotism, and threat of “mau-mauing” that folks like Ridley claim is the M.O. of “the black overseers of the liberal plantation.” His piece is obviously off on a number of levels, and without the cover of racial difference and controversy, I doubt any of Esquire’s senior editors would have found it up to snuff.

    There are lots of black neocons out there who actually do solid work in their own areas of expertise, it’s just that they don’t know jack about fuck-else. Harvard’s Orlando Patterson, for example, famously defended Clarence Thomas (just a poor black man who mistook a feminist harridan for a sister!) but the work he produces for his day job – the history of slavery in Jamaica – is pretty great. Also, John McWhorter, who is likely the biggest black neo-conservative tool in America, turns out to be a fine linguist whose signature work (why are there no Spanish creoles/patois languages in the new world, only French and Fnglish?) has always struck my non-expert eyes as worth reading.

    Guys like McWhorter and Ridley have been elevated by white opinion and neocon think-tank industries that have no way to “error check” their work, this precisely because (chicken or egg?) those dudes were imported in the first place to give the shop some black-related expertise. This isn’t just a political / theoretical problem but an organizational and management problem that any media that pursues affirmative action faces vis-a-vis its black opinion makers. When essential blackness is precisely what gets someone past the receptionist , it becomes politically and practically, er, loaded, for the institution to then go back and independently assess their race-related claims. (Forget about it when those claims dovetail with the institution’s racism.) The only thing an Esquire can conceivably do is make sure that McWhorter or Ridley aren’t the only black dudes in the room, or, barring that, put their work in an interactive/community forum where the audience can error check. (Obviously, having white editors who “get it,” have credibility with their black writers and don’t lose their cookies when confronted with the occasional racial fracaso helps as well. I edited a black-audience publication where my managing editor was a 5’3 blond from Kansas named Kate, and besides being the most exacting editor on our staff, she knew more about “black stuff” than a lot of my black writers. Unfortunately, those kind of white folks don’t exactly grow on trees.)

    Ridley, to his credit, posted both pieces linked above to the Huff Post and seems to be reasonably engaged with the discussions going on in the comments. (I find it interesting that after a string of dumb race related-posts he just did a fairly rote and under-read “Iraq Disaster!!” post. Is someone trying to shore up their Democrat bona fides?)

    I’m not selling internet-panacea shares here, it just seems to me that parallel, community discussions sum up to a bigger, more accurate picture of these issues than what you get from the trad media/opinion machine. The discussions on race that take place in forums like this are profoundly important because the dynamics between us, or even between us and Ridley, are so radically different than Ridley’s relationship to his editor at Esquire. I mean, I’m pretty sure that dude took Ridley out to lunch.

  14. I’m not selling internet-panacea shares here, it just seems to me that parallel, community discussions sum up to a bigger, more accurate picture of these issues than what you get from the trad media/opinion machine. The discussions on race that take place in forums like this are profoundly important because the dynamics between us, or even between us and Ridley, are so radically different than Ridley’s relationship to his editor at Esquire. I mean, I’m pretty sure that dude took Ridley out to lunch.

    Not to mention readers and potential readers.

  15. The perverse thing is that this strain of black neocon blather is invariably produced under precisely the same conditions of white-approved mediocrity, racial nepotism, and threat of “mau-mauing” that folks like Ridley claim is the M.O. of “the black overseers of the liberal plantation.”

    Golly, where have I heard “mau-mauing” lately?

  16. Golly, where have I heard “mau-mauing” lately?

    Hey, hey, no reason to get snarky. This is the blogosphere.

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