Today’s NY Times website has a yuuuuge headline that screams:
“Trump’s Cabinet: The Whitest and Most Male” since Reagan.
This is illustrated by a huuuuge graphic that takes up half the screen.
The graphic is a bar graph, made up of small pictures of the faces of all the cabinet members in previous administrations.
Each bar in the bar graph is labelled with words “number of WHITE MEN”
Just in case you didn’t panic enough, the Times will help you: the words “White men” are in a different font,
in HUGE BOLD RED LETTERS !!!
Yes,be warned, America: there are WHITE MEN in the government!!!
Jeezz…the liberal elite on the coasts just don’t get it.
A whole bunch of white men just voted, all over the heartland. We call that democracy.
The results were shocking.
So maybe, just maybe, the NY times should do a little soul-searching and ask why.
And maybe, just maybe, they might find the answer on their own front page.
Identity politics can backfire on you.
I have two gripes here:
One is the usual liberal racism, with the assumption that skin color determines everything.
And my other gripe is the quality of journalism I’d expect from the NYTimes:
Ranking people by race, with scary headlines, is worse than Fox News screaming about Muslims in burkas.
How about having an intelligent discussion over the qualifications of the cabinet appointees, not their skin color?
Headlines like this show me that the people living in their bubble on coasts have a lot to learn, and need to understand why plenty of good, honest people in the heartland are fed up with them.
So, back in 2008, when Obama was first elected… say he’d named his cabinet, and every single one of them was a black guy. Just, right down the line, every single one of them was African American. Would you think that was… kind of weird? Like, maybe Obama had gone out of his way just to hire black people? You might even think it was some cause for concern, yes?
Nah, you’re the one who doesn’t get it. To a lot of people, the government being all rich white men is an issue. To some other people it isn’t. To the first group it doesn’t magically stop being an issue if the second group are whiny about having it pointed out, or if the second group includes a lot of white women, or if the second group includes the president.
Do you think all conservative news should just have shut their doors when Obama won, in an actual landslide compared to Trump, in 2008?
Reporting the demographics of the cabinet over time isn’t racist.
Feel free to clarify, but these two statements seem contradictory. I interpreted the first as saying that white men got Trump elected, therefore the cabinet should reflect this and be mostly white men, but then you say it’s racist to assume skin color determines everything. Regardless, millions of minorities (and women) voted for Trump.
Neither is reporting on radical Islamic terrorism, for example.
But what you choose to blast in bold red type on the front page shows your bias.
I’d expect a little less racism from the NYTimes.
What I meant was that playing the race card constantly for decades has backfired on the democrats, and the time has come to be a little more sensitive. Poor white folks count, too.
You’re right. I’m no fan of Trump, either. But I judge political candidates by the qualifications, not their skin color. The NY Times should do the same.
Rich, white men tend to have a particular perspective on the world. Not always, but usually. Particularly republican rich white men, who, as part of their political beliefs, reject the concept of “privilege” wholesale. When that’s the only perspective present in government, that’s a problem. It means other perspectives, particularly less privileged ones, are likely to go ignored. As has often been the case. The problem is not “there are white men in the government”. There have always been white men in the government. Lots of 'em. The problem is “there are just about only white men in the government”.
And once again, I have to ask - what, exactly, is the existential threat that leads to “white identity politics”? Black identity politics is, more often than not, fighting against a system that sees them as unworthy of equal rights, or which consistently brutalizes them. Gay identity politics is based on the struggle for basic human rights. Both these ideas have seen intense pushback - “Black Lives Matter” is a four-letter word in conservative circles, despite essentially existing to spread the message that we should do something about police violence against African-Americans. What, exactly, is “white identity politics” fighting for? The right not to get told to check their privilege?
The idea of a “racially diverse” government is simply a marketing tool. The government never actually represents the people’s interest, but the presence of a few people of color make it more plausible to argue that it does.
I don’t care if the “old boys network” is wrinkled and pale or a beautiful multicultural palette worthy of a college brochure, they are a small minority ruling over a large population. That will always be the case with government.
Are you defining that minority as “people in government”? Cause that is of course tautologically true, but hardly interesting or a relevant argument against a diverse government?
Are you talking about “rich enough to run a US style campaign or donate enough to such to get picked for cabinet”? Then I have to point out that not every country has quite the same incestuous relationship between money and politics as the US, I doubt any are completely free of it, but Norway for instance has plenty of politicians in and out of government who are not raking in dough.
Mentioning race isn’t racism, per se. There isn’t much diversity in Trump’s cabinet choices. To me, it’s more significant that they’re all rich ( including Carson and De Vos) than that they’re mostly white men.
Even more significant than than race or wealth is the fact that so many of them are utterly unfit for their “jobs.”
But the fact that Trump’s cabinet will be much whiter than other modern cabinets is another proof that He Doesn’t Care. (Or his handlers don’t.) Like that dreadful Inauguration Speech–that was the time to repeat comforting phrases about bringing all Americans together. (After such an ugly campaign & losing the popular vote.) But he bleated on about “America First.” They aren’t even pretending to care.
I know that much of the country wishes that the press would pretend that racism is over, as they do, and they don’t want to vote for anyone who is interested in combating the modern extent of racism and bigotry. That attitude probably helped Trump a lot. But I’m glad that many newspapers haven’t back down from reporting things like this.
I don’t think there’s any way to “reach out” to folks who think that this kind of headline or story is racist in a way that would both assuage their concerns and reasonably address the myriad of problems caused by or related to racism and bigotry. A lot of these folks are probably decent and caring people, and include some of my relatives. A lot of decent and caring people, including my grandparents, similarly opposed the Civil Rights movement, or legalizing interracial marriages.
They’ll eventually figure this stuff out, or they won’t. The Democrats don’t need them – they (we) just need to motivate disinterested Democratic voters.
Or if I’m wrong, and the Democrats do need them to win, then there’s no solution in the short term, since giving into racists/bigots and racism/bigotry, or those who are uninterested or deluded about the existence and extent of racism/bigotry, is the same as condoning it. And in the long term at least we’ll be on the right side of history.
I understand that my attitude turns off a lot of people – just like my dad’s attitude in the 60s, which caused terrible fights between him and his father, that the Civil Rights movement was legitimate and interracial marriage shouldn’t be outlawed turned off my grandfather – but I see no other way to do the right thing and make the country better. I’m happy to work with anyone on projects and policies that improve the country, but I’m certainly not going to stop talking about difficult issues just because some people find them difficult.
I think the NYT is doing its job and providing a service to everyone. Rich white conservatives will want to know their plan is working, and the rest of us will want to know that too. Did anyone think Trump had a different meaning when he said “Make America Great Again?”
Just as a comparison (and I know that in a multitude of ways, the countries cannot and should not be compared), a little over a year ago Trudeau announced his Cabinet. It’s gender balanced. It has people who aren’t white. It has people with disabilities. It “looks like Canada.”
Trump’s Cabinet doesn’t look like the US.
OTOH, based on the hearings, it doesn’t look like he actually speaks to his cabinet members about policy or anything. Bringing perspectives to the table isn’t part of their job because there is no table in the Trump administration.
Was I making an argument against diverse government? No. What I said was the fact that a government is “racially” diverse does not change the “tautological fact” that you find uninteresting. That is the government is always one of the minority. You’ll find many that believe that US democracy is a government of the majority, it is not, and I have a hell of a time trying to convince people that this is the case. So if it is tautological, one would think it would be an easier argument to make.
“one of the minority” is not what I described. If you’ve been trying to argue that the US cabinet has fewer people then the population of the US and have failed to do so, then you’re not very good at explaining yourself. If that’s not what you’ve been doing then you’re not very good at explaining yourself, and you failed to understand what I wrote.