Every racist writer at the New Yorker, in their own words

TL;DR it's all but ONE

I read a shocking statistic today. In an essay for

Compact Magazine

, “The Vanishing White Male Writer,”

Jacob Savage

writes:

Not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.

Not a single one.

I sat with that, as they say, and then, of course, I thought of my recent essay, “The banal provocation of Doreen St. Felix’s racism,” and the fact that, in the Remnick era, as

Andrew Sullivan

succinctly put it when sharing the piece, white male writers are deliberately censored from the pages of the magazine, yet a sociopathic racist is given a staff writing position. Remnick, by the way, refers to David Remnick, who has been the editor of The New Yorker for the last 27 years. But America’s preeminent literary magazine wasn’t always what it is today. Founded in 1925, its first editor was Harold Ross, who announced the publication in these words:

THE NEW YORKER will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called radical or high-brow.

Republican readers may already be cackling at the thought that The New Yorker has not since become radical or high-brow. In that same announcement, Ross famously said the magazine would not be “edited for the old lady in Dubuque,” but for a more cosmopolitan audience, although in recent years, it feels painfully parochial and edited for a dwindling number of leftist snobs. When a sloppy profile of Edna St. Vincent Millay, full of factual errors, prompted her mother to threaten a lawsuit, Ross established the magazine’s legendary fact-checking protocols, which journalists still today regard as breathtakingly thorough. In 1952, William Shawn brought gravitas and narrative depth, steering the magazine toward longform literary reportage. His son, by the way, is Wallace Shawn, the actor who played Wally in My Dinner with Andre and Vizzini in The Princess Bride. Next came Robert Gottlieb, an editor’s editor who later shaped books by Joseph Heller, Salman Rushdie, and my high school literary crush, Toni Morrison. Then in 1992, Tina Brown became the magazine’s first female and only non-Jewish editor and, correctly noting that the magazine had become too “stuffy,” she overhauled the magazine with celebrity profiles, eye-catching layouts, and trendy pieces that followed the news cycle. She made it fresh, but also tabloid-ish.

Amiri Baraka, who said American white men are “trained to be fags,” advocated for raping white women, hated Jews, and called whites “the enemy,” is a hero to many of the writers on this list, but was sadly never published by The New Yorker.

Remnick took over in 1998, restoring much of Shawn’s gravitas and expanding global coverage. Remnick was a journalistic hand who had started out as a reporter for The Washington Post. He globalized the magazine’s reporting, an incredible improvement, and leaned heavily into political commentary, a potentially incredible improvement that he seems to have blown by leaning away from classical liberalism and into progressive orthodoxy. In 2021, longtime archives editor Erin Overbey audited the ranks of the magazine’s editors and writers, uncovering stark racial disparities. Reviewing over 40,000 features and reviews, she found that “almost none” were edited by a black person, and only a sliver were written by black, Latino, or Asian American women. For a magazine rooted in New York, the city of the Harlem Renaissance, that record was indefensible. Aside from a single Langston Hughes poem in the 1940s, the magazine had largely ignored that cultural flowering. Overbey was blunt. She said the masthead resembled “member registries at Southern country clubs circa 1950,” and tweeted that in its 96 years, The New Yorker had run only four book reviews by African American women, or less than 0.01%. She even took a swipe at Remnick, writing:

Overbey remarked, “This shit is just embarrassing.” Michael Luo, then the website editor, emphasized “how much this issue has been prioritized.” The magazine went one step further and told The Wrap that Overbey’s assessment was unfair, but added, “There is always more work to do, and we look forward to doing it.” Ah yes, The Work.

In seeking to address its racial disparities, The New Yorker has lurched the other way, grossly overcorrecting and “fixing” the lack of nonwhite writers by unofficially banning white male ones and publishing black racists instead. But is this simply a case of one or two controversial figures, or of a broader editorial pattern? Is Doreen St. Felix the problem, or merely the product of The New Yorker’s own brand of systemic racism? Are there more fashionably racist black writers on staff? The magazine currently has, by my count, 13 black staff writers. For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to use the same standards of racism commonly invoked in leftist discourse. That means impact over intent, linguistic taint, and the “community standard” principle, which says that if a racial group deems a term offensive, that testimony is authoritative. This is rooted in standpoint theory and the recognition that marginalized groups are best positioned to define what harms them. Another test is the “reverse rule,” or the idea that if one racial group can be described in a particular way, would the same language be considered racist in reverse? Many progressives reject this “symmetry test,” arguing in Marxist terms that racism is about power dynamics, and that whiteness operates as a dominant racial formation, or a “strategic rhetoric,” with structural advantages. I’m more interested in thinking about ways in which we all would like, or not like, to be treated. So, without further ado, here are the 13 names from the Contributors page:

• Hilton Als

• Hanif Abdurraqib

• Jericho Brown

• Jelani Cobb

• Vinson Cunningham

• Rita Dove

• Doreen St. Felix

• Lauren Jackson

• Kelefa Sanneh

• Zadie Smith

• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

• Bryan Washington

• Alexis Okeowo

---

Hilton Als capitalizes blackness but not whiteness, and claims Southern culture is black culture, which I believe the young kids these days call an “erasure.” That alone would be enough to get him called racist by people like himself if the tables were turned, but it’s more annoying than offensive, if I’m being honest. But his 2013 memoir White Girls uses the titular phrase as a metaphor for dishonesty. He calls gay black men white girls for pretending to be something they’re not. He calls Michael Jackson a white girl because of his inability to be at one with his true identity. He calls Malcolm X’s mother, who did have mixed heritage, a white girl because she distances herself from the black community. In an interview with Vice, Als explained:

If it’s a black person reading this book on the subway or wherever, it’s that you’re reversing the power and taking the power back from them. You’re reversing expectations in some way. You’re saying, as a black person, that you’re allowed. Not only allowed, but you’re reading a book called White Girls. It’s a form of power and it’s a form of subversion. If they were able for centuries to have paintings or pubs called “The Black Boy,” or whatever, then why can’t we have White Girls?

I’ll take this one, Hilton. A black person on a subway reading a book isn’t subverting power. But I think I know what you mean by “you’re allowed.” If white society imposes racism on black people, then carrying a book with a deliberately provocative, and arguably racist, title is a way of flipping that script, an act of racist offense-as-revenge. And if whites had their Black Boy paintings, why can’t we have White Girls? I’ll tell you why, Hilton. The most famous Black Boy painting, probably the one you have in mind, by William Lindsay Windus in 1844, was not tied to racism, but rather:

In 1891, nearly 50 years after the painting was created, a listing in a catalogue claimed the boy was a stowaway whom Windus had met on the steps of the Monument hotel in Liverpool. According to this narrative, Windus took pity on the boy’s condition, employed him as an errand boy and sent his portrait off to a frame-maker’s shop. Serendipitously, a passing sailor spotted it, realized the child was his missing relative — and reunited the boy with his parents.

This charitable tale, with its unlikely happy ending, would have made the portrait more appealing to wealthy Victorian art buyers.

Even if the story is untrue, the fact that it would make the painting more appealing to mid-19th century British buyers says something about how “racist” they were, because remember, Britain abolished the slave trade in the empire in 1833 and until 1867, the Royal Navy’s West Africa squadron patrolled the Atlantic, seizing over 1,600 slave ships and freeing some 150,000 captives. So to answer your question, why can’t we have White Girls? Because the Black Boy painting wasn’t racist, and even if it was, that was almost two centuries ago, brother, and we’re trying to move on from that kinda shit, not simply flip it on the whites. But as with St. Felix, this is simply another example of the banal provocation of racism.

VERDICT: Racist

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Hanif Abdurraqib gave an interview titled, “Hanif Abdurraqib on Censoring the Desires of Whiteness in Storytelling.” That title alone should be enough. Why do people like this have to go out of their way to be so shitty in the way that they talk about things, and yet so sensitive about how others speak of them? But, in context, you realize it’s just a clickbait headline selected for maximum impact by hitting the outrage nerve of seeing such stupid phrasing. The full passage is more nuanced:

For Black writers in particular, seeing what’s left if you censor the desires of whiteness, and for me to do that and see what was left, I was really thrilled to see that what ended up being left was excitement and exuberance and pleasure that I could give more room to stories and give more room to the nuances of the greatness of folks like Don Cornelius.

But then we keep digging. In The Paris Review, Abdurraqib revealed that an earlier draft of his book A Little Devil in America was too white, so he had to revise it:

The book went through a lot of changes. There was a draft that I thought was too centered on whiteness, and there was a draft that was just steeped in grief—and I’ve already written a book that has a lot of grief in it.

And, in an interview with Softpunk, he offered his nuanced reflection on whiteness:

I think about Chappelle’s Show, which in some ways certainly has not aged well, but in some ways certainly has. And I think about his acute awareness of a white audience. Some would argue maybe too aware. Because I think when one becomes too aware of white consumption, even if they’re acting in opposition to that, they’re still acting with the centering of that consumption in mind. […] I was interested in in that era of Chappelle, particularly that “Nigger Family” skit, which I’ll never be able to get out of my head. It is so layered and uniquely crafted to hit on this exact thing where white people laugh, but are not sure what they’re laughing at. Or, are maybe too sure but could not say it out loud. Like, if I were to hit up a white person who watched it and laughed at it and say, “Tell me in your words what’s funny about that,” now we’re in a different ballgame. Chappelle knew this. He was opening up a doorway for people to laugh at things that they could not, in good faith, explain on their own.

The racist sense of superiority, of condescendingly talking about how white people just can’t grasp the meaning of a skit involving a Leave It to Beaver white family being referred to as niggers. Reading this, I feel like Frederick Douglass must’ve felt reading the idiotic rantings of white people describing blacks like anthropologists studying pygmies in the jungle. Except, at least the pygmies live in a distant corner of the world and actually are different in profound ways. Abdurraqib is out here talking about how a white guy like Neal Brennan cannot understand Chappelle’s skit. I’ve got news for you, Abdurraqib — Brennan co-wrote that skit with Chappelle. I find this kind of thinking gross and racist. As I wrote in the essay “Who Is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?”:

One of the ugliest pieces of racecraft ever conjured in the cauldron of the human mind is the notion that great works of art should be fenced off by race like rows of a garden from hungry deer. This means that if you are black, Shakespeare does not belong to you. You can look upon his roses of youth and violets of madness, but you had better keep your hooves on that side of the fence. Shakespeare belongs to white people, specifically white British men. When he writes of forbidden young love or the ruin of unchecked ambition or the delirium of indecision, he is not tapping into shared and universal experiences.

VERDICT: Racist

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Jericho Brown once wrote a poem, “Good White People,” and it got some attention because the last line says, “No such thing as good white people.” But before you jump to conclusions, here’s the poem:

Not my phrase, I swear, 
But my grandmother’s 
When someone surprised her 
By holding open the door 
Or by singing that same high C 
Stephanie Mills holds 
Near the end of “I Have Learned 
To Respect the Power of Love” 
Or by gifting her with a turkey 
On the 24thof December 
After a year of not tipping her 
For cleaning what they could afford 
Not to clean. You’ll have to forgive 
My grandmother with her good 
Hair and her good white people 
And her certified good slap across
Your mouth. Crack the beaten door 
To eat or sing, but do not speak 
Evil. Dead bad black woman 
I still love, she didn’t know 
What we know. In America 
Today, anyone can turn on
A TV or look out a window 
To see several kinds of bird 
In the air while each face watching 
Smiles and spits, cusses and sings
A single anthem of blood—  
All is stained.  She was ugly.  
I’m ugly.  You’re ugly too.
No such thing as good white people.

Reading this, I whisper to myself, And what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Maybe a single poem isn’t enough to judge, but I hear the voice of a decent soul reflected in these lines, one that is arguing that there are no good white people because no people are good due to their race. One can also say, there are no good black people, in the same sense. In a 2016 interview with Stay Thirsty, Brown critiqued white poets for their silence on white privilege:

Yes, I am surprised that more white poets (who watch the news and use social media as much as anyone else) have so little to say in their work about whiteness or white privilege […] that is exactly what whiteness and white privilege allows them: the option to turn away, to not be obsessed with the ways our current social systems slowly kill us all. At any rate, I still would rather read good poems about anything than a bunch of bad poems directly about race and whiteness from white folks who haven't taken the time they’d have to take to think deeply about such things.

I’m not sure how to take this. Is he saying he would rather read good poems by people of any race than bad poems by white people who aren’t sufficiently woke? Is it being insufficiently woke that makes their poetry bad? Ezra Pound and TS Eliot were antisemitic. Walt Whitman was racist against blacks. Does he suppose these men, therefore, were not great poets? It’s hard to say. But he adds:

My only trouble with Black Lives Matter is that there isn't an accompanying violent movement going on at this time that would make Black Lives Matter more appealing to folks in power. […] If there were a really strong “Kill Cops Destroy Property” organized movement that existed and saw itself as diametrically opposed to Black Lives Matter, then more folks would get real interested […]

This is the logic of, “If only the KKK could teach these blacks a lesson, they’d realize that the moderate whites are their ally and a lot of this anti-white woke sentiment would fade away.” And, to be fair, I have no doubt that this is true. But also, it’s a repulsively racist way of getting people to come round to that conclusion, even as a thought experiment.

VERDICT: Racist

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Jelani Cobb once wrote an essay for The Guardian, adapted from his Columbia Journalism Review piece “Missing the Story,” explaining:

It was not lost on me that the journalist who wrote the story was white and that the neighborhood was largely black and Latinx […] American newspapers in general—look nothing like the demographics of the communities they cover.

Speaking at the “Color of Education Summit,” Cobb highlighted what he regards as the absurdity of opposing CRT:

We’ve seen state after state, legislature after legislature, political leader after political leader, stand in front of the podium, pound the podium and advocate for the total ban of critical race theory on the basis of the idea that teaching white children about segregation is psychologically damaging to them.

We are now living in an “upside down” world, Cobb said, where efforts to alleviate psychological injury to black children are irrelevant and overshadowed by the “false, absurd and ridiculous” attempt to shield white children from America’s actual history. But either Cobb is not very intelligent, which if you read anything by him, you realize this isn’t the case, not very well-read, also not true, or he’s being intellectually dishonest at the expense of white people because a man of his intellect and knowledge understands full-well that CRT doesn’t simply teach “America’s actual history,” but also collectively blames white people as “oppressors,” treating them all, including children, as complicit. Can we also teach black toddlers that because of the color of their skin, they are complicit in the black homicide rate in this country? Or the historical sins of blacks who enslaved whites? Of course not. Cobb, a Queens native and a Howard University graduate who earned a doctorate in American history at Rutgers, knows better.

VERDICT: Racist

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Vinson Cunningham is a huge fan of Doreen St. Felix’s writing and calls her his “beloved friend.” By the logic of progressive reason, if I were to claim a comparably racist white writer as a beloved friend, there is zero question that I would be labeled racist unless I denounced the person, and trust me, Cunningham isn’t going to denounce St. Felix in the wake of her scandal. I don’t make the rules. But in his McSweeney’s column series “Field Notes from Gentrified Places,” Cunningham reflects on “America’s signature brand of whiteness,” which he describes as “a weird, haphazard collage made pretty by a series of artful, often barely perceptible thefts from black people,” framing whiteness, white identity, white existence, what have you, as a sloppy cultural patchwork of theft. This is a common trope among racist black thinkers, the idea being that anything good in America can sooner or later be traced back to “black knowledge.” Whiteness has no character of its own, but is a soulless construct that must steal its identity by from the authentic self of other groups.

VERDICT: Racist

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Rita Dove has nothing, at least that I could find, derogatory to say of white people, but her poetry is replete with references to “whiteness,” and never in a positive manner. So, much as I do enjoy the poet laureate’s work, as well as the work of many of the others on this list, we aren’t playing by my rules of what constitutes racism, remember? And if Rita Dove was a white lady who wrote incessantly about blackness in endlessly negative ways, she’d be labeled a Nazi and a white supremacist.

VERDICT: Racist

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Doreen St. Felix. No comment here except to say that if you have any question about her racism, go read my essay “The banal provocation of Doreen St. Felix’s racism.”

VERDICT: Racist

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Lauren Michele Jackson wrote a 2019 book, White Negroes, repeating the trope above that the real America is black America, that what we love about America is actually its blackness, and that white people steal from this and claim it as their own, which they do, but that, of course, is not the totality of white identity. Moreover, the title of her book alone is the kind of racist, banal provocation that the black community would never tolerate. And she means it not merely as a provocation, but in the genuine belief that authenticity and whiteness are antonyms.

VERDICT: Racist

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Alexis Okeowo dislikes the white savior trope in reporting, criticizing the fly-in and fly-out parachute journalism that either centers white subjects or treats nonwhite subjects as weird and dirty. Much of this, Okeowo says, stems from foreign reporting’s historical roots as a colonial enterprise in which white Westerners, generally wealthy and male, travelled abroad to understand the Other. Okeowo finds this racist, which of course it is. But then you have the capitalization of “black” and not “white,” or remarks such as her claim that Alabama “loves nothing more than looking black,” and so, Okeowo is perhaps the most interesting figure on this list because I could not find an instance of her speaking in nasty, brutish terms about whiteness. In fact, in her book, she makes efforts to highlight the racial complexity of the South, and has talked openly about the kindness of white Southerners, so by any rational measure, you would never call her a racist, but by the measures described at the top of this essay, not even she comes out looking clean — which tells you all you need to know.

VERDICT: Racist-ish

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Kelefa Sanneh, like many of those above, does write about whiteness in a kind of abstract, derogatory sense, which would mark him a racist if the tables were turned, but also, he once wrote an essay about the backlash to Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, in which he critically assessed her framework, suggesting DiAngelo reduces “all of humanity to two categories: white and other,” placing people of color in the role of untouchable “sages,” and characterizing her approach as one of “endless deference,” where racism becomes whatever people of color deem it to be.

VERDICT: Untouchable sage

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Zadie Smith, NPR tells us, “never describes the race of any of her characters — unless the person is white.” She says she used to despise Joni Mitchell because she was white, but learned to enjoy her music. She has admirably matured and pretty much any interview you read of hers today will display a more nuanced understanding of race and identity, even when she speaks broadly about “whiteness.” But alas, in progressive orthodoxy, past is present, and decades-old comments, such as on social media, determine your current status regardless of your evolution since.

VERDICT: Racist

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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has the ability to speak in great depth about white people and racism without talking about “whiteness” as if it’s a disease or social contagion, but rather with some sense of dignity, as you would expect The New Yorker, or any other mainstream publication, to talk about any other racial group aside from whites. But in her doctoral dissertation, “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership,” she capitalizes “black” but not “white,” speaks of “Whiteness” in a negative, generalized manner. Not to mention, she co-wrote the book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation with Angela Davis, a book that also uses the condescending, if not degrading, capitalization pattern and subscribes to the notion that whiteness gets its value from blackness, and whites only exist as they do because they steal from blacks or follow blacks’ lead, as one section asserts, “White workers have always followed the lead of Black workers.” And it’s not that there is no colorable argument to be made here, if we were to read this book in good faith and with an open mind, but again, I don’t make the rules.

VERDICT: Racist

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Bryan Washington once explained why he writes “whiteboy” as one word:

When I use ‘whiteboy,’ it underlines that the vantage point is not whiteness. I’m not looking for anyone to pick up one of my texts and learn how their whiteness is refracted. A whiteboy is a whiteboy.

This reflects his effort to de-center whiteness, but also his willingness to use terms that could be offensive to other racial groups, and not care to stop, or even explain. That’s enough to brand him a racist right there, but also, in talking about his novel Memorial, he said:

White folks will be like Where is your explanatory comma? or How am I supposed to know what this particular thing means? and I’m just like you should turn to fucking Google or pick up a fucking book like everyone else has to all the time. I just wasn’t interested in writing about Benson and Mike’s relationship in comparison to whiteness, or refracted off of whiteness, or as it contrasts to whiteness.

VERDICT: Racist

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So there you have it, The New Yorker “fixed” its racism problem by hiring 12 racist black writers, according to its own standards of racism, and one non-racist. You may also be interested to know that I looked through the white writers too, and could not find a single racist because, as you can imagine, if any of the white writers crossed that line in the exact way that virtually all its black writers already openly are, they’d be fired in a second. The underlying problem, of course, is not that The New Yorker hired black writers who, it turns out, are racist. They could fire every one of them — which I do not think they should do — and start again and they’d get the same results, because the problem is not the magazine. It’s black culture, and so any selection of talented black writers in 2025, provided they are not conservative, is bound to be overwhelmingly racist in that woke way that we’ve all come to know, which is tantamount to Nazism if you do it when white, but racism while black isn’t just condoned, it’s literally celebrated, elevated, and framed as justice. And to be painfully clear, I reject the standard of assessment used in this essay, but as Hilton Als observed, if they do it to us, why can we not turn it on them, if only to illustrate the point that this is immoral?

That said, the way forward is not to abandon conversations about race, but to elevate them. We should reject the habit of speaking in sweeping generalizations, of treating “whiteness” as a pathology, or any race. That kind of sneering rhetoric dehumanizes whole groups and fuels the very resentments it claims to fight. Race is a part of identity, and it matters for understanding discrimination and history, yes, but if the goal is genuine fraternity, then our discourse must be rooted in respect, and we have to put our foot down with this shit and be clear that talking about whiteness in these ways is not respectful. It’s racist. Correcting past injustices does not mean steering forever into more bigotry. When we normalize language that treats entire groups as lesser, we lay the groundwork for extremism. This, after all, is one of the lessons that wokery has given us. That’s why the casual disdain, or banal provocation, in the term “whiteness” is not harmless, but conditions an environment where more poisonous ideas can thrive. If a writer like Doreen St. Felix feels comfortable publishing such racist garbage, it’s only because of the culture around her, the culture that leftist black American writers and Remnick have helped build, a culture that has already accepted the premise that some forms of racism are permissible, depending on the color of the speaker. Instead, The New Yorker, as one of America’s leading cultural institutions, should be setting a higher standard, and if Remnick and his colleagues truly want to confront racism, they should begin by thinking carefully about inflaming divisions with fashionable contempt rather than reminding us that, beneath all these skin-deep categories, we are brothers and sisters of the human race, and more than that, fellow Americans.