… This time at the New Yorker.
The New York Times ran an interesting article on Tuesday about the senior thesis of Princeton student, and recent graduate, Katherine Milkman, who used sophisticated mathematical models to analyze New Yorker fiction between October 1992 and September 2001.
She was concerned, among other things, with the gender and race of both the authors of and the characters in the stories that appeared during those years. Whether or not her findings are important, or even interesting, is open to some debate, but I found the following comment in the NYT article to be significant mainly because of the lack of debate about it:
In a conclusion that will probably cause few readers to spill their evening tea, she states that “quantitative analyses revealed that New Yorker characters are not representative of Americans or New York State residents in terms of their race.”
But don’t those same readers, and especially New York Times writers and readers, habitually spill a great deal of tea, and more, when they hear of such “disparities” in, say, entering freshmen or the number of minority computer programmers? Doesn’t the NAACP complain with regularity about how minorities are “underrepresented” in Hollywood? Don’t the mainline journalism organizations wring their ink-stained hands at every opportunity of the low percentage of minority journalists?
Is there any reason why New Yorker fiction editors should receive less criticism than Ivy League admissions officers or Hollywood producers when, in the exercise of their unregulated discretion, their notion of “merit” leads them to publish an ethnically unrepresentative collection of authors who populate their stories with an ethnically unrepresentative cast of characters?
The proper white Manhattan liberal attitude toward blacks is weepy condescension and avoidance of any actual contact.
The typical white Manhattan snobbery represented by the “I don’t do the boroughs” mentality can roughly be translated to mean “I don’t actually associated with blacks.”
I live in the boroughs, and actually associated with blacks, which (in the strange world of the white Manhattan leftist) makes me “stupid.” Wait a minute! I’m also married to an Asian woman. That makes me, in addition, “backward and oppressive.” But, in theory, diversity is God…
I think you misinterpreted that quote, John. I don’t think the comment was, “Few people will be upset by it” but “Few people will be surprised by it.”
The reason New Yorker editors receive less criticism than Hollywood is because (a) far fewer people read the New Yorker, and (b) New Yorker characters aren’t real people. If you make a sitcom with a white character rather than a black one, that’s a black actor who hasn’t gotten a job. If you hire a white journalist rather than a black one, that’s a black reporter who hasn’t gotten a job. If you write a story with a white character than a black one, though, the situation is different. (I’m not saying that it’s reasonable to complain in the first two cases, in the absence of actual discrimination; I’m just explaining.)
John, what a silly question. The reason that the New Yorker isn’t subject to the same affirmative action calls is because the elites who push affirmative action actually care about the New Yorker.