The cover story in Sunday’s New York Times magazine was written by a former drug dealer about his “supplier…mentor…role model.” You could argue about the importance of the subject, or the quality of the writing (which I found a bit mannered), but not, in my mind, about the timing. Putting this story on the cover on Christmas Eve seemed not only insensitive but in your face.
The lead review in the Book Review was of a new biography of Magic Johnson. Undoubtedly, the Times feels it is making amends for decades of inattention to Black Americans, but Sunday it seemed – by featuring an athlete and a drug dealer – to be perpetuating stereotypes. In an interview last week on “Fresh Air,” Cord Jefferson, the director of the new film American Fiction, complained that when he was a television writer the stories he would get asked to write, as the Black man in the room, invariably involved drugs or guns or prison. It annoyed him that a whole swath of the Black experience – the lives of law-abiding, middle-class Blacks – was being ignored. It’s why he made his latest film.
In his memoir Losing My Cool, Thomas Chatterton Williams remembers his father saying he’d be happy if he never saw another Black athlete or entertainer. If he’s still alive, I hope he doesn’t read the New York Times.
