Join The New Yorker’s writers and editors for reporting, insight, and analysis of the most pressing political issues of our time. On Mondays, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, presents conversations and feature stories about current events. On Wednesdays, the senior editor Tyler Foggatt goes deep on a consequential political story via far-reaching interviews with staff writers and outside experts. And, on Fridays, the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the latest developments in Washington and beyond, offering an encompassing understanding of this moment in American politics.
https://the-political-scene-the-new-yorker.simplecast.com
Teju Cole on Blackface
When depictions of Virginia politicians in blackface surfaced this month, the New Yorker contributor Teju Cole was unsurprised. “A white man of a certain age in the U.S.,” he reflects, “is found to have done something racist in his past; well, yes.” As a photographer and photo critic, he is acutely aware that a photograph captures the thinnest sliver of time, half a second or much less. So any photograph of a man in blackface—or in any other offensive image—always indicates that “there’s a lot more where that came from.”
Cole maintains that Governor Ralph Northam’s resignation or persistence in office isn’t the point. Resignations, he says, can play the role of a valve, merely releasing pressure from a system that is intolerable. “Wealth inequality between black people and white people is cavernous,” Cole says. “And yet I don’t suppose most white Americans wake up in the morning and feel personally responsible for that state of affairs.”