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Wednesday 13th February 2019
You have to admire the inexhaustible capacity of the social justice left for taking offense. This week, the straight white male in the stocks is Jay Fielden, the editor-in-chief of Esquire. His sin? To put a white teenager called Ryan Morgan on the front of the March issue, accompanied by the line: ‘What it’s like to grow up white, middle class and male in the era of social media, school shootings, toxic masculinity and a divided country.’ Turns out, it’s a lot harder if you appear on the cover of Esquire.
‘Really @esquire?’ tweeted Karamo Brown, a television presenter in Los Angeles. ‘“What’s it like growing up white, middle class and male…” How idiotic! It’s the same as it’s always been… full of privilege that women, people of color, lgbtq people & immigrants don’t have! I’m done.’ Another outraged tweeter, Leslie Mac, who runs ‘anti-racism boot camps’ in North Carolina, was even angrier: ‘Y’all – this Cover Story in @esquire is thee WHITEST SHIT I’ve come across all… well all week at least. I’m so fucking tired of press stories about poor white boys while marginalized people are actually dying because the current “era”.’
It goes without saying that both those commentators have blue ticks, Twitter’s imprimatur of approval. You’d have thought the blue-tick chorus would have learned its lesson after prematurely shaming Nick Sandmann, the 16-year-old Catholic schoolboy who was falsely accused of harassing a Native American protester at the Lincoln Memorial last month. But apparently this was not a ‘teachable moment’ for the Wokerati. After Esquire posted its March issue online, an author called Sarah Weinman – also the proud bearer a blue tick – compared its 17-year-old cover star to Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who shot and killed nine black worshippers at a church in 2015. (To read more, click here.)
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