Minorities Don’t Need the New York Times’ Elite Condescension

G rowing up as Pakistani-American Muslim in the South was sometimes a challenging experience. Nobody I met could pronounce my name (usually I told people it rhymes with “said”). In a very Christian region, I often stood out like a sore thumb, having to explain that I didn’t celebrate Christmas (a frequent annoyance in primary school) and that I’d have to pass on that drink (basically every day in college).

But these challenges did not cripple me. Even when I faced actual bigotry or discrimination, nothing I encountered gave me more than momentary discomfort. To be honest, the prejudice that persists barely impacts my life. The occasional nasty anti-Muslim email is not stopping me from having a successful career or friends and family who love me.

Such feelings are common among individuals who belong to racial- and religious-minority groups in America. Most of us do not think of ourselves as perpetual victims adrift on a sea of white supremacy, unable to steer our own courses in life. Yet we’re increasingly living in a culture where elites, most of them white, treat us in that exact way.

Take the case of former New York Times science and health correspondent Donald McNeil Jr. I say “former” because McNeil unceremoniously departed the newspaper in early February after staff outrage over an old incident.

During that 2019 incident, McNeil accompanied a student group on a Times-sponsored trip to Peru. At some point, McNeil and the students got into a conversation where he was asked if a classmate of theirs should have been suspended for vocalizing an anti-black slur in a video they recorded. In order to understand what was said in the video, McNeil asked them if the classmate was “rapping or quoting a book title”; while doing so, McNeil vocalized the word himself.

To be clear, McNeil was not using the slur to label any student. He wasn’t using it at all. He was mentioning it. This was the Times’ own conclusion after an internal investigation, in which executive editor Dean Baquet concluded that “it did not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious.”

But Baquet’s common sense left more than 150 New York Times staffers unsatisfied. They penned a letter stating that they were “outraged and in pain” that the paper has given a “platform” to McNeil, “someone who chose to use language that is offensive and unacceptable by any newsroom’s standards.”

It’s unclear, however, when this standard was created. A search of the Times archive reveals the word being printed numerous times over the past year, including in an article published on February 2.

This was left unmentioned in Baquet’s eventual cave. In announcing the departure, Baquet noted that McNeil had been at the company since 1976. Yet Baquet believed that ending McNeil’s long career over vocalizing a single word with non-malicious intent was “the right next step.”

Ironically, McNeil devoted his career to telling the stories of the least among us: people being battered by vicious diseases, many of these people black and brown. He was one of the Times’ lead correspondents covering COVID-19, and in 2002, he received a National Association of Black Journalists award for his coverage of the HIV epidemic in South Africa.

Thinking about all this, I’m reminded of the many friends who used the term “Paki” around me when I was growing up. To them, the word was a harmless demonym for Pakistani. It wasn’t so harmless for many Pakistanis who lived in the United Kingdom, where the term was widely used to denigrate people of South Asian descent — and was even invoked by nativist gangs who wanted to keep “dirty Pakis” out of their country.

But I knew that was not what my friends were doing. The utterance of this word did not cause me to cower in fear or run for cover. I understood the intentions behind its use. Ironically, at a time when a book called “White Fragility” has been flying off the shelves, the adherents to its text seem to think minorities like me are so fragile that we will be gravely wounded by the mere utterance of a word, even in the most innocent of contexts.

My ancestors survived colonialism, world wars, crushing poverty, and a world far more prejudiced than the one we inhabit today. I’m not fragile. Stop treating me as if I were. And stop cruelly ending the careers of good men like Donald McNeil Jr. in our name.