Yes, this is one conservative who’s going to miss Salon.
Some of those headlines made me wonder if the writer had lost a bet. Then I’d click anyway. If I was going to spend my time arguing with progressives, I wanted to know what they’d say when they were talking to each other. Salon gave me plenty to work with.
Joe Biden signed his racial equity order on his first day in office. I remember the sort of thing we used to laugh at in Salon, like the column that took on Matt Damon. So when Biden got to this part, I had a pretty good idea where we were going.
“It is therefore the policy of my Administration that the Federal Government should pursue a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality. Affirmatively advancing equity, civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity is the responsibility of the whole of our Government. Because advancing equity requires a systematic approach to embedding fairness in decision-making processes, executive departments and agencies (agencies) must recognize and work to redress inequities in their policies and programs that serve as barriers to equal opportunity.”
By June, Biden wanted federal agencies to put together plans for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in their own workforces. The merit rules stayed on the books. Agencies now had to look for barriers to equity in how they hired and promoted people. In 2015, I could laugh at the Damon column and get on with my day. By 2021, somebody in Washington had to put together a staffing plan.
Our own Rusty Weiss caught Salon writing about the “total structural collapse” of MAGA media the day before it announced it was closing. After 31 years in business, they could’ve waited one more day to publish that one. I’m glad they didn’t.
John Sexton was ready to pop the champagne over at Hot Air. He also brought back a Salon Thanksgiving piece he’d mocked in 2015. The headline alone got through Black Lives Matter, race, terror, Trump, and political correctness. Your uncle usually needs until dessert to cover that much ground.
And who could forget this one?
I’m a pedophile, but not a monster http://t.co/JibwUL8Idq http://t.co/yLKDa6IpBo
— Salon (@Salon) September 21, 2015
That Damon column is worth reading past the headline. On Project Greenlight, producer Effie Brown asked her colleagues to think about how it would look for an all-white group to pick a white man to direct a film about a Black woman. Damon said to pick on merit. Brittney Cooper heard that and wrote this:
“The myth of meritocracy is one of the foundational and erroneous ideals of white supremacy.”
Cooper had employers in mind, too. In her telling, even an employer who said he wanted a diverse pool of applicants could fall back on qualifications as an excuse. She’d also done readers the favor of writing down where the left might go next on hiring.
Three days after Trump won in 2016, people were still asking whether economic insecurity had something to do with his victory. Amanda Marcotte had already moved on to telling his voters what they’d really lost.
“No doubt Trump supporters are people who felt they’ve lost something. But what they’ve lost is something that wasn’t rightly theirs to begin with: Unearned privilege.”
Go tell a guy whose plant just closed that what he really misses is being ahead of women and minorities. I’d love to hear how that conversation goes. But if you read Marcotte, you could see why some progressives had so little interest in asking the guy what happened. They’d already worked out whose grievance counted and whose was a character flaw. There’s your Oppression Olympics.
By 2019, you could read Chauncey DeVega’s interview with Ibram X. Kendi and see what this sounded like when somebody got down to writing a rule. Kendi imagined a classroom with a fixed number of seats. In his example, you could limit the number of white students coming in until the room was more racially representative. He put it plainly.
“That is a policy that leads to equity.”
Biden's January order also gave agencies 200 days to report back on barriers to benefits, services, and federal contracting. Kendi was talking about classroom seats. Biden was telling the people who run federal programs to review them for equity. By the time there was a deadline in a presidential order, I’d already spent years reading people on the left talk through what they thought was wrong and what they wanted done about it. I’ll miss getting that much notice.
