I came late to Kevin Williamson’s controversial blog-post in National Review online, “Where the sidewalk ends: Danger and despair in Pat Quinn’s Crumbling Illinois.”
From the top, here are the guts of it:
East St. Louis, Ill. — ‘Hey, hey craaaaaacka! Cracka!White devil! F*** you, white devil!†The guy looks remarkably like Snoop Dogg: skinny enough for a Vogue advertisement, lean-faced with a wry expression, long braids. He glances slyly from side to side, making sure his audience is taking all this in, before raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge. Luckily for me, he’s more like a three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg, a few inches shy of four feet high, probably about nine years old, and his mom — I assume she’s his mom — is looking at me with an expression that is a complex blend of embarrassment, pity, and amusement, as though to say: “Kids say the darnedest things, do they not, white devil?†It’s not the last challenge like this I’ll get here where the sidewalk ends, or the most serious one.
[….]
I get yelled at by a racially aggrieved tyke with more carefully coiffed hair than your average Miss America contestant.
Jonathan Chait believes this is a racist rant. David Weigel has more doubts.
So @KevinNR’s article was racist bc he described a short version of the very tall Snoop Dogg as “3/5†scale? Okay. http://t.co/uTJwYAR4Lz
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) August 13, 2014
At a minimum, this piece is insouciantly tone-deaf to some basic proprieties….
Continue reading “The disparaging stranger: Kevin Williamson visits East Saint Louis”