The inner life of Richard Cohen

The inner life of Richard Cohen

Richard Cohen is hurt, because mean hurtful people said mean hurtful things about him. Like how his suggestion that it is a "conventional view" to have to "suppress a gag reflex" at the sight of an interracial family is perhaps, read in the context of his larger body of work about how it's reasonable to be terrified of black people, evidence of racism. How dare you call Richard Cohen racist!



"The word racist is truly hurtful," he told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. "It's not who I am. It's not who I ever was. It's just not fair. It's just not right."

Well, there you go. Richard Cohen doesn't think of himself as racist, so no matter that he wrote something that, when you break it down logically, phrase by phrase, indicates racism, it's unfair to call him a racist. Richard Cohen is a Very Serious Person, so therefore he feels entitled to have his preferences, not his words, dictate how he is described by others.

To fully understand how he is not a racist, Richard Cohen wants you to read his whole column and consider the context of the statement that "People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children." Thing is, we've read the whole column and the context doesn't actually exonerate him. Not even a little. For one thing, gagging at interracial couples and biracial children is, in 2013, a very unconventional view. For another thing, the column as a whole doesn't make much sense. And let's look at his unintentionally revealing word choice: "conventional." His defense is that he was describing the mindset of racists, not his own mindset. So why call it conventional, rather than any of dozens of words that would have indicated that these are in fact unconventionally racist views?

But the problem isn't just that Cohen is a racist hack without the insight to realize those things about himself, it's about an institutional failure at the Washington Post, which pays him to write this stuff:



Cohen said that no editors objected to the phrasing the first time around. "Nobody, not a single one of my editors—and believe me, they're super sensitive to this sort of stuff—said, 'Wait a minute.' They all knew what I meant because of the context of the column. I was talking about tea party extremism. And it's clear."

The notion that Cohen's editors are "super sensitive to this stuff" raises the awful prospect of what gems have been edited out of his columns before we, the general public, could read them, yet obviously they are not actually all that sensitive. In fact, one might almost think that their sensitivity has been dulled by years of editing exactly this kind of stuff. But theis the problem here, because without the platform it gives him, Richard Cohen is just an individual racist.

As far as Cohen's hurt fee-fees? Fuck you, Richard, for believing that your hurt feelings are somehow more valid or important than the couples, the children, the families, you've just described as gag-worthy. Or more valid than the "young black males" you've repeatedly portrayed as terrifying. If as many people are saying one is racist as are saying you, Richard Cohen, are racist, that's cause for serious self-examination, not wounded attacks on the unfairness of it all.