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| Speaking of narratives about regnant white supremacy and misogyny among the Right, this year's White House interns. Via DiversityInc. |
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute welcomes the Heritage Foundation's naming of a new president, Kay Coles James, after the turmoil ending the reign of Jim DeMint:
If the new Heritage president had been a white male, the Times would likely have gone into bean-counting frenzy, tallying up all the other conservative think tanks headed by white males. But not only is James female, she is black. The Times [article here] buries this fact in its ninth paragraph, after characterizing James as a “safe choice.” A conservative organization opting for a black female as its “safety” candidate does not fit the Times’ narrative about regnant white supremacy and misogyny among the Right.I'd like to point out that when DeMint was named to head the foundation in December 2012 the Times did not mention his race or gender at all. They did mention that DeMint was one of the least wealthy members of the Senate and could look forward to a significant boost in his standard of living. The only reference to race in the story was in mentioning that Governor Nikki Haley might pick South Carolina's first black congressman since Reconstruction, Tim Scott, to replace DeMint as Senator (which she subsequently did). Nor did Andrew Rosenthal's op-ed give any attention to DeMint's race and gender.
The most recent appointment of a new head to a conservative think tank I can find out about, when Thomas W. Gilligan became director of the Hoover Institution in 2015, was not covered in the Times at all, in spite of his white and male identities. The same goes for Arthur Brooks, who is also white and male, being named president of the American Enterprise Institute in 2009. Heather Mac's shop, the Manhattan Institute, has been headed by white guy Lawrence J. Mone since 1995, whose only mention in the Times, in 1997, also left the race question blank.
So the evidence is that when a white man is appointed to head a conservative think tank the Times never goes into frenzy, bean-counting or otherwise.
