There’s a recurring joke in the 2017 comedy-horror “Get Out” that involves Northeastern bluebloods casually informing the one black person in the room that they would vote for Barack Obama a third time if they could because they are definitely not racist.
The joke in full context has more depth to it than that, but you get the gist of it.
The following passage from an op-ed authored by former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson feels a lot like that “Get Out” joke. The key difference here is that she’s being completely earnest:
“[I]t’s thrilling to see signs of a Trump rebellion building in the Solid South, the Republican base where religion, racism and love of guns have advantaged Republicans since Richard Nixon’s election in 1968,” she writes in the Guardian. “It’s easy to look at what’s happening in Washington DC and despair. That’s why I carry a little plastic Obama doll in my purse. I pull him out every now and then to remind myself that the United States had a progressive, African American president until very recently. Some people find this strange, but you have to take comfort where you can find it in Donald Trump’s America.”
This would seem like a good time to go back and review all editorial decisions bearing her fingerprints. How can a person with this sort of slavish devotion to a political figure operate a newsroom fairly and accurately?
Then again, how much could she have influenced the paper during her short-lived tenure as executive editor? Remember: Abramson lasted only from September 2011 to May 2014.
After she was fired, she gave little winks and nods to the suggestion that sexism played a role in her being replaced by Dean Baquet, the first African-American to serve as the paper’s executive editor.
It’s hard to say if sexism is responsible for her abrupt firing. Only the people directly involved in that episode can say. But if we’re going to play the guessing game here, as many, many newsrooms did immediately after she was let go, maybe someone should suggest the possibility that she was fired because she’s weird.
I mean, what else do you call an adult who doesn’t leave home without her lucky Obama doll?
