The New York Times endorses black nationalism

By Samuel Sey, Op-ed contributor Wednesday, September 06, 2023

The New York Times has become the highest-profile media organization to leave Apple News, saying the tech giant's service was not helping achieve the newspaper's subscription and business goals. The daily's exit comes as news organizations around the world struggle with declining print readership and an online environment where ad revenue is dominated by Google and Facebook. | JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images

A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow published an article titled, "Dear Black Americans, Please Move To The South". The subtitle is "An argument for consolidating Black political power."

He writes:

“I believe that if Black people simply returned to the South, they could significantly increase their own political power, which has the potential to not only upend the politics of that region, but also of the country as a whole.”

Can you imagine The New York Times publishing an article saying white people should move away from black people in order to consolidate power? If Charles M. Blow was white and he wrote those words about white people, would Times publish it?

If he said: If white people would simply move away from black people, they could significantly increase their own political power, which has the potential to not only upend the politics of that region, but also of the country — would the article be approved by their editor?

Of course not. In fact, we know this because in February they published an article by the same author calling Dilbert creator Scott Adams racist for saying:

“There’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. You just have to escape. So that’s what I did. I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population…just get the hell away [from Black people]."

Blow’s words are identical to Scott Adam’s. The New York Times denounces white flight, but they’re endorsing black flight.

It’s actually worse than that. It’s black nationalism. An argument for consolidating black political power is an argument for black nationalism. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes black nationalists as a hate group who “believe the answer to white racism is to form separate institutions — or even a separate nation — for black people. Most forms of black nationalism are strongly anti-white …”

So Times has published an article promoting an ideology that even the Southern Poverty Law Center considers extremist.

Nevertheless, the article says if black people move to the South to form black political power, it will be a “reverse migration” — the reverse of the Great Migration in the early-to-mid 20th Century when millions of black Americans moved from the South for jobs in Northern and Western states.

“Reverse migration” is actually a fitting term, since black nationalism in the South would achieve the reverse of the purpose of the Great Migration. Before the Great Migration, 90% of black Americans lived in the South. Poverty and racial segregation compelled millions to migrate to the North and the West for better jobs and racial integration.

As a result, black Americans in the North achieved significantly higher socioeconomic levels than black Southerners. The migration created some of the first black middle-class neighborhoods in America.

Therefore activists in the Civil Rights era often referenced the success of the Great Migration in their protests against Jim Crow segregation in the South. Racial segregation didn’t help black people in the past, and it won’t help black people today.

Furthermore, the article mentions that black Americans are already moving to the South. Interestingly, Blow fails to mention why this is happening. Considering the purpose of the article, it seems relevant to mention why millions of black people are moving to Southern states.

Black people — especially young black college graduates — are moving from New York, California, and Illinois to Georgia and Texas. They’re not moving away from white people, they’re moving away from blue states. Like other Americans, they’re moving to Southern states like Georgia and Texas because of low costs and burgeoning economic opportunities. They’re moving away from the Democrat policies that have destroyed majority-black cities for decades.

This begs the question, would black political power in Southern states look any different from black political power in cities like Detroit, Baltimore, or Southern cities like Memphis? These majority-black cities are some of the most dangerous and poorest cities in America. Has so-called black political power helped these cities?

What reason do we have to believe black political power in southern states would have better outcomes? Unless fatherless rates and voting patterns change significantly, there’s no reason to believe that if Tennessee, for instance, became a majority-black state, it wouldn’t be just a bigger version of Memphis.

But that’s the least of the problems with this article. The New York Times article is promoting black nationalism. That is the inevitable outcome of racial identity politics: racial nationalism.

Originally published at Slow to Write.