Steve Sailer has a fantastic breakdown of this article in the Atlantic. The article is tedious, but Steve’s deconstruction is well worth the time it takes to read it. I’ve been meaning to post something about the piece, but I have not been able to plow through it. By nature and habit I am a deliberate reader. Wading through what will surely be emotive slop is hard for me.

It is why I rarely read anything written by women. Women want to share experiences and talk about them. Men want to see facts and state opinions about them. That does not mean all male writers are Spock-like in the prose. it’s that many lack the emotional baggage train that I find uninteresting.

Steve’s comment on this bit from the article

… In recent years, a new term, apartheid schools—meaning schools whose white population is 1 percent or less, schools like Central—has entered the scholarly lexicon. While most of these schools are in the Northeast and Midwest, some 12 percent of black students in the South now attend such schools ….

is what is what I want to discuss. Steve responds, “In other words, the North was traditionally segregated spatially, while the South was segregated socially.”

Let’s back up here a second. The author, a black woman by the way, is writing for a northern publication about “resegregation” in the South, when she fully admits the north is vastly more segregated than the South. If I did not know better, I’d assume this is a very clever prank by someone trying to illustrate the blinkered idiocy of northern white liberals.

According to the author’s resume, she lives in Brooklyn, a place that is actively driving out black people so upper middle-class whites can live in trendy neighborhoods. She grew up in Iowa, went to Notre Dame and then went to UNC for a masters. Her choice of majors tells me she grew up middle-class or better. Her knowledge of the South and experience with the underclass can probably be written on a napkin.

I don’t want to get who/whom here. Outsiders often make the best observers as they lack the emotional blinkers of insiders. Her observations could very well be better than those of someone of the South and deeply familiar with the underclass. As Steve illustrates, what we’re getting here is the same old liberal platitudes about race dressed up with some statistics and stories.In other words, the story was written before she started gathering personal accounts, anecdotes and statistics.

The point is not to inform, but to confirm. Nikole Hannah-Jones is playing the same side of the street as Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is a performance piece intended to flatter the all white northern liberal readership of The Atlantic. I bet town meetings in Iceland have more diversity than the readership of the Atlantic. It is not just super-white, it is culturally monolithic. Ms. Jones seems to have figured this out and parlayed that into a nice payday.