Joe Klein (cc photo: David Shankbone)
Joe Klein, long a writer for New York magazine, was recently hired by Newsweek as a senior editor, where he ponders American culture—like in his recent “Whose Values?” cover story (6/8/92), where he argued that Dan Quayle had a point about Murphy Brown. He has also become a TV regular on racial issues, where he’s treated as a kind of spokesperson for white people.
This is the role that he trained for at New York, where he regularly pontificated about race. The New York he wrote about (New York, 5/28/90) was a
city under siege, not just by criminals and the well-known cast of racial demagogues but by loudmouths of all sorts, radio hosts, squatters in Tompkins Square Park, gay militants, animal-rights activists, rap groups whose noxious mix of sex, violence and hatred blared from boom boxes all over town.
He repeatedly condemned affirmative action, which he defined (6/17/91) as “twist[ing] the law to favor those who’ve been victims in the past.” His criticism of racism (5/7/90) was more equivocal: “White racism is on the rise, largely in reaction to the horrendous, crack- driven city crime wave of recent years.”
One Klein column (6/26/89) suggested that the Central Park jogger rape would hurt–not Ed Koch, the incumbent mayor–but challenger David Dinkins, because he, like the assailants,* was an African-American. By this logic, when David Berkowitz (alias “Son of Sam”) was arrested, it should have derailed the political career of Koch, since he might be associated with Jewish serial killers. In the same column, Klein predicted that Dinkins would “pay the price” for Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing: “If Lee does hook large black audiences…[and] they react violently—which can’t be ruled out—the candidate with the most to lose will be David Dinkins.”
In a piece (9/9/91) on the black/Jewish tensions in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, Klein highlighted false statements made by black activists: “So what if these assertions are fantasies? There is emotional ‘truth’ to them, just as there was ‘historical’ truth to Tawana Brawley’s rape fantasy a few years ago.” To Klein, the use of “fantasies” in support of “black martyrology” could be attributed to a “long-standing difference in the way Africans and Europeans perceive the use of rhetoric.” The suggestion was that African-Americans amount to natural liars.
Research assistance was provided by Shane Safir.
*UPDATE: The five African-American youths convicted in the Central Park jogger case were later exonerated, as detailed in the documentary film The Central Park Five.
