The cover story of the latest New Republic must be admired.
In other words, the more things change . . .
Heer concedes a case can be made that between the late 30s and mid-70s the New Republic covered the civil rights movement as well as any white magazine. But then two things happened. The movement shifted from a clear-cut battle for legal rights to a much more complicated and ambiguous battle for equal social and economic standing. And in 1974 the “neoliberal” Martin Peretz bought the magazine. Again, we know the type, the white man so certain of his racial rectitude that he brushes aside liberal pieties to tell it like it is. Peretz had a weakness “for melodramas illustrating black cultural pathology,” says Heer, and a weakness for male writers from Harvard and for writers who broke the rules to write him melodramas.
