enlightenupper

Girls make monkey noises outside a dorm room at Ole Miss. Black students are sleeping inside. Before long, it’s a sit-down on Good Morning America. Meanwhile, a New York Times bestselling author can put “the dangerous legacy of white male America” on the cover of a book called Mediocre, and bookstores across the country will put it on their shelves. I asked ChatGPT to swap “white” for “black” on the cover. The image editor blocked it. Apparently the wording becomes offensive when you change who it’s about. When a dorm hallway incident becomes a national scandal while a book calling white men mediocre gets celebrated, people notice the double standard. And if we keep treating contempt for white people as socially acceptable, we’ll make it easier for white nationalists to turn that resentment into something uglier. That should worry anyone who wants less actual racism in this country.