WaPo Editor’s Purse Column Inspires Zero Hope For The Next Generation Of Narcissistic Journos
It didn’t take long for The Washington Post’s new opinion editor Alexi McCammond — already twice disgraced by controversies at two previous magazines — to prove her continued penchant for the puerile.
In a Dec. 6 op-ed titled “The bag that opened up my Blackness,” McCammond devotes the first 600 words to lauding a $150 luxury bag that has “unexpectedly opened up so many spaces for organic Black joy and connection.” The Telfar bag, explains McCammond in what sounds like an endorsement for which she is receiving royalties, comes “in three sizes and so many delightful colors. … I’ll find myself gently touching the faux leather every now and then just to reconfirm it’s as soft as it looks.”
What, you might wonder, does a luxury handbag have to do with celebrating black culture? Frankly, I don’t quite know, given McCammond giddily notes that singer Selena Gomez and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., both own versions of the bag, which is the creation of a black, queer designer — presumably that’s why, a few paragraphs in, McCammond offers the caveat that it’s “people of color” sharing the joy.
I also presume for a white woman to buy the bag would be categorized as cultural appropriation, since white people ruin everything. And though I’m being a bit snide, that’s not far off from what McCammond seems to think. That she represents the younger generation of professional corporate journalism gives reason to think there is little hope for its future.
An Example of Anti-Racism Infantilizes Its Adherents
Telfar, declares McCammond, “has brought me into a community in which the full breadth of Blackness is on display.” Yet she can’t help celebrating one community at the expense of another — that of her own biracial family. “I’m biracial but was raised primarily by my mom, who is White and, honestly, not a reliable ally,” McCammond explains. “Black beauty wasn’t embraced or explored in our house when I grew up.”
What, we might ask, did her white mother do that exemplified this crypto-racism? “My mom is genuinely so out of touch that during one visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, she stopped random Black people to apologize … for … slavery? Oppression? Her outfit? I’m still not sure.”
Think about this: McCammond excoriates her mother — in one of the most prominent newspapers in America, no less — not for being a racist, but for doing anti-racism wrong. For goodness’s sake, her mother went with her to the national museum honoring black history and culture and was so affected by white guilt that she went around apologizing to random visitors. And it certainly doesn’t seem that McCammond’s mother was abusive or neglectful, even if the journalist censures her for straightening, relaxing, and dyeing her “thick, brown, curly hair.”
One might expect this kind of immaturity from high schoolers or undergraduate students manipulated by leftist professors to hate the very people paying for their children’s education, but McCammond is 30 years old. Almost as egregious is the fact that no one in the Post’s editorial staff thought to tell McCammond, “Hey, perhaps bad-mouthing the woman who carried you in her womb, nursed you, raised you, and obviously loves you may not be the best look.”
But no — race, in the minds of the woke left, binds tighter than one’s own flesh and blood.
A New Class of Narcissistic Journalists
Not that McCammond is especially unique as far as young corporate journalists go. Her Post colleague Taylor Lorenz last year claimed she suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and is a “victim” because of the attacks she endured from her online critics — such a victim she published a book with Penguin earlier this year. Also at The Washington Post, reporter Felicia Sonmez became such an annoyance to her bosses for publicly maligning fellow colleagues and leadership that they fired her last year.
“It was hard to fathom why smart people couldn’t exercise more self-control,” writes former Post editor Martin “Marty” Baron of Sonmez in a book published earlier this year.
The year before that, The New York Times fired Donald McNeil, a veteran journalist who had visited 60 countries, for using a “racist slur” in the context of a question from a high school student — a group of Times staff members sent a letter to the Times’ publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, demanding his resignation for choosing “to use language that is offensive and unacceptable.”
The year before that, the Times’ editorial page editor James Bennet was forced to resign after dozens of the paper’s employees attacked him for running an op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas calling for military force to be used against rioters. L.A. Times staff writer Esmeralda Bermudez in turn accused Executive Editor Norman Pearlstine of racist hiring and management practices in 2020 because of “the river of white people coming into your office.”
Corporate Media Have Brought This Upon Themselves
For all the controversies embroiling corporate media, should we have expected anything different? Our nation’s elite institutions, not only the media but also the academy and entertainment industry, have for decades been coddling younger generations, praising everything they do and shielding them from “dangerous” and “violent” opinions. Younger generations are told that the only method to succeed is either to identify oneself as a member of a victim class or at least to find a way to ensure that whatever work you are doing is aligned with the victimhood game. It is an all-consuming grievance mentality, premised on celebration of the self and censure of the supposed oppressor, that dominates everything and everyone (so much so that even wealthy, powerful elites must find ways of identifying as ostensible victims).
McCammond was previously an editor at Teen Vogue, though her stint there was abbreviated because someone surfaced racist and homophobic tweets of hers (ironic, I know). Perhaps, then, a 1,000-word op-ed eulogizing a handbag and complaining about one’s mother for performing the wrong struggle session isn’t all that surprising. Nor, based on the quality of other digital-generation journalists populating corporate media, is it necessarily surprising that The Washington Post would print such narcissistic, self-referential drivel.
What should be surprising, at least to McCammond, is that even after declaring to the world that a handbag means more to her than her mother’s reputation, I bet her mother still loves her. Maybe McCammond can send her a Telfar bag to express her appreciation.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.
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