New York Magazine » Benjamin Wallace-Wells » Peretz in Exile:
“When I met Peretz ten weeks later, he still seemed on edge. The bigotry charge was what lingered. “I mean, it hurts,” he said. We were in the dining room of the Loews Regency Hotel in midtown Manhattan, where the waiters greet him as “Dr. Peretz.” At a basic level, he said, he can’t be a bigot; he mentioned two close, personal black friends, one who is “so fucking smart,” and then a third, a black student whom he had plucked from Harvard and made the circulation director of The New Republic. “I hired Muslims—I hired Fareed Zakaria,” he added. The litany provoked a flash of self-consciousness. “I’m really demeaning myself here,” he said miserably, before continuing. Peretz is enough of a liberal to realize that any scene in which a man sits in the dining room of the Regency with a reporter, listing all of his friends and associates who are black or Muslim, is a scene in which that man is drowning. And yet here he was.”
An interesting and really well-written mollification of blatant racism.
