5 Feet of Fury

Derb’s tireless search for Amity Shlae’s forgotten ‘racist’ column

John Derbyshire:

Worst of all is the rise of the Pod People: twenty-something metrosexual media commentators who have somehow persuaded themselves that the real world, at least as manifested in the realities of a multiracial society, does not exist.

Here’s one such: Ed Drantch, a reporter for TV station WIVB up in Buffalo, New York.

He is shocked into breathless stuttering by the interviewee’s calm explanation that working-class white neighborhoods are commonly ruined by an influx of blacks.

Drantch doesn’t merely disagree: He has no idea what the other guy is talking about. It’s like watching someone trying to explain the tides to a Uighur shepherd who has never been within a thousand miles of the sea.

Drantch and his type — they are all over the media and the internet — scare me. Behind their smooth girlish features and open, orthodontized smiles there lurks an icy intolerance, a coarse thuggishness, a blinkered determination to believe that the world is something other than what it is, and a closed, invincible conviction of their own moral perfection in so believing.

PS — yes, Derb tracked down Shlaes’ “offending” article, in back issues at the NYC library. Here’s an excerpt from “Black Mischief”:

It is hostility shared by the black teenagers who push white teenagers out of cars when they are trying to board a crowded train. It is shared by the (black) city employee behind the bullet-proof glass at the token booth, who looks at two simultaneous arrivals—one white, one black—and says to the black one with a pointed and gratified smile, ‘You go first.’