This Is Not the Life I Ordered -- Is Racism Rational?

 Muggings on Fifth and 86th in front of the Guggenheim and on West 23rd. Stabbings on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea and in the long-since hypergentrified East Village. Flash mobs in Soho boutiques. And that's to say nothing of the regularly scheduled programming in Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. (And Detroit, Baltimore, Altanta, D.C., etc.) And what do ALL of the perps look like? Me! They look like me. How can we BP speak to police brutality and profiling and say NOTHING about the epidemic of violent crime offenders that almost characterizes the essence of our entire community? How do BLM again? How can we expect anyone to take us seriously -- beyond the contributions to music and sports that, together with the depravity, only serve to reinforce the idea that we're not quite working with the same materials as everyone else? Because even I'm starting to wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong with most of us. Yes, I said most. This is just beyond out of control. I'm tired of wondering if I barely genetically escaped being a savage unfit for the civilized world. And yet I feel like the only BP who actually thinks this. (Any BA who has never had this thought is either lying or an idiot -- or one of the people I'm talking about.) Well, I know what I'm going to get from some folks, but I don't have the energy to pretend that I can't empathize with racism to some degree at this point. And that's not a nice feeling.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered - Woke Yourself to Sleep

 

Miss the old days of pre-woke Vanity Fair edited by Graydon Carter? Subscribe to Carter's Air Mail, it's online equivalent. I'd love to write this kind of content, even though there's no glamour or prestige to me in writing for an online magazine, and probably not much more money. The evolution of Conde Nast from nepotistic, thoroughbred white country club to a company so desperate to stay relevant that it's collective output these days is almost indistinguishable from the looks of Ebony magazine with an HBCU ethos has been one of the most whiplashing wonders of my lifetime. (I can say this from the inside out, as someone who has been reading their magazines since I was as young as 12 and who eventually briefly worked there.) Yet, as greatly as the long overdue representation is appreciated on one level, the seriousness of the current moment's voice when it comes to culture (see the current VF under editor Radhika Jones whose issues will woke you straight to sleep) has taken over the palace and replaced the once playful, sometimes ironic tone and louche, jet set glamour of Vanity Fair and Vogue with the deadly serious and censorious anti-fun that characterizes hyper-feministic, pronoun-obsessed, inclusive to the point of editorial absurdity diversity diverticulosis that has taken a diuretic to everything fun and sexy today. You couldn't even publish a magazine like Details today. I'd give anything to go back and point out all the things published there just a decade ago (before it shuttered) that could never even be printed today. I guess that could be because irony on top of irony cancels itself out, like double negatives. Which is something I've always found so odd: if it's black, it has to be either serious or wildin' out. There is very little life in between for POC in media. In fact, it's never about the person, it's about their color. So you can't have a woke Conde Nast and keep the winking irreverent attitude at the same time. Anyway, if you miss the old Conde, Air Mail is worth a shot. Because let's face it: there's nothing more outrageous and entertaining than the foils and foibles of the rich, beautiful, and fucked up.