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Report: Another NY Times Editor Made Racist, Anti-Semitic Comments

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Another high level employee of the New York Times made racist, antisemitic, and disparaging comments on social media

By: Haris Alic

Jazmine Hughes, an associate editor of the New York Times Magazine, has made a series of racist and antisemitic comments on social media over a multi-year span. A number of the tweets came from Hughes’s personal account, which is associated with her Times email, after she was hired by the outlet in April 2015 and continued well into 2017.

Breitbart News has been able to confirm the authenticity of the tweets, which are still visible on Hughes’s page at the time of the publication of this story. While Twitter has not officially verified Hughes’ account, her official New York Times website biography links to the account, confirming it is in fact hers.

Hughes is a high-profile New York Times editor. Forbes highlighted her on its 2018 “30 Under 30” list of influential media figures. The business magazine even conducted a brief interview with her, where she promoted herself as a champion of “diverse storytelling,” in the words of Forbes.

Hughes is only the latest Times employee to be exposed for making controversial and racially offensive statements. In recent months the paper has been rocked by multiple instances of such behavior at its top editorial ranks.

Although most of the tweets center around every day interactions, a few have pointed to political overtones. Hughes appears to have been particularly irate with white people for electing President Donald Trump. Late on election night 2016, shortly after it became clear that Trump had won the presidency, Hughes took to social media to state she had not been so angry at white people since having learned of Drake and Taylor Swift’s short but ill-fated relationship.

Another tweet that Hughes sent in the days following the election seemed to imply she blamed white women for Trump’s victory — an argument the Times itself made the morning after the election.

Hughes continued making disparaging tweets about white people and Jews well into 2017. Her most recent came in June 2017, when the editor claimed, “Jews are inDEED good with money.”

Even prior to joining the Times, Hughes had a history of controversial comments and writings. In February 2015, shortly before being hired by the Times, Hughes stated the “working title” of a piece she had just authored for the New Republic was, “What can take yr freedom, but can’t take a joke? White people.”

The article in question discussed what Hughes saw as the “gentrification” of humor at “white people’s expense.” Hughes argued that “racialized humor is an instrument that people of color can use to placate themselves in the face of the overwhelming reality: It’s just better to be Caucasian.”

“By making fun of white people, people of color can, in a small way, push back against stereotypes, opposing racial humor by inverting it,” Hughes wrote, claiming such jokes “gain membership in a club open to all people of color, a space impervious to white hegemony.”

The article’s premise is that as white people become more aware of systematic inequalities, they begin to make light of their privilege in an effort to sympathize with communities of color. In most cases, however, Hughes argued such attempts at solidarity only reinforce the status quo at the expense of people of color.

“This is how the party ends—with white people wanting in on the joke so badly that they create a separate category of ‘cool’ white people who mock their own whiteness in an effort at solidarity,” she wrote.

Breitbart News reported in August that one of the outlet’s senior news desk editors, Tom Wright-Piersanti, had a history of making anti-Semitic and racist statements on his social media accounts spanning over years. Wright-Piersanti, who helps oversee the paper’s political coverage, apologized for the prior comments, but as of now is still employed by the Times even though the outlet is reportedly “reviewing next steps.”

(This article was originally published on the Breitbart.com web site)

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