The Disturbing Conversation At The Root Of The Donald McNeil Controversy

I’m sure by the time you read this you will have already heard all about the ousting of Donald McNeil from the New York Times for using the racial epithet that shall not be spoken. The story has been widely reported on but a brief summary; McNeil was pressured into resigning after a 2019 incident was resurfaced in which McNeil repeated a racial slur in a conversation with high school students during a trip in which he was acting as a chaperone and representative of the Times. The incident was reported and investigated in 2019, resulting in McNeil being disciplined. For reasons that have not been explained, the Daily Beast ran a piece on January 28th detailing the incident, which led to a firestorm of criticism aimed at Times editor in chief Dean Baquet and publisher A.G. Sulzberger for not doing more to punish McNeil. Most of that criticism came from within the New York Times -- more than 150 reporters signed a letter stating that they were “deeply disturbed” by McNeil’s conduct and demanding another investigation into the 2019 incident. McNeil announced his resignation on February 5th, in which we get the first account of what actually happened during the 2019 trip.

That part of the story, absurd as it is, is not what I want to focus on. This, from Jonathan Chait’s writeup of the controversy for New York Magazine, is what caught my attention

“In 2019, New York Times reporter Donald McNeil Jr., working as a tour guide for high-school students traveling to Peru (a service apparently offered by the paper), got into an argument with several of them. The debate centered around whether one of the students’ classmates deserved to have been suspended over a video that surfaced of her, as a 12-year-old, saying the N-word. McNeil, according to a statement released by the Times, asked about the context of the word — was she rapping, or quoting a book title, or using the word as a slur?”

Making an assumption based on this reporting, these students would have been between 15 - 17 years old at the time. The conversation in which McNeil repeated the epithet revolved around an argument over if a fellow student, who I presume was not present to defend herself, should have faced punishment for a video made when she was 12 years old. 

I want to emphasize this - the conversation was about if a high school age student should be punished for a video she made when she was 12. TWELVE.

If you feel like you’ve heard this sort of story before, you have. I predicted when I wrote about the Mimi Groves - Jimmy Galligan incident that it would not be the last time we saw such a story. Here, we have a group of high school students on an overseas trip with a 45-year veteran science reporter for the New York Times who felt that, of all the things they could discuss with McNeil, the issue of if a fellow classmate should be punished over a years-old video was the most appropriate one.

I find it troubling that the controversy here is whether McNeil was right or wrong in repeating a racial slur and not that this conversation took place at all. Of course it would not be appropriate to suspend a high school student for something she said at the age of 12, that this is even a topic of debate is frightening. The idea of canceling someone has shifted from “holding powerful people accountable for their words and actions” to “we must root out and punish every minor infraction any person has committed.” That this mentality is being used against increasingly younger people worries me too; the current generation of teens and young adults have a digital footprint that starts the day they are born. 

A question I asked when covering the Aaron Coleman controversy was how far back is too far back to go digging into a young person’s digital past -- I’ll ask it again here. I don’t see what good purpose could be served by punishing someone in their mid-to-late teens for using a specific word when they were 12, and I can see where that mentality would lead to increasing levels of anxiety in teens and pre-teens. 

This whole story is grotesque, it’s a shame that any of it happened, and nothing good will come of it. Punishing a person for using a word -- be that person an adult or a child -- in a non-derogatory way is not something that should be done. I’m irritated that adults at the New York Times, who should know better, engaged in this behavior but I’m deeply disturbed that young people are internalizing it.