A few years ago, something mildly embarrassing occurred at a Halloween party hosted by a Washington Post cartoonist: A white woman painted her face black and wore a name tag that read “Hello, My Name is Megyn Kelly,” in reference to the TV host’s controversial defense of white people wearing blackface. The intended butt of the joke would appear to be Kelly, not black people. Regardless, several guests approached the woman and explained to her that it was still not OK to wear blackface. The woman reportedly left the party in tears.
Suffice it to say, this is not a story that needed to be told. The woman is not famous, she does not appear to hold any power, and is not seeking public office. But because two of the aggrieved guests—a pair of young, progressive women—are still raw about it, and because we are living through a moment where no single person’s humiliation is too trivial to earn them a reprieve from the forces of cancel culture, a pair of reporters have exhaustively chronicled the incident in a 3,000-word article for…The Washington Post.
Brace yourself before diving in, because this is one of the worst newspaper articles of all time. Between the elite media navel-gazing, the smug sanctimony of the cancelers, the absurd one-sidedness of the narrative structure, the spirit of revenge taken to an odious extreme, it’s hard not to come away feeling nauseated. Unfortunately, it’s so emblematic of the rising dual trends of activist journalism and unforgiving progressivism that I’m going to go into some detail here.
The article is titled “Blackface incident at Post cartoonist’s 2018 Halloween party resurfaces amid protests.” Resurfaced? How? Did it surface once, and is now surfacing again? Already we’re shifting responsibility because the only reason this incident is “surfacing” at all is that the Post lacked the courage to tell the two women pictured in the article’s photo that this particular story was not newsworthy.
These two are Lexie Gruber and Lyric Prince. Gruber is a 27-year-old management consultant, and Prince is a 36-year-old artist. The Post photographed them for the story in Washington D.C.’s Malcom X park, where they appear as bold truth-tellers. Their truth is that they are still mad at an older white woman who didn’t understand that her costume wasn’t funny, and they want revenge. So it begins: