Member-only story
This Week in Racism
Nothing Complements an N-Bomb Tirade Like a Burger King Crown
It’s an embarrassment of riches in our weekly roundup of the world’s most preventable disease!
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
Death and taxes used to be the only two certainties in life — but no matter how much progress it feels like we’re making sometimes, the sad fact is you can probably slide racism into that list. Are we in a moment of uprising that feels like it has the potential to create real, systemic change? Yes. Do people and organizations still show their ass on a daily basis? Oh, most definitely. And to keep tabs on all that ass-showing, we’re pleased to introduce our weekly racism surveillance machine. If you already get our newsletter, Minority Report, you’ve likely seen this — but now the rest of the internet can get a taste.
🗑 We promise you, the real headline is better than this headline
If you asked us to create the most 2020 news headline possible, we’d obviously hire a team of data scientists to create an algorithm, and then feed that algorithm to the world’s most powerful supercomputer. And we’d be wrong. Because the most 2020 news headline possible happened over the weekend, and it is this: “Man wearing Burger King crown yells N-word on JetBlue flight.” It gives you everything you need to know (how unhinged is this person, exactly?) while still leaving room for wonders untold (does he think he is the Burger King?). No, he does not think he’s the titular Burger King. He does, however, think that a flight from Kingston, Jamaica, is the proper place to take his mask off and repeatedly scream the world’s foulest racial slur while complaining that a Black woman accidentally kneed him while getting to her seat — and to utter the immediately classic phrase “excuse me, I’m part West African, I can say the word n****r any time I want!” His Royal Burgerness, who is not in fact “part West African,” has been banned from JetBlue for life. And probably from Kingston, too. (New York Post)
