Ashley Feinberg: Leak: The Atlantic Had A Meeting About Kevin Williamson. It Was A Liberal Self-Reckoning: "In a staff meeting, Jeffrey Goldberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed the hiring and firing of a conservative writer. But it wound up being about a lot more than that...
...On Friday, April 6, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, sat down with the magazine’s star national correspondent, Ta-Nehisi Coates, for a live question-and-answer session in front of the company’s staff. This was a scheduled event, part of the media company’s in-house “Atlantic University” series, but the off-the-record conversation took on a new urgency because of what had happened the previous day. On Thursday, April 5, the magazine had announced that it was cutting ties with Kevin Williamson.... What the centrist magazine might’ve once considered nothing worse than a cheeky heterodoxy from its right flank was now, Goldberg had discovered, suddenly and unacceptably outside the mainstream....
In his Atlantic University appearance with Coates, he tried to explain his thinking to his staff.... HuffPost viewed a video of the session; a full transcript can be found below. It’s a remarkable exchange. Coates, who has spoken admiringly of Williamson’s prose style if not his politics, is frank and searching and self-critical where Goldberg is glib and simpering, apparently unaware of just how much and why the ground had shifted beneath his magazine’s feet. The conversation centers on Williamson and the decision not to keep him around. But it winds up being about more than that. Coates talks about having learned, as a young journalist, from writers who thought of black men like him as less than human. What choice did he have? These were the journalists who got bylines in prominent magazines, and even at liberal publications, the genetic inferiority of black people was a proposition considered worthy of debate. “I didn’t really have the luxury of having teachers who I necessarily felt, you know, saw me completely as a human being,” Coates says...
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