One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

Some people can’t do much more than write a letter to the editor. Some have the ability to pull advertising, to limit access. Most insidiously, some have the power to berate the people who run those media outlets when they next meet at a cocktail party or black-tie fundraiser or whatever social circle in which both move. I’m sure it’s not the case that every editor of every major publication in the West doesn’t give a damn about all those inconvenient Brown people who keep getting killed and maimed by the thousands. But to never see these people in daily life, to never converse with them outside the bounds of interrogation, to never have reason to consider them human in any social sense—these things bleed into the story, or the absence of story. The afflicted don’t need comforting, they need what the comfortable have always had.