In The NYTimes, Only White Leaders Stand Out

The Times spends exactly one sentence on Asia

indi.ca
7 min readMay 4, 2020
These countries are all called leaders. I’ve added Iran so you can see how dumb this is.

The New York Times recently published a list of ‘true leaders’ in the fight against COVID-19. They spend exactly one sentence on Asia and the rest on white leaders that mostly did worse than Iran. The structural racism is mind-boggling, and it’s getting people killed.

According to the NYTimes, Iran Completely and Utterly Botched Its Response to the Coronavirus, but countries with higher mortality rates like Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Denmark are listed as true leaders. It makes no sense. It’s just racism, so structural that the Editorial Board can’t even see it. It’s built into the edifice of the paper itself.

By any objective measure, the true leaders are all not in the west, with asterisks for Iceland and Greece. Basically everywhere else is doing markedly better — Asia, Australasia, Africa, the Caribbean, and parts of South America. Every major western leader has failed and this list is actively making people stupider.

In an age of pandemic, this blithe ignorance doesn’t just mean random brown weddings are getting drone struck. The ignorance of the New York Times is now getting its own readers killed.

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indi.ca

Indrajit (Indi) Samarajiva is a Sri Lankan writer. Follow me at www.indi.ca, or just email me at indi@indi.ca.