The New Yorker's David Remnick writes "Brownmiller’s treatment of the Emmett Till case reads today as morally oblivious...."

That's in "The Weinstein Moment and the Trump Presidency/The producer and other powerful men are facing repercussions for their alleged abusive behavior. Will the President?," a short essay that begins with a section on Susan Brownmiller's extremely influential 1975 book "Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape." Brownmiller's memorable thesis is summed up by Remnick:

“Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear,” she wrote, “must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe.” Sexual coercion, and the threat of its possibility, in the street, in the workplace, and in the home, she found, is less a matter of frenzied lust than a deliberate exercise of physical power, a declaration of superiority “designed to intimidate and inspire fear.”

Remnick has great respect for Brownmiller's thinking, which he finds useful in attacking Trump, even though Trump used words to entice us into voting for him not genitalia as a weapon.

But Remnick needs to lodge one complaint against Brownmiller, because attacking Trump is one thing and seeming oblivious about race is another. Remnick has to put this distance between himself and Susan Brownmiller:

Some of her arguments, particularly those pertaining to race, met with strong and convincing resistance from such critics as Angela Davis—Brownmiller’s treatment of the Emmett Till case reads today as morally oblivious—yet “Against Our Will” remains an important prod to our understanding of the social order.

Man, if I were editor of The New Yorker, I'd be frantically looking for some word other than "prod." It's too soon after the talk of "genitalia... as a weapon" to be aiming anything phallic at the reader.

But here's why I'm writing this post.
I subscribe to the paper and online New Yorker, but I also pay an additional $70 a year to get the audio version, and it has recently changed narrators. Before, there were 2 readers, one male and one female, and both were fabulous — so clear and subtly expressive. I used to marvel at the musicality of their rendition of the text. But the new person, Jamie Rendell, not only lacks the warmth and style of the old readers, he makes mistakes. I don't know how many mistakes, but I catch him mispronouncing names all the time (such as "Des Moines," with the final "s" not silent).

Mistakes like that make the product I paid for seem like a sloppy afterthought, and I feel ripped off for the $70, yet grudgingly willing, because I'm used to an hour or so of walking around outdoors with The New Yorker every week. But there are other mistakes that can really change the meaning and easily escape the listener, that make the audio version an actively defective product. I happened to notice one this week. You see the quote I put in the post title. The audio version says, "Brownmiller’s treatment of the Emmett Till case reads today as morally obvious...."! That still sounds like a criticism, but only because it's suggesting Brownmiller lacks depth and only says what all of us today easily know.

What did Brownmiller say about Emmett Till? She resisted the conventional wisdom and said something that today's feminists should have to confront (because it harshly clashes with the received wisdom on racial injustice):

A murder for a wolf whistle and a jury that refused to convict. The Till case became a lesson of instruction to an entire generation of appalled Americans. I know how I reacted. At age twenty and for a period of fifteen years after the murder of Emmett Till whenever a black teen-ager whistled at me on a New York City street or uttered in passing one of several variations on an invitation to congress, I smiled my nicest smile of comradely equality— no supersensitive flower of white womanhood, I— a largess I extended with equal sincerity to white construction workers, truck drivers, street-corner cowboys, indeed, to any and all who let me know from a safe distance their theoretical intent. After all, were not women for flirting? Wasn’t a whistle or a murmured “May I fuck you?” an innocent compliment? And did not white women in particular have to bear the white man’s burden of making amends for Southern racism? It took fifteen years for me to resolve these questions in my own mind, and to understand the insult implicit in Emmett Till’s whistle, the depersonalized challenge of “I can have you” with or without the racial aspect. Today a sexual remark on the street causes within me a fleeting but murderous rage.

And we know from the record how another person, Eldridge Cleaver, reacted to the murder of Till. In Soul on Ice Cleaver writes that he was nineteen years old when he “saw in a magazine a picture of the white woman with whom Emmett Till was said to have flirted.” Cleaver spelled out his reactions in full, for the Till case was a critical event in his life, one that turned him “inside out.”

While looking at the picture, I felt that little tension in the center of my chest I experience when a woman appeals to me. I was disgusted and angry with myself. Here was a woman who had caused the death of a black, possibly because, when he looked at her, he also felt the same tensions of lust and desire in his chest— and probably for the same general reasons that I felt them…. I looked at the picture again and again, and in spite of everything and against my will and the hate I felt for the woman and all that she represented, she appealed to me. I flew into a rage at myself, at America, at white women, at the history that had placed those tensions of lust and desire in my chest.

Cleaver had a small breakdown two days later during which he says he “ranted and raved … against white women in particular,” and then, “Somehow I arrived at the conclusion that, as a matter of principle, it was of paramount importance for me to have an antagonistic, ruthless attitude toward white women. The term outlaw appealed to me …” His solution: “I became a rapist.”

Cleaver’s thought pattern and the ideological construct he used to justify his career as a rapist, a career cut short by imprisonment, is interesting on several levels. Besides being a rare glimpse into the mind of an actual rapist, it reflects a strain of thinking among black male intellectuals and writers that became quite fashionable in the late nineteen sixties and was taken up with astonishing enthusiasm by white male radicals and parts of the white intellectual establishment as a perfectly acceptable excuse for rape committed by black men. The key to the ready acceptability of Cleaver’s thesis is obvious. The blame, as he saw it, belonged on white women.

That's certainly not shallow and obvious. Perhaps David Remnick can explain why it is oblivious. David Remnick did not (I assume) spend 15 years of his life smiling his "nicest smile of comradely equality" to strangers on the street who murmured things like "May I fuck you?"