The New York Post publishes the Bret Stephens column that the New York Times spiked.

It's not that Stephens, a regular NYT columnist, can or would just give the rejected column to another newspaper to publish. The Post tells us the column — which defends the NYT reporter who got ousted for saying the n-word — "circulated among Times staffers and others" and the Post got hold of it "from one of them, not Stephens himself." Presumably, the Post publishes it because it is newsworthy — not as an opinion on the news but because the spiking of it is news, so we need to see what it is. 

Let's read it:

Every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system and every ethical organization cares deeply about intention. 

It is the difference between murder and manslaughter. It is an aggravating or extenuating factor in judicial settings. It is a cardinal consideration in pardons (or at least it was until Donald Trump got in on the act).

Speaking of Donald Trump, it's the question I think should be at the core of the impeachment trial but is not: Did Trump intend that the crowd break into the Capitol and terrorize the members of Congress?  

It’s an elementary aspect of parenting, friendship, courtship and marriage. A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention.

Yeah, why are the House Managers indifferent to this distinction? I am getting distracted! This Stephen's column reads like a criticism of the House Managers case against Trump. Trump said something, perhaps without any intention of causing the harm, but the harm did ensue. To care about the harm and not what the accused person intended is a "hallmark of injustice." Noted!

Most of what is cruel, intolerant, stupid and misjudged in life stems from that indifference. Read accounts about life in repressive societies — I’d recommend Vaclav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” and Nien Cheng’s “Life and Death in Shanghai” — and what strikes you first is how deeply the regimes care about outward conformity, and how little for personal intention. I’ve been thinking about these questions in an unexpected connection.

Me too. I'm thinking about Trump. But I know you want to talk about your erstwhile fellow Timesman, Donald McNeil.

Late last week, Donald G. McNeil Jr., a veteran science reporter for The Times, abruptly departed from his job following the revelation that he had uttered a racial slur while on a New York Times trip to Peru for high school students. In the course of a dinner discussion, he was asked by a student whether a 12-year old should have been suspended by her school for making a video in which she had used a racial slur. 

In a written apology to staff, McNeil explained what happened next: “To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself.” 

In an initial note to staff, editor-in-chief Dean Baquet noted that, after conducting an investigation, he was satisfied that McNeil had not used the slur maliciously and that it was not a firing offense. In response, more than 150 Times staffers signed a protest letter. A few days later, Baquet and managing editor Joe Kahn reached a different decision. 

“We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” they wrote on Friday afternoon. They added to this unambiguous judgment that the paper would “work with urgency to create clearer guidelines and enforcement about conduct in the workplace, including red-line issues on racist language.”

This is not a column about the particulars of McNeil’s case. Nor is it an argument that the racial slur in question doesn’t have a uniquely ugly history and an extraordinary capacity to wound. 

This is an argument about three words: “Regardless of intent.” Should intent be the only thing that counts in judgment? Obviously not. Can people do painful, harmful, stupid or objectionable things regardless of intent? Obviously. 

Do any of us want to live in a world, or work in a field, where intent is categorically ruled out as a mitigating factor? I hope not. 

He's not saying the deliberate intent of the accused should always be decisive, only that it's wrong to entirely exclude intent, which Baquet and Kahn explicitly did. I would add that the biggest problem is the retroactive declaration of a strict liability standard. If the NYT had declared in advance that any saying of the word is a firing offense, that would have been fair, even if it's too repressive. But we can see that was not the policy, because the original decision was not to fire O'Neil. It was only in response to protest by the staff that O'Neil was ousted. There's the injustice.

That ought to go in journalism as much, if not more, than in any other profession.

That sentence needs editing — "to go" is ambiguous. I think he means "That ought to hold true...." 

What is it that journalists do, except try to perceive intent, examine motive, furnish context, explore nuance, explain varying shades of meaning, forgive fallibility, make allowances for irony and humor, slow the rush to judgment (and therefore outrage), and preserve vital intellectual distinctions? 

That's a good question. I'll put it in boldface. 

Journalism as a humanistic enterprise — as opposed to hack work or propaganda — does these things in order to teach both its practitioners and consumers to be thoughtful. There is an elementary difference between citing a word for the purpose of knowledge and understanding and using the same word for the purpose of insult and harm. Lose this distinction, and you also lose the ability to understand the things you are supposed to be educated to oppose.

Well, you could understand the distinction but still choose to exclude the word, all the time, because you know the harm that it causes and you want to care for others. The problem is establishing a policy, so that people know in advance they can never say the word, for whatever reason. Clearly, the NYT didn't have that policy. It could adopt that policy and put everyone on notice. Has it done that, even now? Would it fire a black reporter who was just singing along to a rap song while alone in her car? Inflexible, draconian rules are possible, but you have to be brutal, and racial discrimination in employment is against the law.

No wonder The Times has never previously been shy about citing racial slurs in order to explain a point. Here is a famous quote by the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater that has appeared at least seven times in The Times, most recently in 2019, precisely because it powerfully illuminates the mindset of a crucial political player. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*****, n*****, n*****.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n*****’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, ‘forced busing,’ “states’ rights” and all that stuff.”

I put those asterisks in. The column, as published in the NY Post — and as, presumably, offered to the NYT — has the word written out. Should Bret Stephens be fired for writing the words? But he's quoting the NYT (quoting Atwater). Not long ago. Recently. 2019. Should whoever wrote that and whoever was involved in publishing that be fired?

Is this now supposed to be a scandal? Would the ugliness of Atwater’s meaning have been equally clearer by writing “n—, n—, n—”?

This is the argument for allowing the word to be used precisely to cause the effect, to make people feel hurt: You want to depict the ugliness of something somebody says. But a newspaper might chose to protect its readers from the word. But the NYT used to print the n-word. Look at all these n-word headlines! I'll just point you toward them. Just to indicate what's there: "Up From N*****" (1976), "'The Legend of N***** Charley' Three escaped slaves fall in with drifters while fleeing a bounty hunter" (1971), "White N***** Of America" (1971), "Rap's Embrace of 'N****' Fires Bitter Debate" (1993).

A journalism that turns words into totems — and totems into fears — is an impediment to clear thinking and proper understanding. 

So too is a journalism that attempts to proscribe entire fields of expression. “Racist language” is not just about a single infamous word. It’s a broad, changing, contestable category. There are many people — I include myself among them — who think that hardcore anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. That’s also official policy at the State Department and the British Labour Party. If anti-Semitism is a form of racism, and racist language is intolerable at The Times, might we someday forbid not only advocacy of anti-Zionist ideas, but even refuse to allow them to be discussed? 

He's opening up a big new topic in that paragraph — the banning of ideas. I'm not even convinced that there's a slippery slope in the banning of words. It's just that one word. The NYT doesn't even avoid "fuck" anymore. For so many years, "fuck" was THE ONE WORD. Maybe there is a weird fetish that there must be one word — and only one word — that you just can't print. It could be "God." There are those who must write "G-d." And these days, the one word is the n-word... at least when it's not in "Rap's Embrace." 

The idea is absurd. But that’s the terrain we now risk entering. We are living in a period of competing moral certitudes, of people who are awfully sure they’re right and fully prepared to be awful about it. Hence the culture of cancellations, firings, public humiliations and increasingly unforgiving judgments. The role of good journalism should be to lead us out of this dark defile. Last week, we went deeper into it.

I had to look up "dark defile." It's a reference to this Kipling poem, I believe. "Defile," the noun, means "A narrow way or passage along which troops can march only by files or with a narrow front; esp. (and in ordinary use) a narrow pass or gorge between mountains" (OED). Stephens is picturing us — all of us, not just the NYT — entering risky terrain, and we are vulnerable in this passageway. The NYT — or whoever the "good journalists" are — needs to lead us out of there, not "deeper into it." He doesn't say exactly what he wants, though it's clear he's strongly opposed to the firing of McNeil. But he's laying out a challenge, issues for the NYT to take up. And the NYT said no. It doesn't even want to see the questions. Or do you think it was just that writing out of the word in the Atwater quote?

I want to be completely out front that I, like Stephens, do not purport to tell you what all the answers are here. I want to get the questions out there and shed light on them. I want to have the conversation. Ha. That makes me think of all the times NYT-type people call on America to have a conversation. Where's the conversation now, you preening power-wielders?

And let me leave you with that 1993 NYT article, "Rap's Embrace of 'N****' Fires Bitter Debate." It's got the n-word written out more than 50 times! Presumably, it's doing that to force you, the reader, to see what the subject of discussion is.

One of America's oldest and most searing epithets -- "n*****" -- is flooding into the nation's popular culture, giving rise to a bitter debate among blacks about its historically ugly power and its increasingly open use in an integrated society. 

Whether thoughtlessly or by design, large numbers of a post-civil rights generation of blacks have turned to a conspicuous use of "n*****" just as they have gained considerable cultural influence through rap music and related genres. 

Some blacks, mostly young people, argue that their open use of the word will eventually demystify it, strip it of its racist meaning. They liken it to the way some homosexuals have started referring to themselves as "queers" in a defiant slap at an old slur....

Blacks who say they should use the word more openly maintain that its casual use, especially in the company of whites, will shift the word's context and strip "n*****" of its ability to hurt.... 

"When I hear it, it makes me angry and very sad," said [Jocelyn] Jerome, a 53-year-old mother of three grown children and the director of a program that tries to encourage more minority students to become physicians. "There are times when I honestly feel like crying." 

She says she has made it her mission to discourage young black people from using the racial epithet. In a recent incident, a group of young blacks got on Ms. Jerome's bus and spoke in a conversation that consisted of little more than 'n***** this and n***** that,' Ms. Jerome said, she decided to speak up. "I put my newspaper down and said, 'Look, I know my talking is not going to make you change today or tomorrow, but I have a question: why are you constantly using that word? Do you know what that word means?' " 

She said the youngsters listened to her respectfully, occasionally telling her that "n*****" was a term of endearment among young blacks. 

Little changed, but that has not weakened her resolve. 

"As far as I'm concerned," Ms. Jerome said, "no one has the license to use it."