Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
A high level of arrogance is one of the bigger items included in the whiteness welcome kit.
It’s a level of arrogance so high that a Martian couldn’t reach it.
This is a story about Jann Wenner.
His name is pronounced like “yawn,” and honestly that is so apt considering the thing I’m about to talk about, I’m just going to refer to him as Yawn throughout this piece. Consider it a mnemonic to help you remember how to pronounce his first name.
His last name is pronounced like “winner,” and this week, he is the winner of the White People Always Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud Award.
Yawn is the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, a publication that is ostensibly the Harvard of music publications. People look to Rolling Stone for great interviews and good journalism, which is why a recent interview Yawn the Arrogant did with the New York Times has people shaking their heads and giving Yawn the side eye.
Let me first give props to David Marchese, the journalist who interviewed Yawn. David kept his foot on Yawn’s neck the entire time, and he did not let him get off easy on tough questions.
Yawn has a new book coming out Sept. 26 called “The Masters,” which features selected interviews from the time he spent at Rolling Stone (he left in 2019). The only people included in the book are white men.
In the introduction to the book, Yawn himself says that people of color and women were just not in his “zeitgeist.”
When Marchese pushed back by naming Stevie Wonder and other white women performers, Yawn said the following:
When I was…
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