World
Dutch Newspaper Uses N-Word in Headline of Review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ New Book
(The Washington Post) – On July 31, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad published a review of several books on race and racism in the United States. The series, written by the paper’s Washington correspondent Guus Valk, leads with a review of Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book, “Between the World And Me.” Somewhere along the editorial process, the editors thought it would be a good idea to headline the article, “Nigger, Are You Crazy?”
If the headline weren’t appalling enough, the article compounded the offensiveness factor with its accompanying blackface figures:
This is how the highbrow Dutch newspaper @NRC designed and headlined its review last week of @tanehisicoates's book. pic.twitter.com/HLFpo70b9X
— siddhartha mitter (@siddhmi) August 6, 2015
How a group of Dutch editors decided to publish an attempt to examine race and racism in the United States, using the English n-word and blackface in a major newspaper is beyond comprehension at the least, and rage-inducing at worst. Indeed, the Twitter reactions were swift and angry. Michel Krielaars, editor of the Book supplement for NRC, said that the paper had taken down the illustrations online, in order not to “offend non-Dutch speakers who only read Twitter.” The illustration still appears on their online reader, however.
