Do you think there will be a gay president or an Italian-American president first?

There’s no right answer

There are some questions that are perfectly suited to be discussed at the bar after you’ve had a few beers with your pals and everyone has finished complaining about work and gossiping about acquaintances. These questions go one step beyond “Which five albums would you bring to a deserted island,” and are intended to spark passionate but low-stakes conversation that is inclusive of a variety of personalities and intelligence levels.

Some examples of these questions are: Do you think Kurt Cobain would have sold out by now if he were still alive? Who is the oldest famous person you would have sex with? Is there a war that you think you could have survived had you fought in it? Does the Queen know who Mario is? (My answers are: no, Dick Van Dyke, Revolutionary, and yes.) These questions are, most importantly, stupid. They have no bearing on our present reality and are just a good way to get a conversation going.

But one stands above the rest. It is my favorite question to ask when everyone is a little tipsy, because no one has ever considered it and yet everyone has an answer they are willing to defend almost immediately. Here it is: Do you think America will have an Italian-American president or a gay president first?

Think about it for a second. There are good arguments for either side. There aren’t a lot of Italian-Americans holding high-level positions in government right now, and now that former Governor Andrew Cuomo has been ousted from polite society, this country’s most powerful Italian-American politician is the widely reviled Sen. Joe Manchin (whose last name is derived from “Mancini”). That being said, the country is still homophobic, and for a gay presidential candidate to be taken seriously they have to also be a veteran who reads James Joyce and is boring. Much to consider.

“Punching up” versus “punching down” is rarely so simple a calculus of power

Some months ago, I got into a Twitter spat with a few moderately popular TV writers/comedians. It involved the subject of labor unions: specifically a growing rift within a certain writers guild, which at the time was having an existential crisis, with one faction wanting to halt organizing to prevent entire swathes of media workers from joining the union. I tweeted the names of a handful of screenwriters I liked who had unfortunately — whether unwittingly or not — cosigned that platform. My doing this appeared to irk some of the aforementioned writers and/or their friends, who made sure to let me know in no uncertain terms online.

If this all sounds terribly boring and convoluted, I promise that it was. But this quarrel at least was useful in solidifying for me a belief that I think can help explain many, if not most, interpersonal conflicts that take place on the internet: Everyone always thinks that they are the underdog in a fight.

For example, to the people with whom I was quarreling, I can imagine what my callout might have felt like: that an extremely prominent, influential, and drop-dead gorgeous Gawker writer (as my 8,000-odd followers attest to) was bullying comediennes who were all women of color, several of them Black — and an Asian woman, if you were curious — in an obvious instance of punching down. Why hadn’t I included the names of men or white people on my list of names that I said were “disappointing” to find endorsing a ticket whose main message was fear mongering about screenwriters being made a minority in their own guild? my critics demanded. But from my perspective, if I were forced to assign a direction, I would have said that I was punching up, since the subjects of my finger wagging were successful entertainment-industry creatives — and thus ostensibly possessed all the clout, connections, and tens of thousands of fans that that entails — whose most vocal advocates apparently sought to shut the door on fellow workers from a notoriously volatile, low-paid industry.

One might come to the generous conclusion that perhaps there was merit to what both sides were arguing. Maybe I didn’t need to give in to an unflattering impulse of sanctimony and name and shame those writers, some of whom might not have known what they were cosigning; maybe a few of those writers and their friends didn’t need to immediately reach for accusations of racism, as they did, to shut me down. I’ve accepted that it ultimately doesn’t really matter who was right and who was wrong. What mattered more in how this conflict played out was the way each side probably felt: targeted and maligned by someone holding presumably greater power, platform, or privilege. A victim, a scapegoat, an underdog.

Since April, 15 of the site's 16 staffers have quit, following a trend of mass resignations at the websites owned by G/O Media

When The Root launched as an offshoot of The Washington Post in 2008, it aimed to fill the gap between print and online media and elevate Black writers in the digital mainstream. It was high-brow — founded by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Donald E. Graham, with early contributions from writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and William Julius Wilson — but fast-paced, topical, and generally in the business of critiquing culture and those in power.

The voice has evolved; in 2018, then-editor-in-chief Danielle Belton told CNN the site had moved past its once “professorial” tone. The following year, the site was acquired by the newly formed, venture-capital backed G/O Media, along with the slew of blogs owned by the Gawker Media Group (G/O Media did not acquire this website, which was sold to Bustle Digital Group after it was shut down in 2016). But it has remained one of the most popular Black news sites on the internet and a frequent destination for interviews with celebrities and politicians. It was in a Root video that Rep. Ayanna Pressley first revealed her alopecia diagnosis. During the last election cycle, writer Terrell Jermaine Starr interviewed Congress hopefuls Jamaal Bowman, Jaime Harrison, and Raphael Warnock. In 2020, writer Michael Harriot interviewed Obama.

But over the past year, 15 of the site’s employees have left — a nearly 100 percent turnover since April, when it had 16 full-time staffers. The departures included: editor-in-chief Danielle Belton; managing editor Genetta Adams; news editor Monique Judge; social media editor Corey Townsend; editor Maiysha Kai; video producers Felice Leon, Jessica Moulite, and PJ Rickards; writers, Tonja Renée Stidhum, Joe Jurado, Terrell Jermaine Starr, Stephen Crockett Jr., and Michael Harriot; and the two founders of Very Smart Brothas, the popular blog that The Root acquired in 2017, Damon Young and Panama Jackson.

Harriot, who resigned in November, told Gawker: “As a staff, we came to the conclusion that, basically, The Root is over.”

His name is Michael

On Wednesday, on the topic of disgraced memelord and former Real Housewife of Salt Lake City Jennie Nguyen, I filed a wildly speculative post about what “truth” she threatened to share on a forthcoming Instagram Live tell-all. I suspected that Jennie’s “truth” would be that her racist Facebook posts from 2020 were leaked and had to do with producer involvement, intentional fomenting of political discord, and sabotage.

But the “truth” is actually much better than what I suggested. Here it is: It was her social media team’s fault that racist memes appeared on her personal Facebook page. “I just want you to understand that, during that time, I had a team of people that [were] helping me. Whether they posted [or] I posted, it doesn’t really matter at this point,” Nguyen said, according to Page Six.

Perhaps it was a former member of the Shah Squad? It’s unclear to me why she needed a team of social media managers for her personal Facebook page, as Nguyen wasn’t cast on the show until at least a year after the posts in question. But who am I to question the personal branding ambitions of the former med spa owner and proud momma to Atlas, Triton, and Karlyn?

Nguyen’s “truth” is ALSO that she actually knows this one guy name Michael, who is Black (and gay, fwiw), and he’s sitting next to her and saying “She’s not a racist” into the camera.

Forgive me.

Not too long ago I received a text from my colleague Claire Carusillo about a new menu item at Dunkin’. The text said: “What’s going on at Dunkin’ Donuts with the omelet bites shaped like donuts,” and the message was accompanied by this photo: