National Review Fires John Derbyshire

The conservative magazine National Review has fired John Derbyshire, a prominent contributor, after he wrote a piece for an online magazine advising his children on how to protect themselves from black people, reports Politico.

In a piece for online publication Taki’s Magazine that was posted Thursday, Derbyshire wrote “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” as a response to the conversations many African-Americans are having with their children following the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida. Among other things, Derbyshire wrote that black people are hostile to whites and advised his kids to stay out of black neighborhoods.

There was immediate uproar over the clearly racist piece that was shocking even for someone who had previously described himself as a racist and a homophobe, as the Guardian points out.

In a post Saturday night titled “Parting Ways” National Review Editor Rich Lowry wrote that Derbyshire’s “column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.” Even though Derbyshire is “a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer” his piece for a website that is unrelated to the National Review “lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible.” Lowry added that "we never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer."*

If you want to read the lowlights of Derbyshire’s piece, Gawker’s Maureen O’Connor provides a summary.

*Correction: An earlier version of this piece mistakenly attributed a quote about the column in question, and the reaction to it, to Derbyshire when in reality it was a statement made by Lowry.