Like any old friend of a publication’s founder who considers it his right to contribute lazy nonsense only when it pleases him, John Derbyshire seemed to pop off from his National Review perch for weeks or months at a time. He would eventually resurface on National Review Online, perhaps touting a playful new book on the apocalypse, to share his oddball musings on various affairs while his more dependable, hawkish colleagues busied themselves with outrage at the Democratic Party. A latter-year blog post from Derbyshire — “Derb” or “The Derb” to colleagues and critics alike — would usually go something like, “My flowers have just come in, looking a bit limp I must say. Did you hear about this latest fashion preoccupation among teenage girls? Nor did I. Watch out for the blacks.” These blasts of Derbitry had become the only reason to visit National Review Online, reliably providing rich material to satisfy the daily fixes of outrage and mockery.

So it’s a shame — well, not really at all — that the Derb Days have reached their natural and necessary conclusion. Derbyshire, see, had been skipping out at night and giving his best stuff to the fringy online magazine Taki, where last week he published the most vile exercise in long-form racism in recent memory.

In the end, Derbyshire had to go so far as to write out an impressively comprehensive, bullet-pointed listicle of the dozen or so most unforgivable racist tropes in the book before National Review editor Rich Lowry finally felt compelled to fire him. The Derb had been sprinkling his work with little racist nuggets of this sort in his work for ages, of course, but one could argue that it took such a bombastic compilation of overt, resurrected hate speech to see the man in full.

Derbyshire was “going for something” in this piece,”The Talk: Nonblack Version.” Somewhere deep beneath the waste lay a newsy peg which Derbyshire found ripe for botched satirization. He was riffing on frequent mainstream media stories about “the talk” that many black parents feel obligated to give their teenage sons about how their normal behaviors can be perceived as threatening in a country with such a long legacy of racism. Don’t sneak up on people, don’t lose your temper, don’t mouth off a cop, and so on. If, for whatever reason, a pundit felt the burning need to push back against this particular newsroom trend piece favorite, there could be unoffending ways to do so: Sometimes the story loses such a sense of balance that the writer/reporter never bothers to say, for example, “of course, many, many white cops take their responsibility seriously and are not constantly seeking to arrest black teenage males on the capital charge of walking down the sidewalk.”

FULL ARTICLE: John Derbyshire, racist hack, gets canned – Salon.com.