A single Epstein email shines a light on myths about American justice – and art |
Here is an email that should bring shame to Jes Staley:
double quotation markyou want to know why we are not São Paolo, watch the TV adds on the Superbowl. Its all about hip blacks in hip cars with white women. The group that should be in the streets, has been bought off. By Jay Z
double quotation markyou want to know why we are not São Paolo, watch the TV adds on the Superbowl. Its all about hip blacks in hip cars with white women.
The group that should be in the streets, has been bought off. By Jay Z
Written more than a decade ago to Jeffrey Epstein, it is sloppy, ungrammatical, and intellectually thin. Staley, who would go on to become CEO of Barclays before being banned for life from top roles in the financial industry in connection with his Epstein ties, reflects on why poor Americans don’t take to the streets to protest injustice, unlike those in São Paulo, Brazil, where tensions over the World Cup had sparked uprisings. His explanation: look at the Super Bowl ads. Look at the spectacle. People are pacified and lulled into compliance. He then invokes Jay-Z, a man whose music millions of us were raised on, to suggest that the artist has been “bought off”. The people who should be in the streets, he claims, have been neutralized by the records they love.
This is what they think of us.
Let’s start with the hypocrisy. Staley’s reduction of Black Americans is racist. Our motivations are as myriad as we are. But more importantly, Staley was no naive bystander. He flew on Epstein’s plane, visited his island, and maintained a friendship that his own bank’s investigators described as “close” long after Epstein’s first conviction. The man theorizing about cultural pacification was himself pacified by a sick pedophile.
But the email deserves a closer reading. Staley articulated a longstanding racist strategy without shame. The logic is old: absorb the culture, give people enough spectacle and vicarious aspiration, and they........