Anti-Trump Pulitzer Prize Winner Rethinks ‘Reverse Racism’ After Encounter With ‘Drunk Black Man’

In today’s polarized society, it’s easy for people to become entrenched in their beliefs without ever actually putting them to the test.

This is a particularly common phenomenon on the left; but to her credit, one influential author recently admitted to being wrong in ruling out the possibility that non-White people could be racist toward Whites.

Of course, as the Daily Caller reported, it took a personal experience for non-binary Pulitzer Prize-winning Masha Gessen to reverse course:

Gessen arrived in Harlem with the anti-white sentiments typical of our intellectual elite.  She recalls speaking to a woman who “said she had been the target of ‘racist remarks.’”

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“I cringed. This woman was white, and the remarks had been made by people who were not. And I knew there was no such thing as ‘reverse racism’: You cannot be the object of racial discrimination if you are a member of the powerful majority.”

The next day, Gessen says, she took her daughter to a playground in Harlem, where a drunk black man called her daughter a “white bitch.”

Her daughter asked her, “Isn’t this racism?”

Gessen writes: “Somehow, my model, which denied the possibility of racism directed against the majority, could not account for the power dynamics involved in being a child being berated by an adult.”

For Gessen to reconsider such a bedrock concept among far-left extremists is notable, given the writer’s history of remarks many would identify as radical:

Masha Gessen masterclass:
– I’m trans and Russia is so backward for denying my ability to be trans.
– I just hate my own country so much, thank you America and LIBERAL DEMOCRACY. Thank you NYT, America’s paper of record, for publishing me as a columnist and thus promoting me.
-… https://t.co/0oOepqqimS

— Nikos Mohammadi (@NikosMohammadi) May 4, 2026

Here’s the full text of the post above:

Masha Gessen masterclass:
– I’m trans and Russia is so backward for denying my ability to be trans.
– I just hate my own country so much, thank you America and LIBERAL DEMOCRACY. Thank you NYT, America’s paper of record, for publishing me as a columnist and thus promoting me.
– Russia bad! Putin bad!
– Trump like Putin. Therefore: Bad!
– I want young Ukrainian men to be sent into a meat grinder so I can be trans.
– Did I tell you Russia is SO backward and repressive??
– Oh, and there’s my Pulitzer!

And here’s where Gessen debates whether it’s even “possible” for a “good” Israeli citizen to exist:

Masha Gessen talks to Israeli dissidents and asks, “Is it possible to be a good citizen of a bad country?” pic.twitter.com/LCAxt70S7n

— Linda Mamoun (@mamoun_linda) November 7, 2025

And plenty of Gessen’s screeds against President Donald Trump have gained traction for what critics like this one describe as “mentally ill”:

Incredibly mentally ill article by Masha Gessen in the New York Times, a beautiful insight into libtard self-hatred and neurosis.

She calls America a monstrous evil country because Trump blew up cartel ships and deported illegal immigrants. She argues every American is guilty.… https://t.co/ZtFmG9ZfeX pic.twitter.com/k9QHg7gfch

— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) November 3, 2025

Here’s the full text from that post:

Incredibly mentally ill article by Masha Gessen in the New York Times, a beautiful insight into libtard self-hatred and neurosis.

She calls America a monstrous evil country because Trump blew up cartel ships and deported illegal immigrants. She argues every American is guilty.

She then travels to Israel to talk to Israeli libtards about what it means to be collectively guilty of evil and genocide.

She talks to some random libtard at a cafe in Tel Aviv about his guilt. He complains about the fact that he is eating at a nice cafe while people in Gaza starve 40 miles away (you can go on TikTok and watch videos of brand new luxury cafes opening in Gaza as we speak). He says he went on vacation to Italy to recover. Wow, hope he is okay. He then wrote a libtarded editorial for Haaretz when he returned from vacation in Italy. Inspired by his Italian sojourn, his editorial accused Israelis of being part of an Italian mafia crime family. Maybe he thought of that at the beach in Positano. So important.

Thank you Massa Gesssn for this beautiful insight into libtard neurosis, guilt and self loathing.

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Notably, this isn’t Gessen’s only recent tie-in with reverse racism. The Trump administration announced that it would be going after the columnist’s employer, the New York Times, over allegations that it passed up White employees for promotions that went to less-qualified minorities.

Here’s what the New York Post reported on that development:

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accused the newspaper of breaching civil-rights law by discriminating against the unnamed male candidate based on his race or sex, according to the agency’s complaint filed in Manhattan federal court.

Nikita Stewart — the Times’ then-real-estate editor who has since been promoted to metro editor — “deviated from normal hiring protocol” in January 2025 to hire someone without experience editing real-estate coverage to work as her deputy, the suit alleged.

The white man who was bypassed for the gig had “considerable experience with real estate news,” which had been a supposed requirement included on the public job listing for the position, the EEOC claimed in the reverse-discrimination lawsuit.

The Times’ hiring decision came amid a broader push at the paper to add more non-white managers in leadership positions.

The debate about reverse racism, which is widely applauded by the left in practice, has been the subject of considerable debate in recent years, including during this congressional hearing from 2025: