The essay addresses Podhoretz's racism, which he calls "the hatred I still feel for Negroes", based on his interactions with African-Americans while growing up as a white working-class Jewish boy in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Podhoretz relates an incident where a non-Jewish Black friend hit him and refused to play with him because "I had killed Jesus"; after asking his mother for an explanation, she "cursed the goyim and the Schwartzes, the Schwartzes and the goyim" in Yiddish and told him to ignore "such foolishness".
Despite expressing disgust for interracial marriage, Podhoretz writes that widespread interrmariage and the subsequent erasing of racial differences could be a solution to racism: "I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned.
"[2] Receiving both praise for honesty and condemnation for racism, the essay has been called both notorious and brave.
This fact alone should show us what this publication stands for: rampant anti-blackness, hidden under the thin veneer of 'intellectual rigor' ... Commentary in other words, still has a 'Negro Problem.