Gray Lady Down (10 page)

Lee included fifteen paragraphs where residents disparaged the “stop and frisk” policy and just four where residents supported it. The closing paragraph described a press conference outside police headquarters the previous day, where representatives of black and Hispanic officers’ groups called for Police Commissioner Kelly to step down. “These numbers substantiate what we’ve been saying for years,” Lee quoted Noel Leader, a cofounder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. “The New York Police Department under Raymond Kelly is actively committing some of the grossest forms of racial profiling in the history of the New York Police Department.”

The commentary on the unfortunate encounter that Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard had with the Cambridge police in July 2009, provided the
Times
with another soapbox to denounce racial profiling. “The clash in Cambridge about ID and racial profiling, about identity and expectation and respect was just a snippet of our culture’s ongoing meta-narrative about race,” according to Judith Warner, a
Times
Web columnist. Bob Herbert devoted two columns to the case. In the first, headlined “Anger Has Its Place,” he wrote: “Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.” In the second column, headlined “Innocence Is No Defense,” Herbert
complained: “Young, old, innocent as the day is long—it doesn’t matter. Your skin color can leave you perpetually vulnerable to a sudden and devastating injustice.”

In the past, a faith in integration had guided the
Times’
coverage of race, as revealed in the paper’s response to the rise of the Black Power movement and its radical notions of cultural separatism. On the confrontation between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Dr. Martin Luther King in 1966 over the issue of white involvement in the civil rights struggle, the
Times
ran an editorial under the headline “Black Power Is Black Death.” It applauded the activist Roger Wilkins for telling the NAACP that “the way out of America’s racial dilemma” was “the inclusion of the Negro American in the nation’s life, not their exclusion.” A year earlier, after Malcolm X was assassinated, a
Times
editorial decried his “ruthless and fanatical belief in violence.”

By contrast, a
Times
news report about a Harlem exhibition in 2004 referred to Malcolm X as a “Civil Rights Giant” and extolled the exhibition for its description of a “driving intellectual quest for truth.” When John Carlos and Tommie Smith had given the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, the
Times
condemned the action; forty years later, the reporter Katie Thomas called it a “heroic gesture.”

The
Times
has endorsed a separatist black identity by reporting favorably on Afrocentric education, which its supporters see as a way to overcome alienation and boost self-esteem in underperforming inner-city black schoolchildren, by teaching them that they are descendants of a scientifically and artistically rich African culture. The fans of Afrocentrism claim that Africa, not Europe, was the cradle of Western civilization, and that racist “Eurocentric” scholarship has systemically denied it. Afrocentric education also emphasizes a “distinctly black learning style.”

To its critics, however, Afrocentrism is “a heavy dose of fantasy mixed with racism,” and an “ethnic religion” based on shoddy
scholarship, with a dangerous potential to encourage racial insularity and intolerance. Claims that black children learn differently from whites are largely seen by professional educators as nonsense, an effort to teach history as group therapy. The notion of introducing a separate black curriculum would undermine the function of the public school as an instrument to instill a common culture and a shared sense of the past.

The debate over Afrocentric education was one that the
Times
should have monitored closely. At the very least, the paper should have provided a complete and candid description of what Afrocentric educators were teaching, as well as an inventory of the pedagogical and scholarly assumptions these teaching materials embodied. Instead, the
Times
shrank from the challenge, and treated the competing claims about Afrocentrism as equally valid “perspectives” whose multiplicity should be celebrated. The
Times
ignored some of the more patently ridiculous claims and airbrushed uncomfortable realities about Afrocentrism as well as the controversy around it. For example, there was no research to support a link between self-esteem and educational achievement. Yet news analysis in the
Times
routinely quoted supporters of Afrocentrism making that linkage. The paper made no attempt to evaluate the strength of Afrocentric scholarship, including claims that Cleopatra (along with the rest of ancient Egypt) was black, and that Africans discovered mathematics, built the first airplanes and were the first to sail to America.

As far back as 1990, the education reporter Suzanne Daley produced a fairly critical report on Afrocentric education, quoting experts who questioned whether history should become an exercise in self-esteem, emphasizing what many experts called the pedagogical “slipperiness” of Afrocentrism, and explaining that much of its curriculum accented white scholarly conspiracies against African achievement. Daley’s report set off protests by black staffers, who ensured that subsequent treatments of the subject were much more flattering and made supporters sound more convincing than critics. In one of those later treatments, Calvin Sims, a black reporter, claimed that the “scholarly underpinnings” of Afrocentric theories and curricula were “firm” and
based on “the work of scholars who are trained in the ancient classics of northern Europe and Africa.”

The
Times
also affirms separatist values in its coverage of the black family and the problem of illegitimacy. As already noted, back in the 1960s the paper had no problem with making value judgments about black illegitimacy. It gave sympathetic treatment to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report on the cultural disarray of “the negro family,” which was attacked by civil rights leaders and leftist publications. The
Times
reporter John Herbers explained that Moynihan’s work was not intended to fuel contempt for black Americans by drawing attention to the problem of illegitimacy; rather, its purpose was to show that “white America by means of slavery, humiliation and unemployment has so degraded the Negro male that most lower class Negro families are headed by females.” This, Herbers quoted Moynihan approvingly, had made it impossible for “Negroes as a group to compete on even terms in the US.”

Today the general public has no trouble seeing the prophetic nature of Moynihan’s argument. In 1965, when he first tried to draw attention to the problem, the rate of black illegitimacy was 25 percent; by 2009 it was 70 percent. A consensus has emerged on solutions, emphasizing welfare reform, which it is hoped will make young, out-of-wedlock motherhood an undesirable experience for teenage girls. But for most of the last two decades, when the debate has been sharpest, the
Times
has been reluctant to admit that the issue is serious and has disparaged proposals floated to address it.

The
Times
has been remiss, too, in reporting on social policy for dysfunctional black families and their relationship to the foster care system in New York City. In the early 1990s, the city began an experiment aimed at better protecting the black and Latino children whose parents have lost custody to the foster care system. The experiment was the work of Robert Little, the brother of Malcolm X and himself a former foster child, who believed that black children placed in white foster homes would lose their “black identity.” This racist assumption was shared most ardently by a child welfare advocate named Luis Medina, who believed, as the
Times
would write in late 2007, “that foster care in New York had become an evil and racist system that was engaged in little more than rounding up poor minority children.” At another point, Medina said the foster care system felt like “some version of apartheid.”

Medina took over a venerable child care agency called St. Christopher’s, based up the Hudson River in Dobbs Ferry, New York. As the
Times
retroactively explained,

As a symbolic touch, Medina ordered that the pictures of white children at the agency’s administrative office be replaced with pictures of black and Latino children.

Eventually, St. Christopher’s would expand, opening offices in the Bronx and in Harlem. But Medina’s ideology began to divide the staff, and some felt there was too much operational chaos. “Mr. Medina’s main Bronx office became overrun by parents, some of whom were dangerous and some of whom came simply to hang out,” the
Times
wrote in 2007. “The presence of the parents—often confused or furious—and a chronic shortage of staff created disorder, particularly during visiting hours with their children. Telephones could go unanswered, dirty diapers often collected in the corners, toilets went unfixed, fights broke out, children were snatched.”

According to Starr Lozada, a caseworker based in Medina’s River Avenue office in the Bronx in 2004, “The birth parents would come and hang out all day. Maybe they would come for the breakfast. Talk with each other. Stay until we closed.” The parents would bring in people from the neighborhood, and there would be screaming and carrying on. “We felt unsafe,” Lozada said.

As this chaos was brewing, the
Times
ran a front-page piece on St. Christopher’s in 1995, extolling Medina and his approach in an account that relied on unverifiable claims by parents who either had been involved with or were still involved with drugs or alcohol, or domestic violence. A father claimed that after his son was taken from them, he and his wife walked into St. Christopher’s-Jennie Clarkson prepared to fight a hostile bureaucracy. Instead, they found case supervisors who promised to do everything they could to help the parents regain custody. “You have to give people something to shoot for,” one senior supervisor was quoted as saying, “not just hold something over their heads.” The 1995 article quoted Jeremy Kohomban, director of family services: “Most important was a shift of power from agency workers to parents.”

A dozen years later, in the 2007 article, the
Times
did finally get around to acknowledging the problems at St. Christopher’s—problems in its racial philosophy and also in its operational administration. But by then the damage had been done. “Children with St. Christopher’s, city records show, were abused or neglected at disturbing rates,” the article reported. “Family Court judges and lawyers cited the agency for years for ineptitude in handling children’s cases. In 2002, St. Christopher’s got so few children adopted that the city gave it a grade of zero in its performance scoring system. And from 1999 to 2005, seven children whose families had been involved with St. Christopher’s wound up dead.”

To be sure, the
Times’
approach to the black family has undergone welcome change, as its retrospective on St. Christopher’s shows. In a mid-2005 column headlined “Dad’s Empty Chair,” Bob Herbert wrote: “I don’t have the statistics to prove it, but black kids would be tremendously better off if the cultural winds changed and more fathers felt the need to come home.” For Herbert it was an easy call: “Moms are crucial. Dads too.” Yet if we—and the
Times
—are at what the sociologist Kay Hymowitz calls a cultural inflection point that portends change, “the lost generations of ghetto men, women, and children” could be forgiven if they found “cold comfort” in this much-overdue shift.