I’m Not The Only One

By now everyone must be aware of the recent editorial cartoon which ran in the New York Post.  In the cartoon a chimpanzee has been shot dead by police officers who say to each other, “Now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.”

Is the cartoon inherently racist?  Not really, if you consider the New York Post is a publication with a conservative slant and highly critical of any Democrat, especially our new Democrat President.  The cartoon was drawn as a reference to the recent shooting by police of a chimpanzee who mauled a woman in Connecticut.  But the cartoon’s message (my interpretation of it) was that the stimulus bill was so stupid, a primate could have written it.

In all fairness, liberals have repeatedly and viciously compared former President George W. Bush to a monkey for the last eight years when they weren’t comparing him to Adolf Hitler.  Obviously there are some people who think Obama is as big an idiot as some people regard his predecessor, as demonstrated in the recent HBO documentary “Right America Feeling Wronged.” Perhaps liberals have set a dangerous precedent in comparing a President to a monkey over and over.  But President Obama’s partial black ancestry makes the comparison extremely taboo as black people have historically been compared to monkeys, ape and other primates, especially in the U.S.

Barack Obama is by no means the post-racial President he is painted as in the media.  If anything his Presidency has caused this country to confront its sad legacy of racism especially at the expense of people of color but certainly not resolve this issue, not yet.  In mainstream America, just being nonwhite is almost taboo by itself, much less being a person of color competing for a position that has always been held by whites.  We watched as Bill Clinton got in trouble during the Democratic Primary campaign for calling an Obama presidency “a fairy tale“, prompting other liberals (especially in the media) to be very hesitant to criticize Obama, ushering in the flurry of well-meaning but condescending “he’s so well-spoken”-themed media coverage.

If you ask self-appointed “black leaders” like Al Sharpton, any criticism of Barack Obama can be construed as racial prejudice, with the right amount of spin.  I can only imagine Rev. Sharpton was smiling from ear to ear when he learned of the editorial cartoon comparing the author of the stimulus package to a chimpanzee.  Granted, President Obama’s hand was not the only one in the pot when this whole stimulus package was being cooked up, but he certainly was the bill’s most vocal advocate, if not the spokesman.  So it’s not that hard to interpret the dead chimpanzee in the cartoon as being an allusion to President Obama.

Is the cartoon inherently racist?  Maybe, maybe not.  Should the editors at the New York Post have used better judgment and considered the fact that black people have historically been compared to as monkeys to justify everything from slavery to Jim Crow to lynching and that the cartoon could be interpreted as continuing that disgusting tradition?  Absolutely.

Having worked in newspapers for several years as a reporter and editor, I can tell you that this is the true nature of the mainstream media.  Not that the editors and publishers and news directors in America’s newsrooms are racist, but that American newsrooms are so overwhelmingly Caucasian that they are not mindful of the legacy of anti-black racism or for that matter, any issue that could have any significance to anyone who is not white.  I’ve worked in newsrooms where I was the only person of color there, where I instantly became the paper’s Latino reporter AND the black reporter simply because the white reporters were too scared to cover stories in black neighborhoods.  The worst part is that because I am light-skinned, my last name is not easily recognizable as Hispanic and reporters are usually white, white people I interview assume I am white and some of these white people have confided in me what they really think of racial minorities using all kinds of colorful language to do so.

I remember one story I wrote about a new welfare program that allowed low-income New Yorkers to save up to $2,000 for a used automobile.  After the story ran, the paper recieved angry phone calls from a local immigrants’ advocacy group who wanted me fired.  I learned quickly that an hour before the paper went to press, the publisher had changed my storyto read that the new welfare program would greatly benefit immigrants, not low-income New Yorkers as I had written, giving the impression that all immigrants are on welfare.  Of course, this editorial faux pas was committed without my consent or knowledge, and the publisher confessed to the activists that it was she, a white woman, and not I, who had made the last-minute change.

Then there were all the story ideas I pitched to various editors involving minorities, from the New York Fire Department stepping up their effors to recruit more people of color into their ranks to a local synagogue that invited a gay Jewish organization to participate in their high holiday events to stories about immigrant day laborers.  I was always told by my superiors that “our readership isn’t interested in those kinds of stories”.  It’s almost as if the editors think people of color don’t read newspapers at all, offering some credibility (at least to the editors) to that old racist adage, “If you want to hide something from a nigger put it in a book.”

There are hundreds of little incidents like this in my memory that are not specifically racist or prejudiced but rather exhibit an editorial board’s lack of awareness that not everybody who reads their publication is as white as they are. This lack of awareness is common in humans regardless of ethnicity, color or social class. Many prominent Latino organizations often speak about the Latino community in the U.S. as if there are no U.S.-born Latinos and too many African-American groups often speak about the black community as if there are no black people outside of the United States.

It is because of the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in American newsrooms that coverage any stories or issues involving nonwhites (except for Black history Month) is often an afterthought, after all the important decisions have been made and publishers and editors have already decided what stories will be given the most coverage, and what stories will be covered at all.

The hesitation to not hire journalists of color, or rather to only meet the minimum requirements for Affirmative Action is only one reason why newspapers all over this country are dying.  As other mediums (TV, Internet) have already met the demands for coverage of issues important to people of color and other minorities, mainstream print media is trying to catch up, too little too late.

Some people are calling for the New York Post to fire the editors who gave the green light to that editorial cartoon.  Others think the New York Post should be shut down altogether.  But even if the Post were to fold, it wouldn’t change our nation’s legacy of tense race relations.  What’s more, it would do even less to change the mainstream media’s legacy of narrow-mindedness and its status as the last industry in this country to maintain 1950s-style hiring practices and to begrudgingly add not just a diversity or race into their ranks but also a diversity of consciousness.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Media, New Yawk, History, Race & Ethnicity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.