Blair/NYT reader response – e-MailBox

There are many layers to affirmative action, alluvial deposits left by The Great Crime: slavery. In our exceptionally well circulated May 15 Cover Story, “The Jayson Blair – New York Times Affair: Affirmative action blamed for white folks’ mistakes,” we wrote:

When we first encountered the NYT-Blair affair, we recoiled; it had that musty smell of an old Ebony magazine, sitting there demanding that we take up a collective defense of the white folk’s erstwhile choice for the next Black journalistic “role model” gone awry – a choice we had nothing to do with, made by people whom we do not respect.

Beneath the sediment lays an essential truth: White people cannot be trusted to create the antidote for their own poison. When white people construct affirmative action policies to suit their own purposes, affirmative action failures must be viewed as white failures. Black people as a group have nothing to do with this state of affairs.

But of course, we must live with the consequences of the decisions of the New York Times’ and other, essentially hostile institutions. Somehow, we must navigate the swamp created when the heirs of men who made Blacks beasts of burden attempt to further burden the offspring of the slave, hitching Black fortunes to white folks’ never ending follies and blaming us for the inevitable results.

In the Blair case, we see that the Gray Lady’s brand of affirmative action elevates the type of Black person who suits the fancy of executive editor Howell Raines, the white “liberal” from Alabama, and the paper’s founding Sulzburger family. This supremely subjective environment may be a fertile field for many white candidates, but it produces strange Black fruit, indeed.

Situated at the pinnacle of pretense, the New York Times styles itself both arbiter and exemplar of excellence. If we buy into that lie, it follows that Black excellence must also be judged by Timesian standards. Those who swallow the potion consign themselves to perpetual hollowness. Too many African Americans in the corporate world revel in a role similar to that of General Custer’s Black Foot Indian scouts, all the while proclaiming themselves proud warriors (“role models”) for the race.

With this in mind, found no reason last week to point out that the managing editor of the Times, Gerald Boyd, is Black. Boyd “manages” to allow all manner of racist skullduggery to occur on his watch. (It’s all his watch, we are led to believe, at least when the Times is anxious to demonstrate that it has changed its racist ways.) Boyd allowed Times political pet Adam Nagourney to get away with a lily-white analysis of the South Carolina Democratic candidates debate. Nagourney, a Timesman in very good standing, pretended that the entire “third tier” of presidential hopefuls (Sharpton, Moseley-Braun and Kucinich) was absent. is forced to conclude that, for Black purposes, Gerald Boyd is absent.

supports affirmative action. However, do not invest the process with magical properties. Especially in the corporate world, the beneficiaries are – as often as not – men and women whose most concentrated talents lie in currying white favor. Fawning careerists have value to themselves and their direct dependents, but they are useless to the group as a whole. In the end, they cannot even save themselves, much less the Jayson Blairs.

Dignity is derived from a well-grounded sense of self. Leadership flowers in struggle.

Ella Baccouche has dignity in abundance. And she’s smart, too.

Take the example you cited of Rev. Al Sharpton’s absence from Nagourney’s report. Mr. Safire, the NY Times cannot compare itself to independent and democratic news sources in the world. One thing is for sure. You can always depend on the Times op-ed articles to cheerlead for US hegemony. And that slogan, “All the News that’s Fit to Print”, is just another way of saying, “All the News that Fits Our Agenda and Our Paradigm”, regardless of its truth value.

Yes, I agree that Blair is an authentic Timesman. In his eagerness to assimilate into the white corporate world, he, like his white counterparts, has forgotten his journalistic oath by lying to the public and by not checking and rechecking the veracity of his sources. But, on top of that, he apparently didn’t heed the cardinal rule that obligates the house Negro to do as the Master says, not as the Master does.

I have one comment about the Malcolm X speech. Malcolm is so contemporary and right on point. However, his request about the US government giving us land and wealth is unlikely to happen because Blacks are a crucial part of the system. The system cannot tolerate non-white independence. (Haiti, Cuba) They need the black masses to exploit. (i.e., poverty, survival and miseducation of black children; overwhelming joblessness and incarceration of African Americans) Blacks must remain in the “belly of the Beast” because exploitation and racism mean huge profits. And for these profits to materialize, the white political operatives in Washington have again (see Malcolm’s BIG SIX) selected and successfully recruited the likes of Colin Powel, Condoleezza Rice, [Washington, DC] Mayor Anthony Williams, Justice Clarence Thomas among others who have demonstrated again and again that they have no scruples about selling us field Negroes down the river.

Ben Tripp is a cartoonist, essayist and playwrite. Here’s his review of the drama at the Times:

But I never quite connected the story with his race. Seen in that context, the anomalies begin to make sense. Your analysis of the situation reveals what this congenital whitey couldn’t see for himself.

But the clincher is in the comparison you make to Adam Nagourney’s on-message, official-version account of the Democratic debate. What a stupendous oversight at the very least not to mention the dark horse candidates, so to speak. One suspects however that this was not an oversight but a deliberate omission. And in context of the standards belatedly applied to Jayson Blair, such an omission ought be grounds for dismissal, particularly if The Times gives a damn about racial parity or editorial purity.

Nagourney is presumably a white man, and I’ll bet he lunches with the editors on occasion. They read his work and check his sources and they like what they see. He’s not out of the loop. But then, neither is Jayson Blair.

Guilty or not, he’s in a different loop, attached to the end of a stout rope.

Carol D. Tart is distracted by neither the Times’ crocodile tears nor the yelps of Hard Right hyenas. Somewhere in the middle of the tale, there’s the question of power.

A matter of supremacy

Black failure is permanent, indelible. White failure is just another excuse for a sequel, writes Margaret Kimberley.

Do you remember the case of Mike Barnicle? He is the former Boston Globe reporter who was accused of plagiarism and lying for years before he was finally fired. The question of race should have been asked of him. Did being white and in the old boys network help him? By the way, he is still working as a syndicated columnist and as a commentator on MSNBC. What are the odds of Blair being employed in journalism again? Hopefully he will have the same second chance that Barnicle had. I must add that I am not holding my breath.

Black folks have been relegated to the shadows for so long that we sometimes forget we are not the only people made invisible by the New York Times and its ilk. Rhoda Shapiro, of Encinitas, California, writes:

Note how they cover the Zionist occupation of Palestine. They would never use that phrase, since they are so tied up in the Zionist project themselves. No story on Palestine and Palestinians is ever covered from the point of view of the occupied. Mostly they ignore the daily murders, home demolitions and now the ‘transfer’ of Arab peoples out of ‘their’ land. Never are Zionists brought to task about how many times they have thumbed their nose at the law of world bodies, beginning from Israel’s imposition on the Arab world, through the refusal to allow refugees to return to their homes, to collective punishment, ethnic cleansing and the deliberate murder of young children. Never mind even considering the legitimacy of another European settler state ….

To me the Blair episode revealed the cynicism and ruthlessness of capitalist white men. This has happened before at NYT and I’m sure it happens all the time at every establishment media outlet. After all they could have fired him as soon as his methods of work became apparent. It happens every day. But they waited. Made an example of Blair. They sat on this story until they figured out how to make it seem like it didn’t have anything to do with racism. And framed the story so that he takes the hit for the real betrayals by the NYT of its readers.

Thank you for your always lucid analysis.

With millions out of work, it is difficult to justify all of the concern over one 27-year-old, university-educated, single man who has not sacrificed a thing – to our knowledge – in the service of others. We are, therefore, glad to hear from a brown brother in a blue collar, Joseph Osorio.

Since the Times makes such a spectacle of self-love, we should be reminded of the newspaper’s and the rest of the corporate media’s orgy of embeddedness with the U.S. military. Leroy Wilson, Jr. won’t let us forget that episode – one that will sooner or later be repeated.

We assume Mr. Jones meant that as a rhetorical question.

Many immigrants to the United States now fear to ask public questions of any kind. This writer asked that we refer to him only as “Eyes Opened” – signifying the way he sees the world.

Astoundingly, it is often those assets that are of most value to the organization that are the most difficult to establish by the African American individual.

Robert E. Reynolds, Orange Park, Florida says there’s a piece missing from this puzzle.

But – no one has heard Jayson Blair’s side of the story. The extent of the effort by the Times to thoroughly discredit Blair, 4 full pages in the print edition, 10 pages on the Internet, is certainly all out of proportion. Further, they set up a special web address to receive new complaints about Blair.

Does this make any sense to you? Does it smell right to you?

Could it be that the NY Times is running a diversion campaign to deflect criticism of other reporters? Questions have been raised about Judith Miller and her reports from the Middle East. She has been tied to Daniel Pipes and others with what some of us consider extremist views. The Drudge Report hints that there are two others under investigation.

It should never be forgotten that the NY Times, along with the Washington Post and the LA Times, led the attacks on Gary Webb and the San Jose Mercury for the CIA and Drugs series. They made allegations against Webb and the Mercury that were untrue. It destroyed Webb’s career.

I’d like to hear Blair’s side of the story. Even if what the Times claims is true that doesn’t mean that there isn’t more to this story. Perhaps he became a threat for reasons unknown.

The one thing that is clear is that the attacks on him are disproportionate to the alleged crime. Maybe they are just overreacting, maybe not.

Cocaine traffic buster Gary Webb is no longer a corporate journalist, but he doesn’t labor in obscurity, either. His “Dark Alliance” site has hosted 26,000 visitors in search of the truth about the CIA and the crack cocaine explosion in inner city America.

Ric Dodson sees intellectual corruption at the Times as symptomatic of a deeper rot.

Your article was refreshing, insightful, factual and timely in this nation, which continues to lose its way and disintegrate.

Your article succinctly juxtaposed the inequitable standards of many US institutions and the follies of such institutionalized policies being administered by some of the most incompetent and biased individuals on the entire planet.

At a time when most US residents (citizens and others) are petrified of the regressive regime in Washington D.C. and its collusive minions, it is comforting to know that there are some of us who have the courage to illustrate critical thinking in an intellectual but comprehensible manner, such as your article.

Unless the residents of this nation recapture our government, regrettably, this nation is doomed.

If I may add, we need not fear the so-called terrorist from abroad – our home-grown “decepticons” are doing a yeoman’s job at destroying what existed of this nations fabric, one thread at a time.

Thank you for the insightful discourse.

“Prismatic” stuff!

Jesse Elam reports that the monochrome corporate media culture also reigns in his city, Vancouver, Washington.

In the specific case of the Times, the newsroom could recognize (as none of our commercial news outlets have) that having an all- or mostly-white staff of reporters will inevitably slant the news, but that would mean giving up the front that objectivity ensures the race of the reporter doesn’t matter. (The Times would recognize that in order to chop away bias, paradoxically, they’d need to admit to themselves that they aren’t objective.) Beyond the Times, in other businesses and institutions, the internal incentive may not be there. Few businesses, arguably, have a product that manifests the race of its manufacturer. Would they require legal compulsion or shame, the same less-than-moral mechanisms employed during active integration, to change?

If the news is to be distributed justly, it can’t be news by and for whites only, and that seems to me the ineluctable outcome of a pale newsroom. This approach sidesteps equitable hiring for its own sake and talks about the “good reasons” for hiring people of certain races. Ultimately those good reasons also have to do with justice, but justice across the whole society, getting whites’ minds off the individual hire. Thus they can stop sputtering about how this is a meritocracy and that one has to “deserve” to be hired. Maybe then the sanctimonious white reaction can be avoided – the lines that whites got their positions by their cultivated merits, not by native traits; or that it’s unfair for whites to have to give up their spots for disadvantaged races so they can become “advantaged.”

As the article well points out, the NYT puffs up in its security that it sets the standards, that blacks don’t meet them, and that blacks don’t deserve desks there. And it has a flawed character in Jayson Blair as a fait accompli. But given the lapses or outright whitewashings in the Times that the article also noses out, the NYT’s standards aren’t in shape. The lesson for the Times should be that, among other things, it vitally needs non-whites on-board.

The good judgment of persons we don’t know brought us in contact with W.S. Tkweme, who wrote that he also passed the Blair commentary along to people he respects.

Dr. Donald Blais, ThD scared us for a second when we opened his letter. Dr. Blais (Penobscot-Metis) is a lecturer in Aboriginal spirituality and Christian colonial history, Department of Religion, University of Toronto.

It turns out that “Ahneen!” means “Greetings” in Penobscot. “Hehehe” is untranslatable.

Counterpunch.com editors Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn published our piece on Blair two days before we did – a good thing, allowing us to catch the flavor of their worldwide audience. Peter Kaslik is Hungarian Human Rights Monitor in Cambridge, Ontario.

“The starting point of American racism is the assumption that white people and their institutions represent the proper, normative standards against which all other people and institutions are judged”.

It should be posted all over the land. Keep up the great work!

Kevin Stiers, of Hamburg, Germany, appears to have learned his English from – the English.

Note the British-style sarcasm employed by Mr. Stiers. We at appreciate all cultural manifestations of contempt for the newspaper that claims to have copyrighted objectivity, but dispenses paeans to Power, instead. Or, to paraphrase Napoleon’s humiliation of Talleyrand, “The New York Times is shit – in a silk stocking.”

With that, we have completed our segue to a letter from Philippe Dambournet, of Paris.

Now here’s an anecdote: I read Herbert for quite a while assuming he was white. Then I saw his picture. I had to adjust. Not because I thought he was therefore less talented or interesting, but because I had to recompute where he came from. The messenger is part of the message, it’s a package. We are all decrypting what comes out in one variation or another of that mode. On the other hand, if you are one of those who can only trust, respect, or love those who most closely resemble them physically, you are engaging in a variation of incest.

There is no question that Bob Herbert is an excellent journalist and an honorable man. For two years he refused to allow the Times’ readership to forget the atrocity against the Black population of Tulia, Texas. Herbert elevates the Times – not the other way around.

We saved the last Blair-NYT comment for Ernest Allen, Jr. a professor at the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Professor Allen’s note is shorter than our buildup to it. However, we are aware that Allen was busy marking papers when arrived in his mailbox, just like so many of our readers in academe. Nevertheless, Prof. Allen took time to offer a critique:

Thank, sir.

Slow motion overthrow in Haiti

2004 marks the 200th anniversary of the establishment of Haiti as the world’s first Black republic. The Bush men would like to be there for the occasion – in place of the popularly elected government. All signs indicate that Washington has set lose the dogs of the former military regime, who operate with near-impunity from their sanctuaries in the neighboring Dominican Republic.

As reported in last week’s issue, it has become clear that the “U.S. plots ‘regime change’ in Haiti”:

We also noted the rightwing campaign to pressure MCI to fire actor Danny Glover as its advertising spokesperson. Glover is board chairman of TransAfrica Forum, which vigorously opposes U.S. policies in Haiti.

We got this letter from a reader named Nadege.

“Chickens Come Home To Roost”

May 19th was the birthday of Malcolm X – El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, who would have been 78 years old. We marked the occasion by publishing his December 4, 1963 speech commonly known as “The Chickens Come Home To Roost,” edited by former assistant minister Benjamin Karim. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad silenced his top spokesman shortly after the speech. Thus, it was Malcolm’s last major address as a member of the Nation of Islam. Here’s an excerpt:

We want no integration with this wicked race that enslaved us. We want complete separation from this race of devils. But we should not be expected to leave America and go back to our homeland empty-handed. After four hundred years of slave labor, we have some back pay coming, a bill owed to us that must be collected.

If the government of White America truly repents of its sins against our people, and atones by giving us our true share, only then can America save herself!”

R. W. Stamper, Sr. appreciated seeing Malcolm’s words in print:

After the Civil War Black people were conscripted into American citizenship without our consent. No plebiscite, national referendum or inquiry of any kind was taken among us. Those of us who choose to depart from the oppressor realize that no peace or justice is possible living among the European, that he is and shall remain a thief, a liar and a murderer. Thus, reparation necessarily means separation.

The most important aspect of the reparations movement is (1) the instillation in us of the consciousness of the debt America owes us, (2) the hopelessness of peaceful integration with the European, and above all (3) the development of a sufficient number of Black minds, a critical mass, who realize that separation is the only solution, who can will that reality into existence; in other words, a nommo type of reality creation.

The printing of Malcolm’s words is a significant contribution to this necessary aspect of the struggle. The divinities and the ancestors await our mass awakening, poised to intervene, empower and aid us in our righteous struggle.

Black Children in Poverty

Since George Bush snatched the keys to the White House, the number of Black children in extreme poverty has risen 50 percent, as if a trap door had opened beneath the feet of a condemned generation. In our May 8 Cover Story, “Bush’s Harvest of Shame,” we wrote that “the Bush men celebrate every step that is taken in the forced march to a society of vast inequalities, spreading squalor, and premature death.”

Such people cannot be moved by appeals to conscience – they have none.

This is an enemy who plays for keeps – a happy, smirking child killer.

JoAnn Wypijewski agrees:

Superpower in a bubble

The world watches as U.S. dreams of hegemony dissolve at a quickening pace. The juxtaposition of awesome military power and near-autistic behavior can lead an observer to wonder what he has missed – there must be an intelligent method somewhere beneath the madness, a hidden text.

There is none. The Bush men operate on a complete set of delusions, nurtured on the North American continent through hundreds of years of predation and privilege. As we wrote in our April 24 commentary, “Conspiracy Theories II“:

In this closed, continental conversation a worldview was refined that has grown so fundamental to white American methods of thought, so perfect in its affirmation of self-serving assumptions, so automatically corrective of unwanted information, that the social organism is all but impermeable to disagreeable facts. Outside of the centuries-old American cocoon, much of reality simply does not compute.

Mandy Pegram is relieved, having previously thought she had failed to comprehend the masterful part of the Pirate’s Master Plan.

In response to the American offensive-against-all, virtually every sector of every nation seeks ways to withdraw from the madman. Since George Bush’s “With Us or Against Us” and “Axis of Evil” speeches, these global currents of revulsion have joined the structural undertow sucking the U.S. dollar downward.

The Iraq war was largely designed to insulate the dollar against the threat of euro-denominated oil. But the world economy is bigger than petroleum. The slide will continue, as dealmakers everywhere quietly redline the United States at every opportunity – a characteristic of global resistance to the men who are proclaiming a New American Century. As we said on April 24:

Maureen H. Williams, Sylmar, California, has been taking notes.

Anti-public education chief

The Bush men are like the Sioux “contraire” brave in the movie, “Little Big Man” – everything they say means the opposite. As one of countless examples, Bush chose as Secretary of Education a Black man who detests public education. We wrote about Rod Paige’s duplicities April 24, under the heading, “U.S. Education chief favors church schools.“

In other words, he does not like public schools.

At another religious event, the man who sits on billions of dollars of the public’s money explained that, “in a religious environment the value system is set. That’s not the case in a public school, where there are so many different kids with different kinds of values.”

Kurt Kiebler writes to us from Kansas City.

These constant intrusions of rightwing Southern Baptists into the national dialogue are what happens when a quarter of the electorate determines the outcome. The GOP rules through this active minority, and must keep them energized. Thus, the Bible thumpers color the public face of what is essentially a regime of piratical, speculator, war profiteering thieves. It makes for a weird combination of absolute cynicism with a halo around it.

Obligations of the Black candidate

There are candidates who are Black, and there are Black candidates. In the current Democratic presidential primary race, Rev. Al Sharpton is the latter. Our April 24 commentary, “What the Black Presidential Candidate Must Do,” sought to clarify the matter.

We also had some specific advice for Rev. Sharpton, when he is compelled to defend his stance during the Tawana Brawley affair. Amy Tillem thought we gave wise counsel:

Appreciative remarks

In all uphill endeavors, morale is the critical factor. Our readers never fail to keep our spirits soaring.

Errolway Kirkland:

F. Green:

We saved “Joyce in Connecticut” for last, just because she makes us feel so good.

This is the stuff great warriors are made of. Wage on, Brothers and Sisters! And may God continue to bless you in your efforts!

Keep writing.

gratefully acknowledges the following organizations for sending visitors our way during the past week:

Information Clearing House

Destee Discussion Forum

Counterpunch.com

Black Planet.com

Democratic Underground.com

Liberal Oasis.com

Africana.com

Playahata.com