How ironic that the day journalists and scholars released
results of a survey revealing that the media did a "fair to poor" job of covering race issues during the 2008 presidential campaign was also C-Day.
That would be "chimpanzee day" or "cartoon day," maybe "cringe day" for many of us. The coincidence was so stark -- and perhaps telling -- that when Onica Makwakwa, executive director of UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc., introduced the survey at a press conference at the
National Press Club in Washington, D.C., last week, she had to point out that organizers hadn't planted the story about the
New York Post cartoon.
UNITY and
The Loop 21, a Web site that addresses economics and politics through an African American lens, teamed up to survey more than 500 journalists of color about campaign coverage.
Overall, the results paint a bleak picture. The majority of the African American, Asian American/Pacific Islander, Native American and Latino respondents said the news media ranked "fair" or worse in covering issues of interest to people of color. Nearly all -- 92 percent -- said mainstream media is not doing an adequate job covering race relations.
So when the
Post cartoon connecting a news item about a chimpanzee shot and killed by police with the economic stimulus plan emerged that morning, it became, as one of the panelists at the press conference said, "the gorilla in the room."
That panelist was
Clarence Page, the venerable
Chicago Tribune columnist. "It was a bad cartoon," he said. "It wasn't funny."
More importantly, Page said, the hubbub over the cartoon illustrates the "gaffe" culture that has dominated our discussion of race and Obama.
Obama's former pastor is
caught on YouTube saying "God damn America." Joe Biden refers to
Obama as "articulate" and "clean." Hillary Clinton asserts that it
took Lyndon Johnson to make Dr. Martin Luther King's dream a reality with Civil Rights laws, and hubby Bill reminds everyone that
Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice.
The New Yorker depicts the Obamas as terrorists/black militants in another hackle-raising cartoon.
Eric Holder, the first African American attorney general, just a day before the cartoon and the survey came out, used another "C" word in his
Black History Month speech: We are a "nation of cowards" when it comes to talking about matters of race.
It appears the fear of talking about race permeates newsrooms as well. As a journalism professor at American University, I sat on the panel with Page and others and spoke of the mainstream media's palpable discomfort with trying to pin down the race of a candidate who defied traditional racial definitions.
Was he black, white or biracial? The son of a white mother, or of an African-immigrant father? Was he Muslim or Christian? Was his own racial consciousness defined by an upbringing in Hawaii or his early political career on the South side of Chicago?
And Obama just wouldn't cooperate by fitting himself into Civil Rights-era concepts of race. He never actually called himself ... anything. Instead, he was the candidate "with the funny name" or who didn't look like the guys on dollar bills.
This overall unease -- with race, with the inability to categorize Obama -- seemed to define interactions between editors/producers and reporters, according to the survey. Nearly 30 percent of the journalists surveyed said their supervisors were somewhat knowledgeable about race, but "rebuffed seeking further information." And another 19 percent said their editors/producers were just "not at all knowledgeable" about race.
Can you imagine the journalism industry if nearly half of all editors and producers lacked knowledge of, or didn't want to learn more about, government? The justice system? Economics?
Few editors or reporters would hesitate to say, "I need to learn more about the history and principles of our economy to cover the financial crisis."
But why are we so afraid to acknowledge what we do not know about race? Why do we not have more open discussions in newsrooms about what kinds of racial issues are news, which ones should be news and whether tomorrow's editorial cartoon might inflame some historic racial wounds?
I can offer one more word that begins with "C" as a closing thought -- comfort, as in comfort zone.
Get out of it, I tell my students.
You did not meniton that eric holder called us a...
