African-Americans in the United States and especially in Florida may benefit, as daily newspapers cut back on and even close their print editions. Those publications have contributed greatly to the embarrassment, ridicule and humiliation of blacks, by story and word selection, use of positive as well as negative photographs, especially mug shots, and artful editing and headlining.
How does this ongoing pervasive characterization of a people happen in a profession in which students are zealously taught to avoid using race in news reports, or editorials? In part, this behavior occurs precisely because whites have become adroit at not using the pejorative “b” word.
What we get instead are euphemisms. Try “minorities,” for one. In 1993, two investigative reporters, Steve Berry and Jeff Brazil, won Pulitzer Prizes for their expose of “the unjust seizure of millions of dollars from minority drivers by the Volusia County, Fla., sheriff’s drug squad.” Law enforcement was shown to have targeted “minorities” who were traveling north from or south toward that known drug capital, Miami. Their series went on and on with no statistical breakdown about which minorities were affected. What percentage was Hispanic? Asian? Native American?
But someone slipped up. One brief statistical box appeared. It turned out that nearly 93% of those stopped on the highways over a period of years were “minorities.” Of those 93%, 88% were black, 5% were Hispanic, 6% white, and the remaining fraction was “unknown.”
In Gainesville, FL, the euphemism of choice is “East Gainesville.” Locally, that section of town whose outline is uncertain is known to be historically black, or predominantly black, and most certainly poor. Go ahead and discuss poverty. But race. No way. But blacks should not be discouraged. Gainesville always has plans in the works for “East Gainesville.” Right now, a restaurant is even being considered for that vast area of town. Surely whites will travel across town to eat with their good black friends at this new exciting business in the middle of nowhere.
For more than 25 years, I have cringed at what I would see and read as I opened up the Orlando Sentinel and/or the Gainesville Sun. For nearly 20 years, I daily clipped materials from those papers to document the evidence of such racism. Would there be another photo of wailing women grieving in Haiti over the loss of life in an earthquake? Would it be the six or seven mug shots of blacks charged with crimes in the local and state edition?
You could never tell when the latest racist trick would appear or even what it was likely to be. On Sunday for instance the Sun “weekend” section featured a major report about “Teaching the Titanic.” A white 11 year old is shown smiling while he holds up a model of the ship. The only other discernible photo of an individual on the page shows the late” ‘Godfather of Soul’ James Brown “during a Java Jazz Festival concert in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2005” reaching out to a crowd.
The one-column headline describes an author who “dissects James Brown in ‘The One,’ according to the AP writer. Follow the story inside and you will see a three column photo of Brown performing with “singers Rick James, left, and Bootsy Collins at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles on June 22, 1991.
“The caption explains that Brown “made his return to the stage for the first time in more than two years since serving time in prison for aggravated assault and failing to stop for a police officer,” sometime in the 1980s. Another photo of Brown on the inside page reveals his bare chest as he sang “at the rock festival held at Roosevelt Raceway in New York on Aug. 12, 1972.”
The photos accompany a book review by someone named R. J. Smith, who published a 464-page biography of Brown through Gotham Books. At a time when protest marches are being conducted to protest the murder of an unarmed 17-year-old black youth in Sanford, FL, the AP writer notes that people sometimes can mistake the motives of a seemingly innocent person:
“(M)any people felt (Brown) was guilty of nothing more than driving while black,” but “(t)hose closest to Brown—long aware of the star’s increasingly erratic behavior and penchant for driving fast, high on the powerful hallucinogen PCP—saw things differently.”
“The New Yorker magazine showed Brown to be a highly unreliable, often unintelligible source. The portrait of Brown that emerges in ‘The One’ is that or an ornery charmer…who is almost maniacally driven to rise to the top. Brown also has a disturbing knack for having his worst behavior forgiven.” Smith recalls Brown when the singer “was dancing for spare change from sailors and growing up in Georgia with a violent, unpredictable father….But the One proves hard to define, and the more Smith delves into it, the more slippery it becomes—not unlike the mercurial subject of his book.” Brown, who died in 2006, has no known significant connection to Gainesville.
Fraternities on campus of course do have a connection, especially when they are being investigated for physical hazing. For weeks, the Sun has been covering every facet of an ongoing investigation into the hazing death and abuses at FAMU. Often race is not mentioned at all, though on occasion, the Sun has quoted a young black man who is an invited guest in the President’s Box at the University of Florida football games. Using a respected black to chastise his or her own is a favorite device in a community which takes its “Black on Black” crime seriously. I have looked in vain to find any report about hazing on college campuses anywhere in Florida or elsewhere, at historically white fraternities, but apparently there is nothing negative or positive to report.
As long as monopoly daily local newspapers keep slanting information about race, readers will continue to accept the myths those publications have encouraged us to believe for years, e.g., racism no longer is significant in our society; blacks are as likely or more likely to be prejudiced against whites or Hispanics or Asians or any other group you can think of than we are; and, most of all, that society no longer needs affirmative action, thanks to the adjustment whites have made to accommodate African-Americans. In that light, whites do not have to think about the fact that no black has been elected to any statewide office in Florida, since Reconstruction, or that none currently sits on a circuit court bench in Gainesville, Fl, or for that matter in Seminole County. That’s where Trayvon Martin of Miami was shot and killed by another member of a minority–George Zimmerman,–whose mother is Peruvian.
