Hundreds of thousands were expected but early news reports, though not providing estimates that made sense, reported that tens of thousands had shown up or were showing up for not only Beck’s but one organized by The Reverend Al Sharpton.

A NY Times’ Caucus headline: Parallel Rallies by Beck and Sharpton. Not much interest engendered. Beck has a passionate, pathological animus about people of color. And Sharpton, well, one of my students published an article a while back – Reverend Sharpton Should Read This Article – indicating  great distance between him and the students he was trying to reach at Hunter during that period when he was visiting college campuses.

So, it was decided to publish an opine by Ed Kent, a professor emeritus, philosophy, Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He blogs and posts at a number of yahoo groups.

I spent an incredibly boring 3 hours or so watching Glenn Beck's
"Restoring Honor" on C-Span.  Most channels had switched to other
things.  What seemed to be the content was a series of 20 or more
fundamentalist Protestant sermons given by various invitees -- which
looked to be be boring the Lincoln Center audience as much as me.  The
things not included or mentioned while I listened were Roman Catholics,
traditional Protestant denominations or their leadership, Muslims, or
political issues.

This was Beck the nice guy heading up a fundamentalist Christian event
with some kind words thrown in now and again about our battered military
heroes out there.  The only recognizable speakers were Beck and, and, of
course, Sarah Palin. The implicit attack on Obama and Democrats lay in
the title of the event.

Traditional Martin Luther King, Jr. commemorators on the King dream
speech were meeting elsewhere and plan to hike to meet Beck's crew at
Lincoln Center when they finish their own event.

What a waste of time!

*I have a mild basketball jones: All-Ivy, MVP, captain, Cornell; Assistant B-Ball Coach, one year; one year, schizophrenic, semi-pro and one year playing for the Sporting Club of Lisbon.

Was race a factor in the death of  NYPD Officer Omar Edwards?

Possibly.

Was Officer Andrew Duton acting like a racist? Trash that question. Better ones are: Does he live in a racist society? Was his fatal mistake the result of his growing up and living in a racist society? What was his mindset at the moment he squeezed off several shots? Would he have shot a white man, woman or child under similar circumstances?

Who the hell is capable of answering such questions considering the epistemological challenges, regardless of the torrent of news reporting as well as commentary manipulated to look like news reporting?

No one.

Google, this date, listed 1,184 links to news stories about Omar Edwards’s slaying. Yet, every sane New Yorker, however, knows the answer to this one: When was the last time a black NYPD officer mistakenly shot a white police officer under similar circumstances?

The reality is this: Racism is a vicious reality of American life, an institutional disease pervading and defiling every core of every level of society. It has been sooooo easy for White America to ignore the reality and be soooo tolerant of its seismic protuberances – lynching, segregation, racial profiling – that show and have shown, like geiger counters ticking off incredible, defiling moments in this land of supposed liberty, that something is fatalistically wrong with the American dream. Everyone with a brain knows of the Doomsday Clock, that it’s five minutes to the midnight of catastrophic destruction. The way that nefarious forces have been continually savaging America’s Civil Liberties clearly shows this country needs a Doomsday Clock for its cherished principles. That is, if they are really cherished. 

White American Racism is more pernicious than any terrorist or terrorist group or nation on this globe, more fatalistic than any pandemic in play or on the horizon. It has been suborning this country’s espoused core principles since the beginning. The 9/11 attack (inspiring the Bush zombies to suborn, out in the open,  cherished Civil Liberties) is no comparison to the consequences caused by this disease.

The ubiquitous Sharpton will try to use the incident to confront a vicious reality that is constantly denied. The established news media will use his visage for the appearance of responsible reporting. A few other activists – and I mean a few – might try to emulate Sharpton or join him. The Reverend, however, carries too much baggage, one piece being this: Every time there is a seismic Omar Edwards-Andrew Duton event, and there will always be seismic events as long as America’s racism prevails, the established news media (corporate-owned and trying to present themselves as mainstream), the zombies of flawed info dissemination and who should always be under a spotlight of suspicion, will stick a camera in his face. The result is a double-edge sword that looks like authentic reporting but suborns as it is wielded. The Reverend’s solo presence on the front page clearly shows a severe problem.

African American communities need more activists and militants on center stage, that is, every man, woman and child.  Sharpton should not be the only prominent Africa American who is and it shouldn’t be left to prominent African Americans. Should Sharpton step aside? Answer: More have to make their way to the stage regardless of where the Reverend stands. A real crusade for him should be this: Getting more up on the stage with or without him.

African American communities, where the savaging takes place daily, need to galvanize another movement against racial intolerance so that residents act like every day of their lives is the day that they learned that Rosa Parks refused to live the rest of her life riding in the back of the bus and that they are ready to follow suit. There epiphanies have to inspire them to move collectively on the scale of the Civil Rights Movement, so tsunamic that each and everyone who cares can infect those who have given up and are ignorant or indifferent in order to sweep over the predacious beings and institutions who like things the way they are because of the promise that the erosion of American freedoms might be theirs for the doing if they just endure. That way  they may yet achieve that promise that was within reach for them before Brown vs. the Board of Education thwarted their dreams. 

Rush Limbaugh and his like, such as Fox News, are an excellent example, forming the perfect picture of the patriarchs for those barbarians but Rush & Company are soooo easy to target that targeting them distracts from the reality of the predation. America needs dedicated action if it really wants to be the purveyor of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. The United States never had to invade Iraq to find the weapons of mass destruction because the weapons here at home are more insidiously dangerous than those phantoms fabricated by the Bush folks.

This New York Times article stands out for the moment, cited on the quick because so much of the early reporting was sooo typically flawed. And this is the place for a editorial pause. I’m composing and writing on the QT.  Stream of conscious, that’s what attempted here. This piece would be editorially better if I tucked it away as a draft for a few days, if not for a few weeks, and then revise and revise and see the revisions with new eyes. But the moment is now and even that has passed. [Note: Google, this date, listed 1,184 links to news stories about Omar Edwards's slaying].

Back to the stream.

I was a police reporter a few years in Rochester, New York, for the Democrat & Chronicle and in order to cover my beat the way I believed it had to be covered, I virtually lived in police cars. As I was leaving the D&C for the Washington Star in Washington, D.C., a lot of cops learned that I had been a reporter, not one of their own, that I was not an undercover cop who had been talking and jiving and drinking booze/coffee with them, a reporter who had been showing up at scenes, plaincothes, any time of day and night, with a portable radio that tethered me to my news desk and a portable Bearcat scanner that tethered me to the police dispatchers. The tethers made me look like an undercover/plainclothes cop. I got along with cops better than I did with my editors.

I know that sounds weird, this comportment with police (many white, some Spanish-speaking and a few black) but that was emblematic of the wry realities of the brutal reality of this society. I was always living on the edge, and I never, absolutely never, portrayed myself as anything other than a reporter. 

I wanted the police beat – needed the police beat – after of a friend, Alvin White, was killed by a Nevada State Trooper who said in the reports that Alvin was reaching for a dark object (a comb?!?!?!) and because many others were abused when not shot or beaten. There are googobs of stories of cops shooting blacks reaching for dark objects, reaching for shiny objects, reaching for wallets. I needed to get the fear of police out of my blood …  so I became a cop reporter. I did some police reporting later for the Washington Star, a spattering here and there, compared to what I did in Rochester.

The fear is gone; caution remains.

When I left D.C. in an U-Haul (the Washington Post having crushed the Star and the Star also being crushed by its own business arrogance), I was stopped 10-12 times, all illegal, on the New Jersey turnpike by New Jersey State Troopers; my brother was with me. He was helping me move to the Big Apple to start a job at Time magazine (and I later worked for the New York Post, both with way too many editors and reporters as loathsome as any errant bigot of a cop I had met or would meet, on or off the job). Quote Marks for Effect: “So, will you tell the other guys ahead that I’m legit,” I told the last New Jersey State Trooper about 20 miles south of New York City. 

Later on, after Time and after the Post, there I was teaching journalism at the New Brunswick branch of Rutgers University (where there were loathsome colleagues like those at Time and the Post and the Wasington Star, the latter embroiled in a major EEOC classic action lawsuit for racial discrimination in its newsroom, a reality which never showed up in any Washington Star eulogies, that’s for sure, for something like, QMfE:  ”… and the Star was embroiled in a bitter lawsuit because its editors treating its journalists of color as if they were third-class citizens.”

At Rutgers, I would frequently check out any news reporters whose paths I crossed. Check them out? That was, engaged them in conversation about my 10-12 stops on the turnpike in order to prompt a conversation for me to evaluate their worthiness to call themselves reporters. Many regaled me with their knowledge of the racial profiling going on not only on the turnpike but in some areas in the immediate vicinity of the campus, like the Highland Park police department. One African American professor who was not in the Department of Journalism and Mass Media where I taught but had lived in Highland Park, said to me one day, QMfE: “They stopped my husband so many times, that we had to move.”

He was also told by one of the cops who had stopped him – he was stopped numerous times until he and his wife fled Highland Park – that someone like him shouldn’t be walking around in that neighborhood of Highland Park so early in the morning.

But not one news reporter for the local newspapers ever did a news story. It was like this big news media secret: Everyone knew what was going on but no one did one fucking news report, though those that I had engaged were ready to commiserate or express sympathy about the Jersey Turnpike-stop experiences that I had described to them and the stops that were going on, them advising me in what they considered a sympathetic/commiserative manner, that I should be careful where I drive and where I walk in Jersey.

Sympathy? Commiserate? That’s why I don’t have much respect for the Jersey news media. Though some news media did spring into action, so to speak, when, subsequently, two New Jersey State Troopers were caught lying about their pumping bullets into the passengers of a car with young black males on their way to a basketball event. Subsequent criminal and civil trials caused, for serious moment, a light to be shown on The Racial-Profiling-State-Troopers-of-the-Garden-State. Yes, that last sentence has to be in italics.

But did anyone ever ask where the hell the news media had been when all of this had been going on for years?

I learned more when I witnessed a New Brunswick cop walk into the downtown NJ transit station and, in front of me and lots of people waiting for the train to NYC, threatened to kill a posse of homeless men sleeping in on the floor. With his hand on his holstered gun, he said, QMfE: “I’m going to kill you if you don’t move.” I wrote the police department a detailed description – I described him kicking the ones moving too slowly – and I sent a local police reporter a copy. And this is what she said, QMfE: “He [the cop] does that all the time. Don’t worry about not knowing his name or badge number [I was too afraid to demand it from the cop]. They know who he is.”

That’s how the city cleared the homeless out of downtown New Brunswick, she and others said in other conversations.

I wrote the letter, despising my cowardice as I wrote (still despising but not as much). Too scared to approach the cop for his badge number, nor shout something to get him to stop, nor tried to galvanized the other witnesses into action (such as, QMfE: “Hey, are we going to just watch until this cop-hating-human-being shoots them – and maybe us”).  Nor did I rush to a pay phone (no cells then) to tell 911, One of your cops is here in the train station threatening to shoot homeless people. Send backup.

I should have, at the very least, interviewed or try to interview the dozen or so NYC-bound passengers who had witnessed this tyranny. I didn’t. But I did write the letter.

Did the local reporter ever do a story? Did the local newspaper ever do a story? Did the local police department ever respond to my letter? Hell no.

Read this from the blog of the Investigative Reporters & Editors about the 2009 third-place winners of the Philip Meyer Journalism Award.

Third Place:  The Philadelphia Inquirer for “Too Tough: Tactics in Suburban Policing,” Mark Fazlollah, Dylan Purcell, Melissa Dribben, Keith Herbert:

“The Inquirer’s team studied arrest and court data from police departments in the suburbs that surround Philadelphia and [my emphasis] found towns where blacks were being arrested in extraordinary numbers for minor offenses such as loitering or jaywalking. Their follow-up reporting uncovered jails where thousands of illegal strip searches were conducted, police dogs were used to control black children walking home from school and traffic citations were filled out in advance of arrests.

Sounds like Alabama and Mississippi (Nina Simone’s Mississippi) circa the lynching days.

Now, there are probably people who believe that the Inquirer story reveals an isolated regional occurance, the suburbs of Philadelphia. But then there’s the recent reports by the New York City Civil Liberties Union about the NYPD stopping innocent New Yorkers:

Police made more than 151,000 stops of completely innocent New Yorkers – the overwhelming majority of whom were black and Latino. These innocent people did nothing wrong, but their names and addresses are now stored in a police database.

This is insane but millions and millions can accommodate this insanity as easy as millions and millions lined up to support the Bush administration’s Iraqi invasaion to find the WMD.

This is insane but millions and millions can accommodate this insanity as easy as millions and millions lined up to support the Bush administration’s Iraqi invasaion to find WMD.

Or that I was stopped several months ago by two New Jersey City cops as I was riding my bicycle home from a public swimming hole. They were looking for a robber, one eventually said. I had fitted the description. Black man on a bicycle. I showed the cop, Hispanic looking, standing in front of me with his thumb resting on his holstered weapon, my wet trunks and towel. I let him – I didn’t have to – peek in my backpack. I hadn’t expected the shove from the cop, white, who had come up behind me surreptitiously to thrust his hands in my pockets. 

Groped by cop?

It was a provocative shove. I had learned not to react suddenly in a threatening manner towards men with guns, mace, bully clubs, handcuffs and the law on their side. Anyway, I immediately raised my hands above my head so that all those people on the sidewalk and those in their cars —  the stopped patrol car had created a mini-traffic jam in the narrow lanes of that avenue — could see that I wasn’t carrying a weapon, didn’t have one in my hand, wasn’t about to make one of those sudden moves that got Alvin White shot dead. After the cops fled – there was a crowd lingering and staring – I thanked everyone for sharing the moment.

I should have filed a complaint even though every resource I checked about police stop-n’-frisks indicated that the two cops hadn’t done anything illegally, per se. But I should have filed anyway. Nevertheless, I have no doubt there will be more. And I am better prepared. In a need to step up to the plate, I’ve been experimenting with a Civil Liberties project for the WORD. I need to do more, much more than just beat up on The Four Barnacles of the Apocalypse and their like. I need to get more serious. I need to infect others, so, that none of my grandkids will ever have to ask: Hey, grandpa, where were you when the cops were beating up black people.

They will know.

I needed to get this off my chest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I plan to revisit this post and tweak and rewrite until I decide to leave it up absolutely or take it down, absolutely.

Feature Writing, Spring 2009.

Email sent to my Feature Writing students after the Thursday, April 30 class:
Andrea Leon convinced me that I missed the big picture and that she has a story that no journalist, pro or student (in recent memory), has regarding Sharpton. So, I would really appreciate it if everyone in class would send her three or four sentences regarding their likes and dislikes about Sharpton. Try to be specific about why you like or don’t like or respect or disrespect about him.

Please let her know if you can use your name or not in this special she’s working on.

For pedagogical reasons, I will offer a brief recap and opinion at the beginning of class because the tiff illustrates some journalistic matters that can’t be taught via book/class and have to be learned via real-world experience.

Thanks,

gm

So:

Actually Leon’s perception at the time was that she had been sucker punched in a brawl, not drawn into a tiff. It was over the first draft of her  Reverend Al Sharpton lecture March 30 at Hunter. Leon thought I was cruelly criticizing her because I believed she disliked Sharpton. Students in the feature writing class didn’t like the way I was critiquing her article.

Thus, her final article of 2,500 words is to be published soon, hopefully by the weekend or thereabouts. And I will have to blog about what went on in class and what I thought I was doing as an instructor.

Did Time's story say anything about the Post's history of overt racism directed at the black communities of New York?

Sharpton et. al. did a splendid job in their vicious poke at the Post but that’s all it was, a poke. I wish it had been the sharp point of a spear starting a rally.

Snickering, chortling, that’s what I thought that the writer of the “apology” or the person or persons who penned the words — the Boss himself? I think not — was/were doing as the response was being drafted: Over the past couple of days, I have spoken to a number of people and I now better understand the hurt this cartoon has caused. I wonder to whom he spoke for his insight. Hurt? No one was hurt, but many were whipped into serious snit by a masterful conjurer who, knowing the Post’s history of denigrating and mocking the black communities of New York, spun a cartoon into a call for action, limited as it was.

Now, if the conjurer extraordinaire could have brought forth soul shaking outrage, like that inspired by Rosa Parks, a myriad would have descended on the Post building at 1211 Sixth Avenue, catalyzing opportunities. That’s how I perceived all this.

Yes, there were reports that the Post switch board was inundated with phone calls. And I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of Post reporters of any color who have to trek into New York’s black communities in the near future, not so much because of possible violence but the derision could be scathing.

Hurt? How condescending.

A boycott? Nope.

A complaint to the FCC? Maybe a visit. Maybe just lunch. But no action here.

Murdoch started it all, and, as the insufferably powerful SOB he is, brought this episode to a close. He started it all? Yep, the buck stops with him for all those years of the Post mocking and denigrating the black communities of New York. The stench of the compost heap where the Post’s reputation resides, at least as far as the black communities of New York are concerned, is irrefutable, emanating from the buck at Murdoch’s door.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Footnotes

[The Original Before Murdoch Showed Up
And Stole the Show]
 

 

 

Here are footnotes for a big picture I can’t grasp. Several days ago, in the evening and night, for example, the TV news media, as it had for several days, reported from outside the New York Post at 1211 Avenue of the Americas that irate demonstrators and the Reverend Al Sharpton, eventually joined by filmmaker Spike Lee (wearing a very snazzy winter jacket), were marching and shouting for a boycott, that the vile publication should be shut down; that the NAACP was in town and was planning to ask certain businesses not to advertise in the Post; etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

So, what?

The Reverend Al Sharpton said he was planning to contact the Federal Communication’s Commission.

So, what?

The marchers as much as viewers, if any of my students of one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse colleges in the CUNY system are any indication of public sentiment in this rich Big Apple milieu of race and gender and class, enjoyed the Post bashing. But there were also those who didn’t. I don’t know how or if the action at 1211 will galvanize any progressive action beyond the few days of hearing broadcasters using the words “racist New York Post” in their deliveries, merely repeating what the demonstrators had been saying, certainly not expressing an opinion but, nevertheless, delivering a pleasureable melody to the ears of many in New York’s black communities.

However, is “racist New York Post” about to be no more than a cliché and not a rallying cry for something more significant.

More Footnotes

As for the NAACP: A lion that has lost its roar. Despite the mainstream broadcasters’ standup deliveries of Guest-Who’s-Coming-to-Town and Guess-What-They Are-Going-to-Do and Guess-What-the-Reverend Al-Is-Up-to-Now, I have to ask, So what? The Post and its hundreds of thousands of admiring readers are suppose trembleing in fear that its poison is about to be diminished?

With all the community activists of color in this five-borough metropolis, the best that can be served up is threat of a lion that cannot roar? Strike fear? Rend flesh (editorial, of course)?

The President of the National Association of Black Journalists criticized the Post in a TV interview snippet for its racist cartoon. I wished she had also denounced the death penalty. The NABJ has refused to sign on with opponents of the death penalty seeking their participation in various actions. When I was interviewing and researching a project about kids on death row, people of color reportedly made up more than 60 percent of death row inmates. In Texas, they are 70 percent.

She could have also sneak in a denouncement of the NYPD for what the New York Civil Liberties Union and Center for Constitutional Rights have shown is its mass harassment of people of color with its stop and frisk policies.

I don’t have time to locate the Village Voice’s Press Clips column of many years ago describing how the Post and the News provided the Reverend Sharpton the tantamount of unlimited, favorable news coverage albeit short stories about various initiatives planned by his National Action Network. Many of the initiatives never found fruit – and most reporters covering NAA press conferences correctly suspected that they wouldn’t – but that, according to the Voice, didn’t seem to bother the News and Post. The Voice insinuated that the two tabloids perceived the Reverend Sharpton as amusing and colorful and preferred him over serious black activists who couldn’t get the equivalent of a teaspoon of coverage for real initiatives.

Both the Post and the News, however, did do follow-ups on a Newsday report about the Reverend Sharpton being a federal informant for the FBI and U.S. Attorney General’s Office. He tried to drop dimes on his political opponents who were black. Much later, of course, when Sharpton’s stature was being embossed by an impressive national image, Cornell West allowed him what I describe as a blessing and forgiveness.

In the countless stories reporting on the Tawana Brawley extravaganza, I recall Sharpton and activist attorneys Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason saying they were using that case to attack racism in the criminal justice system. I and many other black New Yorkers as well as mainstream and community journalists didn’t believe the accounts of her rape even as we imaginatively found ways to maintain respect for the activist trio.

In a war waged against a community, should one be concerned about the fairness of leaders and activists who use propagandistic tools to take on assassins attacking their people? The lack of truth can exact a terrible price. Which is not to say that the later disbarments of Maddox and Mason were related to the subterfuge in the Brawley case (though there are many who believed they were especially targeted because of their roles).

However, their actions did spark this: I watched New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams say in a television interview that racism was a problem in the state’s criminal justice system and that more needed to be done to address it. As a follow-up to that admission, to show that he was serious, it would have been have been so apropos if Abrams had spearheaded a movement for a reversal of the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws. But he didn’t.

So, what now?

 

 

 

 

Snickering, Chortling?

 

As the Chairman of the New York Post, I am ultimately responsible for what is printed in its pages. The buck stops with me. 

Last week, we made a mistake. We ran a cartoon that offended many people. Today I want to personally apologize to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted.

Over the past couple of days, I have spoken to a number of people and I now better understand the hurt this cartoon has caused. At the same time, I have had conversations with Post editors about the situation and I can assure you – without a doubt – that the only intent of that cartoon was to mock a badly written piece of legislation. It was not meant to be racist, but unfortunately, it was interpreted by many as such.

We all hold the readers of the New York Post in high regard and I promise you that we will seek to be more attuned to the sensitivities of our community.

The organizers have obviously scored a hit but of what significance? I need time to process.

Selected: URLs: CNN. Rueters. NY Post. ]

It cannot be denied: Lots and lots and lots of New Yorkers who love the Post don

 

I’m in awe of the comeuppance, as I wrote earlier, though I wish the take down had been rooted more in assertions incontrovertible and irrefutable. The Post is not bloodied, and it most certainly is unbowed [plus it has been hiring people of color for news editorial positions]. So, what’s the toll?

Because of the protest and threats of a boycott, will circulation drop? – I doubt it. The call for a newspaper boycott may generate attention getting news but such boycotts in the pass have rarely been effective in other cities. There has always been talk but effective action was almost always ineffective regarding stated goals of the organizers.

Stocks drop? – Doubt it. Advertisers pull out? – Nope. The Post’s re-examining its animus for black communities? – Nope, otherwise it wouldn’t be the Post. But as I wrote earlier, the way it expresses its racist contempt has been modified though its history remains a big blip on the social radar of New York black communities. Is there a silver lining here? – Doubt it.

Will the organizers, drawing on the energy of their current protest, go after the bigotry in the rest of the New York mainstream news media? Nah. So, what will they do so that this New York Moment may continue to resonate? Is there a strategy about?

I don’t know.

The Reverend Al Sharpton, in an evening TV news snippet February 23, said that he was planning to contact the Federal Communications Commission about dual ownership, that is, big corporations like Murdoch’s News Corporation owning newspapers and broadcast news media in the same municipality. That was a hop topic several years ago, and Murdoch was in the bulls-eye for his dual ownerships in New York City and Boston. But even U.S. Senator Teddy Kennedy, who had been the target of several Post articles, so-called investigative pieces (regarding the Chappaquiddick incident), op eds,  and editorials, supported the law allowing News Corporation and other media giants the right to their dual ownerships. So, I’m not inspired about the prospects of this FCC angle.

Because of the election of the first black President, race is certainly on everyone’s mind, elevated to a consciousness and public awareness in a way unheard of before November 4. Yes, the Civil Rights Movement made race and American racism and America’s omissions much harder to hide. Lots and lots and lots of us are watching and waiting, and, I hope, planning.

I sense this labyrinth but can’t make coherent sense of it. So, I’ll just list some footnotes because I can’t described the big picture in the making.

End, Part II of III.

In Part III: Footnotes for a big picture yet to be described.

Shortly after Rupert Murdoch bought the Post, its Australian and British and American editors and reporters relished its “news stories” spiting African Americans. I recall one vile tongue-in-cheek about Stepin Fetchit who was dead at the time but none the less was described in a Post article as a gifted African American actor whom the black community should be proud.

This picture of Stepin Fetchit groveling in a typically degenerate manner was not the one used by the Post but matches the essence of that missing picture.

The Post, its villainy and malice veiled in a smug editorial impunity allowed by the First Amendment, published racist invective, though no reader ever once saw on its pages the word nigger that could be heard on certain shifts in the newsroom. The Post’s contempt for people of color was well known in the bars frequented by journalists. It was well known throughout the city. Its writers and editors and supporters made sure of that.

In one period in the early 1980s, it also had published stories bashing gays. However, hundreds of gays showed up one evening at 210 South Street, where it use to reside, threatening a ransacking, and they returned for several days as a menacing horde.

The upshot? The Post stopped bashing though no one would ever say its homophobia was on the back burner.

Blacks never showed up in mass threatening to sack the place though there were calls for boycotts, and the paper was denounced in churches and barbershops and restaurants and all makes and manner of collectives in New York’s black communities. In the middle of a plenary discussion of community activists and journalists of color, at a New York City conference organized by the National Alliance of Third World Journalists, I stood and identified myself as a Post reporter when discussion about racism in mainstream New York news media included comments about the Post. I believe I was hearing a call to action and said I was ready to be an undercover agent for any planned action by NATWJ.

Quote Marks for Effect: “We have so much to deal with that we have to deal with them later, brother, so just hold on to your job and try not to do any harm,” a community activist said. Nevertheless, there were heated moments in communities where I identified myself as a Post reporter there to get “news.” And I often defused the situations with, Quote Marks for Effect, “I don’t write those kind of stories” or “You’ve never seen my name on any of those stories.”

I was working part-time at the Post while I was trying to finish my first book, The Kids Next Door: Sons and Daughters Who Killed Their Parents (William Morrow & Company, and out of print), while trying to help a youth who had been wrongly convicted; while suing a weekly national news magazine in a federal discrimination suit (written up in the Columba Journalism Review) and trying to figure out how to purse a journalism career. Jimmy Breslin, at the New York Daily News then, wrote two columns about the racism of the Post.

His News had been sued in a federal discrimination lawsuit that it would eventually lose, the only big city daily ever to lose a suit like that, and Breslin’s pieces, in essence, rhetorically questioned how the News could be sued despite its employment of several black reporters and editors and copy editors, yet, the Post didn’t have one full-time black journalist (although it had two full-time Asian Americans, one an editor, another a reporter).

[ I wonder if anyone recalls the brouhaha at New York Newsday, when it was alive, over Breslin's newsroom racial rant about Asian Americans but that's another story. ]

Breslin’s first piece shocked the Post editors. I was there the day of the jaw-dropping surprise. I was not in the newsroom when Breslin followed with a second column that week jolting them into action. After ignoring all manner of subtle and direct entrées by Post editors, I was “pressured” to apply for a full-time position, though, after I was hired, I refused for many weeks to allow my byline on stories I had written – that was my ad hoc strategy for dealing with newsroom racism and I milked it for as long as I could.

I was riding on a Post elevator one day with members of the editorial page when two portly Australians (I say Australian because of the accents, and portly because they were portly, but they could have been British) were discussing the appropriateness of using “spear chuckers” as a reference to African American community activists whom the Post detested. Quote Marks for Effect: “They don’t like being called spear chuckers,” one, who was looking directly at me as I glared, said to the other.

In the newsroom, Post editors and reporters denounced other New York mainstream and broadcast news media as hypocrites that pretended that they weren’t racist when they shared the same opinions as the Post but were too chicken to let it all hang out as the Post did.

Post-ers said white liberals were as racist as they were. As far as they were concerned, there was no grey, only black and white.

This has to be stated: Well after I left to teach at the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the surly racist content was gradually being replaced by what the Post considered nuances and subtleties in its news stories, though the race sleaze was left to columnists. That occurred about the time the New York Times started citing and crediting Murdoch’s newspaper in NYT stories, something it had refused to do for years.

Nevertheless, the Post’s reputation for being a vile racist is written in stone, as far as many people of color are concerned, no matter its subtleties and nuance.

End, Part I of III.

In Part II: Should one be concerned about the fairness of a wronged community’s leaders and activists who take on an assassin that has been maliciously abusing its people?