Original posting: Nov. 8, 2004
What’s Up With the White South?
Last week, we noted that Mara Liasson of National Public Radio observed that the once-Democratic “Solid South” had come full circle since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act: With the Nov. 2 election, the old Confederacy became solid again — this time, solidly Republican.
In his ombudsman’s column in the Washington Post Sunday, Michael Getler quoted a Post editor as saying, “why is the South so red? Race is gone as the issue. There is a new South that we don’t understand.”
At the annual meeting of the Trotter Group of African American columnists, taking place at Harvard University, Journal-isms asked an expert on voting and race, David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, whether race was in fact no longer part of the equation.
“The issues have been transformed so that it’s easier to call it nonracial,” Bositis said. With a posture of “low taxes, anti-union, limited services, low wages” in a region of the country known for inadequate education systems, he asked, who is hurt by a reluctance to spend public money there?
It was the South, Bositis told a session attended by 28 Trotter Group members, that led the way in keeping blacks from voting. “I can’t believe that the rest of the country is finally going to concede the Civil War to the South,” he told the group. “The North stopped fighting it, but the Southerners have never given up.”
Trotter Group members comment on campaign
Author Says Beware the “Ownership Society”
During the election campaign, President Bush advocated what he called “the ownership society,” which, the New York Times says, “is built on the assumption that giving individuals more responsibility for their financial lives, combined with a greater reliance on the private market, can slow the growth of government, reduce the cost of social welfare programs and modernize programs created in the New Deal and Great Society.”
Thomas Shapiro of Brandeis University, author of “The Hidden Cost of Being African American,” said it really “looks like ‘the debtor society’.”
Among the points Shapiro made to the Trotter Group Sunday night was that at the mortgage table, the average black family pays interest rates one-third of 1 percent higher than does the average white family, “because whites tend to come in with more money up front.” That adds up to about $12,000 over 30 years, he said.
The racial gap is due to the disparity in wealth, as opposed to income, Shapiro said, citing figures that show the typical African American family having a dime of wealth for every dollar held by whites. Young white Americans tend to receive significant help from parents and grandparents in buying a home, he said, unlike African Americans.
While homeownership is at record levels, Shapiro said, so is bankruptcy, foreclosure, late mortgage payments and car repossessions.
In case of a financial disaster, “most African Americans and Hispanics don’t have a safety net to start with.” Shapiro advocated instead building financial assets — such as children’s savings accounts, that “will help America’s families and children acquire assets for their own future. Assets don’t just add to your bank account; they feed dreams.” Children from such families do better in school; it has something to do with stake holding,” Shapiro said.
Growing “Testocracy” Blasted on Two Fronts
The nation’s increasing reliance on tests — from the SAT to the “No Child Left Behind Act” mandating achievement benchmarks in elementary and secondary education — a reliance dubbed our “testocracy” by one presenter — came under fire from speakers at the Trotter Group conference.
William C. Hiss, vice president for external affairs at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, described today how SATs were made optional at the college in 1984, followed by all testing in 1990.
Over the 20 years of the policy, Hiss said, the difference in grade-point averages between those who submitted to the tests and those who did not was a negligible .05 of one point.
“We may be throwing away one-third of our national talent” in overly relying on tests to determine who is admitted to college, Hiss said.
One of President Bush’s campaign talking points was his advocacy of the “No Child Left Behind” education initiative.
His victory means “we have just elected a lot more tests,” said Gary Orfield, director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation.
Orfield presented results of a study of teachers’ attitudes toward “No Child Left Behind,” along with conclusions that the initiative penalizes schools whose students are poor and black or Hispanic by encouraging good teachers to flee otherwise bad schools, among other reasons.
“We may see a coalition emerging between conservative states who believe they should run their own schools and minority groups concerned with the social consequences of these actions,” said Orfield, who coined the word “testocracy.”
He recommended a series of revisions. “We know more about how to increase the graduation rate than how to increase test scores, but we’re not doing that,” he said.
In a recent survey by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, only 23 percent of African Americans and 32 percent of the general population give the “No Child Left Behind” program high marks.
Lani Guinier Backs a “Deliberation Day”
Lani Guinier, famously known as the law professor who President Bill Clinton nominated in 1993 to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, only to withdraw the nomination after her ideas were distorted as extreme, eventually became the first woman of color to receive a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School.
Today, she, too, criticized “teaching to the test,” telling Trotter Group members that the practice “gives a false impression that there is a right answer to every question and a wrong answer.”
But she spent most of her talk on her vision of democracy, advocating greater public participation between elections and backing other calls for electoral reforms.
She maintained that the Electoral College runs contrary to court rulings requiring one-person, one-vote by disproportionately empowering rural areas, contrary to the intentions of the Founders, she said. In addition, Guinier said she favors a proposal by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D- Ill., for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to vote, a concept not now in the Constitution. She backed a proposal for making Election Day a holiday where one would not only vote but engage in public discussions of issues, and she called for the elimination of the disenfranchisement of ex-felons.
Guinier attributed the election holiday idea — she said it might be called “Deliberation Day” — to Bruce Ackerman, described by the New York Times as “a liberal professor at Yale Law School and one of the nation’s few imaginative thinkers on election reform.”
More Consolidation, Pressure on Indecency Seen
“President Bush’s re-election last week means new faces on the Federal Communications Commission, another four years of generally deregulatory policy and increased pressure over broadcast indecency from an energized right wing, analysts and activists say,” reports Todd Shields in Media Week.
“Bush’s victory in the Nov. 2 election returns an administration that has promoted relaxed media ownership rules in the face of legislative and court challenges. Unless the Supreme Court weighs in, the FCC will need to rewrite the ownership regulations its Republican majority passed in 2003. Democrats might have sought rollbacks, but Republicans are not likely to do so, according to Legg Mason analyst Blair Levin.”
Ed Gordon Joins “60 Minutes Wednesday”
“The embattled CBS newsmagazine ’60 Minutes Wednesday’ is adding to its reporting roster, hiring Ed Gordon, known for landing high-profile interviews while an anchor at cable’s BET channel, as a contributing correspondent,” Elizabeth Jensen reports in the Los Angeles Times.
“Gordon’s interview with Jamie Foxx, star of the new Ray Charles movie, ‘Ray,’ will air Wednesday. The 44-year-old interviewer is best known for his exclusive talk with O.J. Simpson in January 1996, just months after the former football star was acquitted in the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.
“BET canceled Gordon’s nightly program in December 2002. Since then, he has been a contributor to other TV programs and on radio, and recently interviewed Sen. John F. Kerry for BET, a channel targeted at an African American audience.
“Gordon said he had been talking to CBS for about a year. Both CBS and BET are owned by Viacom.
“Josh Howard, executive producer of ’60 Minutes Wednesday,’ said Gordon will likely work on profiles and ‘newsier investigative pieces.’ He added, ‘We’re looking to see who the next generation is, and I think he has a real shot at a future here.’
The Associated Press added, “Gordon said he won’t be typecast by stories he does, explaining: ‘I won’t solely pitch African-American issues, but I think it’s important that I do.'”
Columnist Pitts Seeks His Roots in West Africa
“The past is hard to know for all of us. But for African Americans, it is worse than mystery. It is a broken bridge, a missing piece. It is that untethered feeling that comes when your history is only two generations long,” syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts wrote Sunday in the Miami Herald, in a piece picked up by other papers.
“Which is why I was intrigued several years ago when I heard about Dr. Rick Kittles and his work with the National Human Genome Center at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
“Kittles was building what is now a database of 22,000 DNA samples representing 135 African population groups. And last year, when he began to commercially exploit that research, offering DNA tests to help American blacks determine what part of Africa and what peoples of Africa their ancestry traced to, I was among the first in line.
“I went to www.african ancestry.com and ordered two of the company’s tests, one each for maternal and paternal lineage. The company says that 1,500 other people have done the same, including former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, actor LeVar Burton and director Spike Lee.
“Six weeks later, I received the results. My paternal line traces to the Mende people of Sierra Leone. My maternal link is here, among the Songhay people of Niger.
“I have come to Africa to find out what that means.”
Pitts was accompanied by photographer Sarah J. Glover of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the secretary of the National Association of Black Journalists who was already in Africa after winning an NABJ Ethel Payne Fellowship.
Cartoonist Defends Image of Black Drug Dealer
A Don Wright editorial cartoon in Florida’s Palm Beach Post showed an elderly white couple sitting in a car pulled over to the curb. The driver is speaking to an African American man leaning in the window: “Ethel, I said, there are no flu shots! How do we get through the winter? That’s why we’re here looking to score some blow!”
C.B. Hanif, the paper’s ombudsman, reports one reader’s view condemning the cartoon as stereotypical and another who called it thought-provoking.
He continued: “Mr. Wright, however, said he considered the dissent ‘a classic denial of reality. Those who protest the truth, or advocate such censorship, are in danger of becoming caricatures themselves. To suggest that some African-Americans don’t sell drugs on street corners is to deny not just my work but the creative energies of many award-winning black authors, historians, filmmakers and comedians, including Spike Lee. And to so easily hint of racism skirts the edge of racism itself.
“‘In fact, I suggest that devoting this much energy to analyzing a single figure in a single drawing out of 261 such drawings that appear each year is to take one’s eyes off more important prizes. African-American liberties are being systematically eroded in voting rights, health care, economic opportunity and education. Surely, time spent protesting those losses is time better spent.'”
Raines, Boyd Are Heavies in New Book
The book about the New York Times that Seth Mnookin left Newsweek magazine to write hits bookstores Tuesday, and New York magazine says it portrays the deposed editor and managing editor, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, as the heavies.
“This taut, involving story slowly takes on a Woodward-and-Bernstein urgency, with Raines and Boyd jointly playing the Nixon role, with all the stonewalling, denial, and self-deception that implies,” writes William Powers in a review of “Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media.”
“In the newsroom, where Raines has managed to alienate much of the population with his high-handedness and cronyism, there ís a palpable hope that the story will do him in.” But the seven Times people chosen to investigate the Jayson Blair affair, which prompted Raines’ and Boyd’s resignations last year, “realize this could be a career-killer for them. What if Raines doesn’t like their work and survives? They wonder if they might wind up in some Timesian Siberia, like the dreaded ‘large-type weekly.’
“None of these things happened, of course. Raines and Boyd were eventually forced out, and the customary wailing ensued about the crisis of journalism, even as the paper got right back to work fixing itself.”
Powers says that “some of the key characters, including Boyd and Raines,” refused to talk to the author.
No word on the production by Showtime of a movie based in part on articles by Mnookin for Newsweek, announced a year ago.
Boyd was the paper’s first African American managing editor. Last we checked, the highest ranking people of color in today’s Times newsroom were graphics editor Charles Blow and dining editor Kathleen McElroy.
Some Hard New Facts on Raines, Blair (Editor & Publisher)
Suede’s Suzanne Boyd a Star in Canada
“Suzanne Boyd is the living, breathing incarnation of the magazine her New York bosses hired her to create — young, savvy, well-heeled, with a rock-solid belief that blacks rule fashion.”
So reads the headline over a story by Isabel Vincent in Canada’s National Post.
“Today, Boyd and her crew are among a select group of Canadians running some of New York’s most important magazines,” Vincent writes. “There’s Bonnie Fuller, of course, who also worked at Flare and is credited with revitalizing Glamour, Cosmopolitan and Us Weekly, before becoming editorial chief of American Media; Graydon Carter, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair; and, most recently, Joe Zee, who heads up the new men’s shopping magazine Vitals.”
Boyd is the founding editor of Suede, described in the piece as “the hip new high-fashion magazine aimed at black and mixed-race American women.” She is a native of Halifax who grew up in the West Indies.
