Site icon journal-isms.com

White Writers Join N-Word Debate

richard

“‘You Don’t Get It; You’re White’ . . . Doesn’t Work for Me.”

News Organizations Challenge White House on Photo Access

Al Jazeera Testing S.F.-Based Internet News Network

Kennedy Assassination Marked Year the ’60s Came Together

NBCLatino to Shed 3 Positions in January Relaunch

Former Librarian, 83, Recorded 140,000 Tapes of TV News

Blackistone Needed More Time to Explain, Ombudsman Says

Short Takes

” ‘You Don’t Get It; You’re White’ . . . Doesn’t Work for Me”

White writers are coming forward to say they cannot sit on the sidelines in the debate over who can use the “N-word,” if anyone. The latest is Mike Wise, Washington Post sports columnist, who responded in Friday’s printed Post, “I deserve a seat at this table. This is about the world my 3-year-old is going to live in.”

Wise isn’t the only one. Garret Mathews, a retired metro columnist for the Evansville (Ind.) Courier & Press, wrote Thursday in the Indianapolis Star about a visit to an Indianapolis high school where the word was bandied about by black students. He taught them about the civil rights movement. “I tell the students the N-word was used by white racists as far back as the 19th century to reinforce the stereotype that persons of color are lazy and stupid,” Mathews wrote.

Even Rush Limbaugh, patron saint of conservative talk radio, entered the fray. After Michael Wilbon, co-host of ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” said last week that he uses the N-word “all day, every day of my life” and that white people have no right to tell black people how to use it, Limbaugh said Wilbon should have used the occasion to scold white liberals wedded to “political correctness” — rather than all whites.

The latest controversies over the N-word have come from the sports world. The NBA fined Los Angeles Clippers forward Matt Barnes $25,000 last week after his ejection after L.A.’s’ 111-103 victory over Oklahoma City the previous night. Officially, Barnes was dinged for “failing to leave the court in a timely manner … and using inappropriate language on his Twitter account.“

“I love my teammates like family, but I’m DONE standing up for these n—–!” Barnes wrote, referring to his fellow Clippers, Ben Golliver reported for Sports Illustrated. “All this s— does is cost me money.”

Before that, black players in the Miami Dolphins locker room said they had no problem with white players calling them the word. The Dolphins’ Richie Incognito, according to news reports, left a voice mail calling teammate Jonathan Martin the N-word. Incognito later apologized after the incident became public.

Most recently, John Wooten, chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, a group formed to promote diversity in hiring in the NFL, said Thursday that Trent Williams, offensive tackle for the Washington Redskins, directed the N-word at umpire Roy Ellison after Ellison had attempted to stop players from the Washington and Philadelphia teams from directing abusive language at one another, Mark Maske and Mike Jones reported Friday in the Post. Williams and Ellison are black.

On Friday, the NFL suspended Ellison for one game without pay for “making a profane and derogatory statement” to Williams, Maske and Jones reported Saturday.

Wise wrote, “All this time I had it in my leftist-engineer head that this word was the most vile, disgusting, loaded word in the history of the English language, and now it’s an accepted synonym for ‘man’ or ‘dude’ or ‘partner?’ More jarring, Wilbon said he used it ‘all day, every day, all my life,’ specifying on ‘Pardon the Interruption,’ ‘I have a problem with white people framing the discussion for the use of the N-word.’

“Okay.

“And I have a problem with anyone of any ethnicity telling me that my values and beliefs about eradicating slurs from public and private conversation are less important than having agency over them for personal use — no matter who it hurts, including millions of African Americans who want the word abolished and should have just as much say.

“Actually, it’s deeper than that. When you think you’re fighting for a less hostile, less confusing and more mutually respectful country for our children to live in and then you find out your idea of a shared purpose wasn’t shared by people you like and respect, a real hopelessness sets in.

“The N-word is filth; it’s disrespectful, confusing and uplifts no one. I know of no other minority in the world co-opting a dehumanizing, racial slur used by its oppressor.

“Yet I’m told, ‘You don’t get it; you’re white.’

“No. That doesn’t work for me. I deserve a seat at this table. This is about the world my 3-year-old is going to live in.

“Spending my formative years in a rural part of Hawaii, where welfare and food stamps were how many families in Ewa Beach got by, I grew up as one of a few ‘haole’ kids among an ethnic stew of poor- to middle-class Filipino, Samoan, Tongan, Hawaiian and Japanese kids. I would not wish some of the early prejudice and violence I experienced on any prepubescent teen. But in hindsight, I now feel being a minority, even for a few years, should be a prerequisite for every person of a dominant culture; it makes you see and feel what people on the other side see and feel.

“It’s where I gained a real affinity and appreciation for diversity, for experiencing the world outside my own ethnic prism. I want to continue that for my son, to impart the one-world values my father imparted on me. I don’t want him to experience the word in any form.

“When I am told, ‘This isn’t about you,’ I feel like I’m being judged by the color of my skin and not the content of my character.’ . . .”

Wise joins Tom Joyce of the Mount Airy (N.C.) News, Skip Bayless of ESPN and Jack Dickey of Time magazine among whites who have said they cannot keep silent.

Dickey zeroed in on NBA analyst Charles Barkley, a Hall of Famer who said, “White America don’t get to dictate how me and Shaq [O’Neill] talk to each other.” Dickey picked apart Barkley’s logic in a blog post headlined, “Charles Barkley Is Still Not a Role Model.“

News Organizations Challenge White House on Photo Access

“The atmosphere in the White House briefing room got heated Thursday afternoon as reporters challenged a spokesman over press access to the president,” Jennifer Epstein reported Thursday for Politico.

“After delivering a letter arguing that officials are ‘blocking the public from having an independent view of important functions of the executive branch of government,’ members of the White House press corps cut into principal deputy press secretary Josh Earnest as he defended the administration’s policies on press access.

” ‘It is the responsibility of those of you who sit in your seats to push for more. You’re supposed to be agitating for more access. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be doing your job,’ Earnest told reporters as he filled in for press secretary Jay Carney at the White House press briefing. ‘So, the fact that there is a little bit of a disagreement between the press corps and the White House press office about how much access the press corps should have to the president is built into the system.’

“Earlier Thursday, the board of the White House Correspondents Association delivered a letter to Earnest detailing press concerns that the White House has engaged in a ‘troubling break from tradition’ by choosing to release photos and videos of events to which the press has not had access, but to which White House photographers and videographers have had access.

“As POLITICO has reported, much of President Obama’s daily schedule is not made public, though some of it later becomes public when the White House releases photos, videos or blog posts about the president’s activities, something the White House argues has given Americans more access to Obama. . . .”

Al Jazeera Testing S.F.-Based Internet News Network

“Across from San Francisco’s AT&T Park stadium, a small group of news junkies is working on building a different kind of startup,” Janko Roettgers reported Friday for gigaom.com.

“The first thing you notice when entering their building is the omnipresent imagery of civil rights leaders and pop culture icons from around the world. Nelson Mandela, John Lennon and Aung San Suu Kyi are everywhere, as are promises of defiance and empowerment. But the building, which formerly housed Al Gore’s Current TV, isn’t home to some kind of progressive nonprofit. Instead, it’s the birth place of AJ+, Al Jazeera’s ambitious attempt to produce news for an audience that gets its information from the internet.

“Al Jazeera first announced its plans to launch an internet news network at an industry conference in October, and the Qatar-based news organization is set to officially unveil the AJ+ brand with a placeholder website in the next few weeks. But in San Francisco, the team of AJ+ is already busy working on producing pilots to meet its goal of a soft launch early next year. AJ+ executives invited me to take an exclusive behind-the-scenes look this week, and while they didn’t share too many details about the shows and news formats that they’re working on, they weren’t shy about telling me what they don’t want to do: television. . . .”

Kennedy Assassination Marked Year the ’60s Came Together

“We were never innocent,” Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote Wednesday in his syndicated Miami Herald column, anticipating Friday’s 50th anniversary commemoration of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

“That word is invariably used to describe what changed in America 50 years ago Friday when a dashing young president was murdered in Dallas. But the word has never been quite right.

“Anyone who was 40 years old the day John Kennedy died had already lived through global economic collapse, factories silenced, smokestacks stilled, bankers selling apples on street corners. She had seen the agricultural heartland dry up and blow away in towering black clouds of dust, the former tenants dispossessed and forced to flee. She had seen war on a scale that beggars the imagination, mass murder in numbers that blaspheme God and a nuclear sunrise over Japan. Just the year before, she had seen the world teeter on the brink of another nuclear catastrophe.

“We were not innocent.

“And yet, something did change when Kennedy’s motorcade executed that hairpin turn onto Elm Street and Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger of that mail order carbine. After that moment, something was different, something was lost — and it has haunted America ever since.

“Nineteen sixty-three is the year the 1960s began, the year so many of the themes that would define that tumultuous era — civil rights, women’s rights, Vietnam, the British Invasion, political assassination — came together for the first time. . . .”

NBCLatino to Shed 3 Positions in January Relaunch

NBCLatino.com, which launched last year in the first time an English-language broadcast network news division initiated a Web site specifically targeted to Hispanics, is shedding three positions as it plans to relaunch in early January as part of NBCNews.com, according to NBC News sources.

“This move will allow its content to reach a much larger audience and it will further enhance NBC News’s commitment and ability to cover news and issues that matter to the Latino community,” Ali Zelenko, senior vice president, communications, told Journal-isms on Friday by email. “Unfortunately this means a few positions will be eliminated. We are grateful to those affected for their contributions and are actively looking for other roles for them inside the company.” [She added on Nov. 25: “the nbclatino brand will remain.”]

Zelenko said she was not permitted to identify how many positions would be lost and identify them. Chris Peña, an NBC veteran, is executive editor, overseeing a staff of bilingual writers and producers at NBC’s headquarters in New York. Sandra Lilley, another NBC veteran, was promoted to managing editor in July. Suzanne Gamboa joined as politics editor in September from the Associated Press.

Former Librarian, 83, Recorded 140,000 Tapes of TV News

“In a storage unit somewhere in Philadelphia, 140,000 VHS tapes sit packed into four shipping containers. Most are hand-labeled with a date between 1977 and 2012, and if you pop one into a VCR you might see scenes from the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the Reagan Administration, or Hurricane Katrina,” Sarah Kessler wrote Thursday for Fast Company.

“It’s 35 years of history through the lens of TV news, captured on a dwindling format.

“It’s also the life work of Marion Stokes, who built an archive of network, local, and cable news, in her home, one tape at a time, recording every major (and trivial) news event until the day she died in 2012 at the age of 83 of lung disease.

“Stokes was a former librarian who for two years co-produced a local television show with her then-future husband, John Stokes Jr. She also was engaged in civil rights issues, helping organize buses to the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, among other efforts. She began casually recording television in 1977. She taped lots of things, but she thought news was especially important, and when cable transformed it into a 24-hour affair, she began recording MSNBC, Fox, CNN, CSNBC, and [C-SPAN] around the clock by running as many as eight television recorders at a time. . . .”

The Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a free Internet library, plans to make the tapes public and searchable, Kessler reported.

Short Takes

Follow Richard Prince on Twitter

Facebook users: “Like” “Richard Prince’s Journal-isms” on Facebook.

Exit mobile version