by Rivals Now Sits Idle, and Angry.” Williams explained that a violent brawl during the final minutes of a game had led city athletic officials to bench the team for the rest of the season. The Paul Robeson team was perennially ranked among the best in the city, Williams reported, and had a chance to win the city title that year. It attracted scouts and coaches from basketball powerhouses, and players regularly received scholarships, some to NCAA Division One schools. But there was something “toxic” about the school’s basketball program, Wilson noted. “Its popular former coach, Lawrence Major, committed suicide in 2005 at age 45 after being charged with statutory rape, accused of carrying on a three-year relationship with a student that started when she was 14.” In past seasons, “several rival coaches have agreed to play games in Robeson’s gym only if they bring their own security guards, saying they are fearful of being assaulted by Robeson fans. At least one coach has vowed never to take his basketball teams to Robeson again.”
The incident that led to the suspension came after a hard foul on a rebound with thirty seconds remaining in a game against Thomas Jefferson High. A Robeson player then shoved the ball into the chest of the Jefferson player who had fouled. Benches of both teams cleared and the crowd surged out of the stands. The Jefferson team was trapped in a corner as a violent confrontation ensued. The Jefferson team coach said it was a “Brooklyn mauling” and that “we had to fight for our lives.”
Despite the obvious pathology of the Robeson team, Williams chose to focus on the dashed hopes of the players and their anger over being suspended, reporting that one player started to cry. Williams also endorsed the school principal’s complaints that the punishment was too rough for the crime: “They wanted to send a real strong message, but it is not proportionate to the offense. The question we should be asking is, what lesson are these kids learning about fairness and justice?”
A hallmark of the Times’ coverage of black crime is a fixation on racial profiling, which it sees as an expression of institutional racism in the criminal justice system. One example involved a study of speeding on the New Jersey Turnpike, conducted by the state in 2002, which concluded that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to speed than other drivers. The Metro editor, Jonathan Landman, proposed a story on it, which would have been an exclusive. But the study’s conclusion rankled the sensitivities of Howell Raines, who had not read the report but nevertheless said that the methodology was flawed and that the Times was being “spun.”
The story was held for a week. When it did run, it acknowledged a sizable gap between minorities and whites in speeding behavior, and noted that the issue was a political hot potato between civil libertarians and state troopers, but finished with liberal conventional wisdom: “Whatever the reasons for the speeding rates found in the study, civil rights advocates and lawyers said they cannot obscure the state’s acknowledgment that racial profiling was an accepted tactic in the department for years.”
The fixation on racial profiling appeared also in a 2007 report by Trymaine Lee, under the headline “As Officers Stop and Frisk, Residents Raise Their Guard.” Its pull quote said, “In Brooklyn, some neighbors see searches as police harassment.” Set in one of the most violent housing projects in the city, Brooklyn’s Red Hook Houses, the piece was about the aggressive “stop and frisk” tactic taken up by the NYPD under Commissioner Raymond Kelly. It had taken many guns off the street and played an important role in dramatically reducing New York’s murder rate.
Lee’s story emphasized that more than half of those stopped and frisked by the police citywide were black. One of the Red Hook residents he interviewed, Mikel Jamison, said that in Brooklyn it was “hard being an African-American, hard to live and walk down the street without the police harassing us.” After having a police officer jam a gun in his chest a few years ago, “in an incident he said he would rather not discuss,” Lee wrote, “Mr. Jamison said he converted to Islam and is now more conscious of the way the community is affected by such police actions.” (Why Lee allowed Jamison to dismiss the incident as something he “would rather not discuss” is journalistically dubious.)
Lee included fifteen paragraphs where residents disparaged the “stop and frisk” policy and just four where residents supported it. The closing paragraph described a press conference outside police headquarters the previous day, where representatives of black and Hispanic officers’ groups called for Police Commissioner Kelly to step down. “These numbers substantiate what we’ve been saying for years,” Lee quoted Noel Leader, a cofounder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. “The New York Police Department under Raymond Kelly is actively committing some of the grossest forms of racial profiling in the history of the New York Police Department.”
The commentary on the unfortunate encounter that Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard had with the Cambridge police in July 2009, provided the Times with another soapbox to denounce racial profiling. “The clash in Cambridge about ID and racial profiling, about identity and expectation and respect was just a snippet of our culture’s ongoing meta-narrative about race,” according to Judith Warner, a Times Web columnist. Bob Herbert devoted two columns to the case. In the first, headlined “Anger Has Its Place,” he wrote: “Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.” In the second column, headlined “Innocence Is No Defense,” Herbert complained: “Young, old, innocent as the day is long—it doesn’t matter. Your skin color can leave you perpetually vulnerable to a sudden and devastating injustice.”
In the past, a faith in integration had guided the Times’ coverage of race, as revealed in the paper’s response to the rise of the Black Power movement and its radical notions of cultural separatism. On the confrontation between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Dr. Martin Luther King in 1966 over the issue of white involvement in the civil rights struggle, the Times ran an editorial under the headline “Black Power Is Black Death.” It applauded the activist Roger Wilkins for telling the NAACP that “the way out of America’s racial dilemma” was “the inclusion of the Negro American in the nation’s life, not their exclusion.” A year earlier, after Malcolm X was assassinated, a Times editorial decried his “ruthless and fanatical belief in violence.”
By contrast, a Times news report about a Harlem exhibition in 2004 referred to Malcolm X as a “Civil Rights Giant” and extolled the exhibition for its description of a “driving intellectual quest for truth.” When John Carlos and Tommie Smith had given the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, the Times condemned the action; forty years later, the reporter Katie Thomas called it a “heroic gesture.”
The Times has endorsed a separatist black identity by reporting favorably on Afrocentric education, which its supporters see as a way to overcome alienation and boost self-esteem in underperforming inner-city black schoolchildren, by teaching them that they are descendants of a scientifically and artistically rich African culture. The fans of Afrocentrism claim that Africa, not Europe, was the cradle of Western civilization, and that racist “Eurocentric” scholarship has systemically denied it. Afrocentric education also emphasizes a “distinctly black learning style.”
To its critics, however, Afrocentrism is “a heavy dose of fantasy mixed with racism,” and an “ethnic religion” based on shoddy scholarship, with a dangerous potential to encourage racial insularity and intolerance. Claims that black children learn differently from whites are largely seen by professional educators as nonsense, an effort to teach history as group therapy. The notion of introducing a separate black curriculum would undermine the function of the public school as an instrument to instill a common culture and a shared sense of the past.
The debate over Afrocentric education was one that the Times should have monitored closely. At the very least, the paper should have provided a complete and candid description
