The New York Times is a racist newspaper.
I am writing these introductory paragraphs of this blog post on July 4, 2011. One reason for my delay in posting this – I had intended to have it up, oh, a month ago - is that I have been too busy writing The Times to complain, again and again, about its reporting on Africa. So far this month alone, the paper has had an almost-daily barrage of racist reporting about Africans (and occasionally about other non-white peoples of the world).
Yesterday’s paper (July 3) has examples; so does this morning’s paper. From two different reporters. One, Jeffrey Gettleman, who appears, sadly and unfortunately, to be the chief reporter on African affairs, seemingly has a compulsion to use words and terms that denigrate the people he is writing about. It is frequent. It is deliberate. And it will not stop, in spite of years of complaining by me.
I hope you will join me in demanding that the paper cease the vulgar use of pejorative terms that, in and of themselves may not always be repugnant, but, as used by The Times, they represent a racist mindset. I am providing some Times e-mails further down in this post, if you choose to write.
Several reporters (whose writings are left uncorrected by their equally-guilty, equally-racist editors) cannot seem to compose a single news story about Africa without using words like “natives” or “huts,“often expanded to “mud-walled huts” and “thatched-roof huts,” and, in one story, a reporter astonishingly wrote “mud-walled, thatched-roofed huts.” Damn.
Add “village” – sometimes used incessantly in a single article (is nine times in a recent article on the Masai “tribesmen” who shockingly use bicycles and cell phones – start the presses! - incessant?) – and “jungle” and various forms of “tribe” and we have a predictable litany of terms that remain – after all, this morning’s paper is about as current as we can get – even though my earliest complaint to The New York Times was sent in 1996. The travel editor printed my letter pointing out the amazingly 19th-centuryish use of “natives” when speaking of Africans. (That year marked the 30th anniversary of my arrival in Africa, the same year I began to fire off – if one can “fire” using a manual typewriter – my first complaints about coverage of Africa in American media.)
The printing of that letter to the travel section (as bad, if not worse, than the foreign news section) seemed, ever so briefly, a sign of hope. Ha! A month later, another letter to the travel editor complained that I didn’t understand what a “native” was, even though I had pointed out the vast difference between being “a native of Indiana” and “the natives” used to describe citizens of countries inhabited by darker-skinned people. “I watched the natives of Kenya dancing…” is quite acceptable to The Times. “I watched the natives of Ohio dancing…” would be laughed out of the newsroom – and edited out.
It angered me that the letter-writer was so stupid. But, it angered me so much more that The Times knew she was wrong, but printed it anyway. And they did not print my rebuttal to her “rebuttal.”
If the word “natives” in the pejorative sense, reserved deliberately for certain types of people, shows up in articles on predominately white countries such as Australia or New Zealand, you can be assured that it will be used only with the “tribal” people who were living there when the whites arrived only a few centuries ago, and not to describe the whites themselves. Same is true for Norway, Sweden, Finland, and portions of Russia where the Lapps, not the whites, are the “natives.”
I have told the paper, in e-mail after e-mail, with increasing amounts of sarcasm and anger, the following:
1. Africans live in houses. They have homes. (I’ve lived and traveled for nearly eight years in urban and rural areas of several African countries and have yet to see a hut.)
2. The construction material, earthen walls and roofs composed of layers of palm fronds and similar materials, tightly and thickly layered, are wisely chosen for the cost-effectiveness, availability, and suitability for the climate. (When living in Santa Fe, we admired, but could never afford, the mud-walled homes – known as “adobe”-- of movie stars and the local rich residents. These expensive huts were flat-roofed, so thatch was not an issue, but, had it been used, you can be sure The Times would find these dwellings quaint and cute and chic, not words to be used when making snide put-downs of African’s residences.)
3. In rural areas, Africans very often live in towns. Many do, indeed, live in villages, but a word-search in a travel article about the countryside of any U.S. state would be unlikely to pull up “village” even one time.
4. If one uses some form of “tribe” to describe people of Nigeria or Afghanistan, why don’t we use it to describe the residents of France or Latvia? Yes, some groups call themselves tribes (some of my students in Santa Fe would have described themselves as belonging to the Navajo tribe), but it was not intended to be self-demeaning, as in the way The New York Times selectively uses it.
5. Why is “civilization” reserved for European culture, in at least one recent Times travel article, in contrast to what one finds in Africa? (My class of Nigerian fifth-formers – about 11th or 12th grade in the U.S. – bemoaned that their country was not “civilized,” and so I talked with them about the great achievements in science, literature, music, and other areas by Germans over many centuries, and concluded by discussing Dachau, at that time closed for only 21 years, and asked if that fit in with a “civilized” people. Point made. Point taken.)
Once upon a time, in a journalism department not terribly far away, this naïve student dreamed of the day he would be a foreign correspondent for the newspaper I now write to constantly, denouncing its lack of depth in reporting foreign affairs – shallow commentary is often all we get, something we’d expect from a Rupert Murdoch publication, but not the once-thought-venerable Times. After graduation, I went out into that world – to Africa -- where I quickly fell in love – and remain in love -- with the people and lands where I lived.
When I cut-and-pasted the string of e-mailed complaints to The Times, from 2009 to July 2011, into a Word document,it came to more than 20 pages, single-spaced. You are relieved, I’m sure, that I chose not to share that correspondence with you, but, if you really want to see it, I’ll send it – you’ll find a fair amount of redundancy in my comments, and I get really snarky, but never swear at them (but, is it tempting!), responding to the sad, ever-present use of the pejorative use of words and phrases I’ve mentioned above.
Africa is demeaned the most, although the occasional South American or Asian country gets hit, too (but, generally only the “tribal” people). Have you noticed that such writers call the heads of these groups “tribal chieftains.” Never “leader” or “commander” or other such words. And never chief, but chieftain. Got me. Don’t know why.
I am appalled at the arrogance of it. They know better. They don’t care and they are deeply involved in an us/them policy. Good versus bad. White versus black. House versus hut. And so on.
I have asked a number of times, when referring to the offenders, “Is this the best you can do? How did they (or you) get jobs at The Times? Seriously, how did you get hired?” You may have already figured out why they don’t respond any more often than they do – but, at least, they should share my valid concerns with the reporters I am complaining about. If they do, it hasn’t made a bit of difference.
Defenders of this blatant racist reporting and cooperative, like-minded editors include Acting Senior Editor Joan P. Nassivera (Senioreditor@nytimes.com) and Joseph Burgess (public@nytimes.com) of the Public Editor’s staff – I asked both of them to stop responding to me, as their defense was more upsetting – absolute refusal to acknowledge anything wrong with the reporters’ and editors’ work – than the articles themselves.
Other e-mails that go to departments that publish offensive material or who are responsible for those departments include the following: nytnews@nytimes.com,executive-editor@nytimes.com, managing-editor@nytimes.com, foreign@nytimes.com, travelmail@nytimes.com and obits@nytimes.com. Yes, even the obits often jar one with the use of “natives” or “villagers” or “huts” when referring to Africans or other non-white people.
If you’re still with me, thanks for letting me rant to you about such a discouraging state of affairs. Now, I have to get back to writing to the newspaper in question about two more articles. I may be tired of this – oh, I’m so weary – but, as I mentioned in one e-mail to The Times, referring to my persistence, like Churchill, “I will never never never never give up.”
But, goddamn it, I would love to. If only The New York Times were to become what I, for one, once thought it was: a publication with a fair-and-balanced, culturally sensitive worldview. It, I now know, never was. But it could be.
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