The New York Times has hit a new low, perpetuating all existing racial stereotypes of mixed race couples as well as creating new ones, in a front page story today.
The entire article, including the headline and accompanying photograph, is so blatantly racist that it could have been written by the Grand Wizard of the KKK. The headline "In Strangers' Glances at Family, Tensions Linger", actually enforces the very same kind of stereotypes that the article claims to be concerned about.
Follow me below the fold for details:
Starting with the lede, the Times manages to both indulge in a lazy, journalistic faux-pas that brings that simmering racism right out in the open:
“How come she’s so white and you’re so dark?”
The question tore through Heather Greenwood as she was about to check out at a store here one afternoon this summer. Her brown hands were pushing the shopping cart that held her babbling toddler, Noelle, all platinum curls, fair skin and ice-blue eyes.
Starting an article with a quote is one of the hackiest things a writer can do. That it appears in a front page story in the New York Times is emblematic of how far the Paper of Record has declined in recent years.
I got the sense that the Times was viewing mixed race couples like the Greenwood's with some kind of voyeuristic fascination with what is in my view, the "new normal":
The colors that strangers find so intriguing when they see the Greenwood family are the result of two generations of intermixing.
The shoulder shrugs about being mixed race within the family are in stark contrast to insults outside the home — too many for the Dragans and the Greenwoods to recount.
But some still sting more than others. On one occasion, a boy on the school bus called young Heather a nigger, and she had no idea what the word meant, so Mrs. Dragan, now 69, got the question over homework one night: “Mom, what’s a nigger?”
Some media critics might defend using the N-word to illustrate the racism of others, but I found the inclusion of the quote to be gratuitous. IMO, an indirect quote would have served the same purpose w/o having to resort to publishing one of the most offensive slurs in one of the biggest newspapers in the United States.
This kind of follows the Rick Perry N-head story that many traditional media sites found necessary to display this offensive epithet because it was "part of the story."
I acknowledge that a story about the difficulties of a mixed race couple is newsworthy. I just take exception with the manner that the Times illustrated the difficulties. If I wrote the piece, I would have made it much more redemptive, and to make the bigots seem even more narrow-minded.
For example, an anecdote about how Mrs. Greenwood's adoptive mother calmly turned the tables on a racist.
Once, on a beach chair at a resort in Florida years ago, a white woman sunning herself next to Mrs. Dragan bemoaned the fact that black children were running around the pool. “Isn’t it awful?” Mrs. Dragan recalled the woman confiding to her.
Within minutes, Mrs. Dragan, ever feisty despite her reserved appearance, had her brood by her side. “I’d like to introduce you to my children,” she told the woman. Awkward silence ensued.
“You know what? She deserved it,” Mrs. Dragan recalled during an interview at her home in Lambertville, N.J. “I figured, why miss an opportunity to embarrass someone if they needed it?”
In my view, the article by Susan Saulny, is concern trolling about the difficulties of mixed race couples in the 21st century:
Mrs. Dragan said her life came to revolve around shielding the children: “I was always on my A-game. My antennas were always up. I was aware all the time.”
Fast-forward 30 years, and Mrs. Dragan sees her daughter, Mrs. Greenwood, going through similar episodes with her own children — all because mother and child are not the same color.
Ironically, Saulny purports to be concerned about the children, who don't seem to get adults obsession with race.
For the moment, the matter seems simple enough for Sophia, too. She responds confidently when asked what race she is. “Tan!” says the second-grade student. “Can’t you tell by just looking?”
The story received a large number of comments, currently more than 400. This was typical of readers bewilderment at the article.
My older daughter was born with the dark olive skin and black hair of my Hungarian grandfather. I am a lighter shade of Italian/Hungarian, and my husband is of 100 percent British descent ... and very "white." When my daughter was an infant and we were checking out home daycares, one woman looked at me, looked at my husband and looked at my beautiful dark-skinned girl and marveled at how different she was from either of us. She asked (jokingly?) if I'd "jumped the fence." I didn't know what that meant at the time, but I later learned that she was asking me if my daughter was my husband's child!
We chose another, less ignorant daycare provider, but I still bristle at the memory. It is amazing to me that people are so racist they feel the need to account for every shade of beauty that humans come in, wrote Lisa Wesel of Maine.
Yet another reader, nymom, correctly noted that strangers comments in these situations are blatantly inappropriate.
It is simply rude to, in any social situation, comment on the way someone looks, unless you have something nice and pleasant to say. If anything, I would have hoped that the rude woman in the supermarket would have commented on the absolutely adorable daughter of Mrs. Greenwood, and left it at that.
My adolescent nephew is very tall. Sadly, folks find the need to point this out, daily. At his age, he is self-conscious as it is. As a woman, one of the worst things to hear is "you look tired today". Up until that point I may have felt on top of the world, and not tired at all. A rude comment like that can ruin your afternoon. And the worst is situations like what is in this story. People are who they are, folks. Who cares who they love, marry, and the color of their children's skin. It should all be irrelevant.
People pointing out something about personal appearance is arrogant; strangers have no way of knowing the personal details of how we as individuals became who we are, or how we feel about who we are. For the arrogant woman in the supermarket, the reasons for the young Miss Greenwood's color could be for a variety of reasons - anything from the race of her parents to being adopted - and it is presumptuous for anyone to assume.
I guess I am still shocked that in 2011, that a major newspaper would resort to Barnum-esque curiousity about mixed race couples. We're better than that as a society (I hope).