editor of the NYT!!! What a statement that would be for the Sulzbergers to make! To their peers. To the nation! See how far we have come—A black man as the editor of the NYT!”
But the Jayson Blair scandal—in which Boyd’s documented racial favoritism toward a liar and plagiarist wound up destroying not only his career but that of Howell Raines as well—brought the chickens home to roost in terms of diversity’s inherent double standards. “If this hadn’t eventually blown up, and Gerry did get the top job, you would have had an African American shaping the news coverage of the nation’s most important newspaper for more than a decade,” Stockton said, adding that “Arthur just took it too far too fast.”
Gerald Boyd died in November 2006, but left a memoir that was published in 2010, called My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at The New York Times. “Second only to my family, The Times defined me; I was addicted to the paper and all it represented, cloaking myself in its power and prestige,” he wrote. In his Times review of Boyd’s book, headlined “A Blessing and a Burden,” Robert Boyton wrote: “Much of the book is devoted to the racial slights Boyd suffered during his 20 years at the paper. White subordinates bridled at taking orders from him; white superiors alternately patronized and betrayed him. ‘The Times was a place where blacks felt they had to convince their white peers that they were good enough to be there,’ he writes.” Indeed, as elevated as the Times made him feel, Boyd also often felt “sandbagged, cornered and disrespected,” and was especially bitter about taking the fall for the Blair scandal. He singled out Jonathan Landman, the Metro editor and generally regarded as a hero in the Blair case, as a man of “no decency and integrity” who had backstabbed him. A Washington Post reviewer wrote, “A skeptic—or just a good reporter—might find it hard to accept that a man who climbed so high at the politically driven Times could be as guileless as Boyd portrays himself.”
The Times’ racial script, which has come to resemble the journalistic equivalent of reparations, is particularly evident in stories about instances of historical racism. Some of these stories are newsworthy and do a service in reminding readers of forgotten injustices that lie behind economic inequities, educational disparities, high incarceration rates and enduring prejudice against African Americans. But many others seem to have been assigned in the spirit of racial hectoring, which feeds what John McWhorter calls “therapeutic alienation in blacks” and creates an “exaggerated sense of victimization.”
Stories on the retrial of those involved with the 1955 Emmett Till killing in 2005, for instance, were surely newsworthy, especially one that unearthed the only surviving transcript from an earlier acquittal. So were the stories about the sentencing of the yet-unpunished perpetrators of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. Likewise Brent Staples’ “editorial notebook” piece on the organized bloody pogrom that drove blacks from Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, an event that became a blueprint for other racist actions throughout parts of the South.
Yet the bulk of the Times’ reporting and commentary on the racial past is distinguished by a sense of grievance and cynicism. The fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, for instance, was not an occasion to celebrate for Adam Cohen, an editorial writer who instead wondered if the civil rights situation in America had become even worse. A 2005 report on the number of African immigrants coming to America—more than in the days of slavery, according to the reporter, Sam Roberts—allowed Howard Dodson, a radical activist at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, to assert that “Basically, people are coming to reclaim the wealth that’s been taken from their countries.”
To a large degree, the Times’ reporting and commentary on contemporary racial developments seems based on William Faulkner’s famous comment that the past is never dead, it isn’t even past. For example, voter identification laws in states like Georgia, Missouri and Indiana have been referred to editorially as the functional equivalent of an “illegal poll tax.” According to the editorial writer Brent Staples, disqualification of convicted felons from voting “recalls the early U.S. under slavery” and is no different from tools used to limit the political power of emancipated slaves in the Jim Crow era.
Some of the stories on hate crimes against blacks that have appeared in the Times are deserving of the coverage, like the death of James Byrd, a Texas black man who was dragged behind a truck by racist whites in 1998, and a similar case in 2008. Yet in many other cases, the paper has been suckered by people who are perpetrating a scam or indulging in propaganda.
In October 2007, the Times got caught up in a racial hoax—as it had several times in the 1990s—because it was eager to break news of rampant white racism. The story involved the discovery of a four-foot-long hangman’s noose on the doorknob of a black professor’s office at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The victim was Madonna G. Constantine, a professor of psychology and education, whose specialty is race, racial identity, multiculturalism and racial justice. The noose was particularly upsetting for Teachers College, which prides itself as “a bastion of liberalism and multiculturalism.” The local police said that their hate-crimes unit had mounted a full investigation, including testing the rope for DNA. The Department of Justice opened an investigation.
Professor Constantine called the episode “an unbelievably blatant act of racism,” telling about two hundred supporters who had gathered outside Teachers College that she would not be intimidated. “I want to let the perpetrator know that I will not be silenced.” The Times gave ample space to accusations of racism. “This incident really gives you a new perspective on the state of race relations in this country,” said Michael J. Feyen, a doctoral student at Teachers College. Another student insisted to the Times that “It’s the latest and maybe most visible and extreme case of a climate of racism that we face in our entire society but of course is manifested at Columbia as well.”
Yet the more street-smart New York Post and Daily News, citing unnamed sources, said the noose might have been the result of an academic dispute with a rival professor, who was white, which had led Constantine to file a lawsuit in May 2007 charging her with defamation. The investigation mounted by the Hate Crime Task Force of the New York Police Department yielded few leads or clues. But in June 2008, more than a year after the incident, the Times was forced to reveal that the university had fired Constantine after what was reported to have been an eighteen-month investigation found that charges of plagiarism against her were accurate. According to the school, Constantine had lifted material from two former students and a former colleague prior to the noose incident. In fact, Columbia had sanctioned the professor in February, but allowed her to stay in her job to appeal the ruling. Columbia, however, had never released that information, and the Times, which has close contacts and good sources at the school, either never found out about it or chose not to report it. To date, the Times has still never performed a postmortem, acknowledged its role in yet another racial hoax, or followed up in any way to determine who exactly was behind the noose, or whether Constantine should have been charged criminally.
Meanwhile, as responsive as the paper is to allegations of hate crimes against blacks, it has not demonstrated the same responsiveness in cases where the races are reversed and whites are the victims. In December 2000, for instance, Jonathan and Reginald Carr went on a heinous rape and killing spree in Wichita, Kansas. The two brothers were black; their victims were all white. After breaking into the residence of three young men, the Carr brothers forced the two women who were their guests to perform sexual acts on each other, and then forced the men to participate. The Carrs raped the women, and then drove the five victims to an ATM machine for money. Next they headed to a soccer field, where the victims were made to kneel in the snow and beg for their lives. All five were shot in the head, before the Carrs ran over them with their truck. One of the women survived and walked more than a mile in the snow for help; her fiancé was among those killed.
Two years later, the Carr brothers were found guilty of four counts of capital murder, along with rape, aggravated robbery, burglary and theft. As Michelle Malkin wrote in her account of the case, “The horrific James Byrd dragging case in Texas and the Matthew Shepard murder in Wyoming,