In 2000 the New York Times published an ambitious 14-part series, titled “How Race Is Lived in America,” examining racial attitudes and experiences as told through the lives of ordinary Americans. The project, produced by a team of 34 staffers over 14 months, ran for six weeks and won the Times a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. It seemed to be just the latest in the long line of historical contributions the family-controlled newspaper has made in its effort to improve race relations in America.
“We hoped the series not only showed people how difficult it was to talk about race, but got at why,” project co-director Gerald Boyd said at the time. The following year Boyd was appointed the newspaper’s first black managing editor.
Today, in the wake of the newspaper’s sprawling scandal involving disgraced reporter Jayson Blair, a rising black star in the newsroom who perpetrated journalistic fraud on a massive scale while working under editors who were at best inattentive, the Times finds itself struggling with the issue of race in its own newsroom. Frustrated staffers as well as critics outside the newspaper are asking what role, if any, the combustible matter played in the Blair affair.
The Times, trying to navigate its way through what it calls a “low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper,” on Wednesday scheduled a rare company-wide meeting to let employees air their many grievances. The meeting signaled continued tension at the Times, no doubt compounded by reports that federal prosecutors were considering the almost unheard-of step of filing criminal charges against the former reporter. For top executives such as editor Howell Raines, the injection of race into the story is only making things more stressful. As the Times documented in “How Race Is Lived in America,” blacks and whites in America often come away with opposite conclusions from the same circumstances — a dynamic very much at play in the Blair controversy.
The question of race lingers even after the paper published an exhaustive and humiliating 7,000-word explanation in last Sunday’s edition. In detailing the damage Blair had done, the Times largely positioned itself as the victim of an elaborate hoax perpetrated by a troubled but enterprising reporter. The race debate was almost inevitable because the Times exegesis, for all its detail, still did not resolve a central question: How did Blair get away with his errors and with fabricating facts, quotes and scenes for so long, while working among what may be the best news staff in the world?
As one New York Times writer tells Salon: “This really is a story about race.” Underlying the comment is the suspicion that a reporter with a well-documented history of inaccuracies and erratic behavior was able to not only keep his job but also secure plum promotions, because the Times, in the interest of newsroom diversity, was committed to a fault to attracting, and retaining, black journalists.
“You would have to be a fool to read the Sunday piece and think race wasn’t a factor,” says William McGowan, the author of “Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism,” a controversial book critical of the effects of newsroom diversity.
Diversity’s defenders are in the difficult position of trying to prove a negative — that race was not involved. They insist the Blair debate has followed a predictably depressing path, with race coming to the forefront of any examination surrounding a minority journalist caught breaking the rules. They cite Janet Cooke, who fabricated a Pulitzer Prize-winning story for the Washington Post in 1981 about an 8-year-old heroin addict. But, they say, when it’s a white reporter accused of plagiarizing or fabricating published work, there’s never speculation about whether the unethical reporter really should have been hired in the first place. And they ask, if black reporters have it so easy at the New York Times, how come so few of them boast prestigious beats?
“Anytime a black reporter is found guilty of a transgression we somehow make it racial,” complains Pamela Newkirk, author of “Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media.” “If we’re not making the race argument when a white reporter gets caught, then why are we making the case only when black reporters get caught? I don’t get it.”
Times metro editor Jonathan Landman, who tried to warn fellow editors at the paper about Blair’s increasingly erratic behavior, says the truth lies somewhere in the middle. “There are two conventional wisdoms out there [about the Blair scandal],” he says, but “neither one of them is right. It’s not a morality play about race and affirmative action, as some would like to suggest, and it’s not a story that has nothing to do with race. Race was one factor among many in a subtle interplay.”
One of the many ironies in the Blair story is that it’s damaging the reputation of a newspaper that has a history of championing civil rights. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has been at the forefront of attempts to diversify America’s newsrooms. As deputy editor in the late 1980s, Sulzberger deemed diversity to be “the single most important issue” the Times faced, warning managers, “We don’t have much time to get our white male house in order.” In the early ’90s, Sulzberger in quick order appointed Gerald Boyd as assistant managing editor, making him the first black to appear on the Times masthead, while hiring the paper’s first black columnist, Bob Herbert, and its first black critic, Margo Jefferson. Despite the push, the Times, like many other major dailies, has made little headway in recent years in assembling a newsroom that reflects the diversity of the nation.
It’s doubtful Blair’s memorable trail of infamy will help change that. Between last fall and this spring, the Times team of investigators found, Blair published 73 articles; 36 of them contained “problems.” They ranged from factual errors to plagiarism to pure fabrication. In some cases he purported to file stories from cities without actually traveling to them.
The speculation about race was first raised by reports that Blair enjoyed mentoring from Boyd who, according to the Times’ own reporting, seemed to come to Blair’s aid in the newsroom time and again. It’s easy to see why the two might form a bond. Like Blair, Boyd got his break in journalism thanks to a college internship program and also benefited from a newsroom mentor who reached out to minorities. Blair returned the favor in 2001 by nominating Boyd for the National Association of Black Journalists’ Journalist of the Year award; in verbal scrapes with editors, Blair was not above mentioning his friendship with Boyd. The managing editor has since denied he had a close relationship with the young reporter.
In an odd way, the Times’ own Sunday exposé, with its detailed behind-the-scenes reporting about how Blair was able to survive warning after warning, only added to the suspicion that race was a factor in protecting him. Yet the story itself danced around the topic, with just a couple of perfunctory quotes from top editors denying race’s significance.
“It could have been addressed more thoroughly, yes,” says Susan Tifft, coauthor of “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times.” That squeamishness, along with the subsequent near silence that’s emanated from the newspaper’s West 43rd Street headquarters, has led to a simmering controversy about the controversy.
“It’s a journalistic train wreck and it certainly is legitimate to ask about race,” says McGowan, who accuses the Times of being in “institutional denial about the role of race, and the climate set by its obsession over diversity.”
He says that by failing to deal with the issue in the Sunday story, the paper “added another dimension for the chattering classes out there to debate.” Indeed, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote that the answer to the question of why Blair was protected, “appears to be precisely what the Times denies: favoritism based on race.” Former New York Daily News columnist Jim Sleeper charged that Blair was hired and kept on in order to “to assuage white managers’ moralistic enthusiasm and guilt.” They’re white, but there are African-Americans with a similar point of view. Robert L. Jamieson Jr., a columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, wrote Wednesday that the Times, under pressure to improve newsroom diversity “coddled and promoted” Blair when he got into trouble. “The Times, which has so few young, male, African American stars, wasn’t about to let this one crash and burn,” Jamieson wrote.
Jim Dwyer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Times, dismisses charges that Blair was the product of newsroom affirmative action gone awry as “a crock of shit.” He insists, “You can go crazy trying to explain everything through the prism of race.”
“Jayson had talent. He had drive. Some people found him charming. That ought to carry you somewhere in this world,” says Dwyer, who is white and who had no direct working relationship with Blair. “It carried him further than his skin color did, in my opinion.”
Dwyer notes the idea of redemption, as attempted for years with Blair, is hardly unique within the newsroom business. “I’ve worked at six newspapers and seen alcoholic shipwrecks and drug shipwrecks, and people who’ve fallen apart through nervous breakdowns, and they’re all brought back and given a second chance. I’ve seen it happen to people of every race,” says Dwyer.
He also claims critics, including Cohen at the Post, are playing loose with the facts when they express astonishment that the Times did nothing after metro editor Landman sent his now famous two-sentence e-mail to his colleagues in the spring of 2002: “”We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.” Says Dwyer: “Anybody who says nothing was done is reading right over the inconvenient fact that Jayson Blair was shut down [in the spring of 2002] and brought within an inch of being fired and put on a probation that he worked himself out of. Then events accelerated [when he was moved to the national desk], and unfortunately he did what he did when given a bigger chance.” (Landman declined to discuss specifics of the Blair case with Salon.)
But skeptics such as McGowan point out that Blair went from a serious probation to being considered for a permanent slot on the Times’ prestigious national desk within a matter of months. That, they say, suggests something strange was going on at the newspaper. “The pattern is this guy had editors talking about his performance, his erratic behavior, his drinking, yet he still got promoted,” says McGowan. “He slipped through every safeguard, and there’s got to be a reason why.”
McGowan suspects a newsroom atmosphere of lenience toward blacks led to Blair’s advancement. “I think the relationship he seems to have had with Gerald Boyd was probably something that inhibited editors from coming forward and pushing the issue [of job performance] as strongly as they would have with somebody else.”
He also notes that after Blair came off his probation and was sent to the national desk, Boyd never told Blair’s new editor about the reporter’s checkered past. That’s information national editor Jim Roberts says he wishes he had while dealing with the controversial work Blair did on the D.C. sniper case last year.
Black journalists agree that delinquent Times editors fell down on the job, but say that had nothing to do with the color of Blair’s skin. “They haven’t dealt with their own culpability, of how they let Jayson Blair get away with this,” says former Times national correspondent E.R. Shipp, now a columnist for the New York Daily News. “It’s about getting hoodwinked. It’s not a race issue.”
Others insist a newsroom culture of rewarding productivity explains Blair’s pampering at the Times. “He was clearly a schemer who was rewarded for being prolific, being able to turn a phrase, having no life outside of the Times newsroom, and catering to the whims of his superiors,” says Newkirk, author of “Within the Veil.” “What editor is not going to fall for that, no matter what the person’s race?”
Newkirk complained about the double standard that’s applied when newsroom fraud stories break involving white journalists, such as Mike Barnicle at the Boston Globe, or Stephen Glass and Ruth Shalit at the New Republic. The scale of abuse in those cases may not have been as grand as what Blair did, but that doesn’t explain why questions about race or cronyism were never raised then, she says. (Interestingly, in 1998, New York Times executive editor Howell Raines, then overseeing the paper’s editorial page, penned a column attacking the Boston Globe for not immediately firing columnist Barnicle over charges he’d lied and committed plagiarism.)
A more recent example came two years ago, when a white graduate student at Northwestern University’s journalism school was accused of fabricating facts in perhaps dozens of stories he wrote while interning at the San Jose Mercury News and the Philadelphia Daily News. After internal reviews of his work, both newspapers informed readers they could not confirm that people the reporter quoted actually existed. “During the whole investigation, no one ever said, Was he treated this way or allowed to continue on because of his race,” says Bryon Monroe, the Mercury News’ former deputy managing editor and currently a vice president for the National Association of Black Journalists.
“Look across the board at very unfortunate instances of plagiarism or fabrications. Most involve journalists not of color,” says Monroe. “So for race to be brought up in this situation seems inappropriate and myopic.”
Like so many other topics dealing with race, diversity in the newsroom has been an explosive one over the years, in part because of the press coverage it has generated. McGowan’s “Coloring the News” book was condemned by the National Association of Black Journalists, which protested when the National Press Club recently gave the book an award. Sparks flew in 1995 when Shalit wrote a controversial 13,000-word missive in the New Republic attacking the Washington Post’s push for diversity. The Post claimed Shalit had lifted parts of her work from others, while Post publisher Donald Graham attacked TNR as overly exclusive, even suggesting a new motto for the magazine: “Looking for a qualified black since 1914.”
The argument in favor of newsroom diversity suggests not only that it makes up for decades of exclusion — an industry-wide survey from the 1950s revealed just 38 blacks were working among the nation’s 75,000 newsroom employees — but also that a newsroom more closely resembling the general population can attract a wider readership. And “diversity” does not just not mean “black”; it means more Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, gays, women, disabled people and younger people.
In 1978, the American Society of Newspaper Editors decided 2000 was the year that the percentage of minorities in newsroom jobs should match the percentage in the general population. Back then, just 4 percent of journalists were people of color, while the minority population in the United States stood at 17 percent. By 2001, newsrooms included 12 percent journalists of color, but the national minority figure had jumped to 30 percent, and ASNE announced it had pushed back its goal of diversity parity to the year 2025.
In 2002, the average percentage in the nation’s newsrooms inched up to 12.5 percent. With the recent advertising slump taking its toll, some newspapers have cut back on the money they spend recruiting minorities. Still, some top news managers know the more minorities they hire, the bigger their year-end bonus will be. At the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, as much as 15 percent of a publisher’s bonus is tied to minority hiring success in the previous year, according to a report in the Columbia Journalism Review. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper company, reportedly includes a paper’s coverage of minorities when considering publishers and editors for bonuses. And during the ’90s, Time Inc. magazines instituted a bonus policy for its managing editors in which 10 percent is linked to how much success the managing editor of each magazine has had in hiring and promoting minorities. According to a Times spokesman, the company does use minority hiring success when reviewing job performance for managers, but there is no direct financial incentive.
It’s no surprise the Times has been a leader in newsroom diversity, in keeping with the Sulzberger family’s long liberal tradition. Half a century ago, Sulzberger’s father, Arthur Sr., overseeing the family’s Chattanooga [Tenn.] Times, supported the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case on segregation, which won the paper enemies. Sulzberger soon ordered that the daily do away with the segregated obituaries, which were common throughout the South; 3,000 readers promptly canceled their subscriptions.
According to “The Trust,” the definitive history of the Times co-written by Tifft and Alex Jones, the senior Sulzberger was also among the first big-city publishers to try to hire blacks in his newsroom. “The Trust” recounts one failed attempt that offers odd parallels to the Blair controversy. In 1945, the Times hired Fisk College graduate George Streator as its first black reporter. Streator, though, had no formal training and had difficulties at the Times. His correction file quickly expanded along with his unsatisfactory performance reviews. Soon editors discovered he was fabricating quotes, and Streator was fired.
Although the Times was championing civil rights in its news and editorial pages, the paper’s newsroom did not reflect that inclusive philosophy. In 1961, a confidential memo to Sulzberger Sr. revealed the paper employed just one black copyeditor and only three black reporters.
To a degree, that same schism still exists between the Times’ public pronouncements and the reality of its own payroll. A decade after Sulzberger Jr. set diversity as a top priority, the newspaper’s track record for employing and retaining blacks is less than spectacular. The paper reported to the ASNE this year that 17.1 percent of its newsroom staff members are racial minorities. And most of the newsroom’s top-ranking editors are white men. “The Times does seem like a place that suffers from a lack of diversity in important jobs,” concedes Dwyer. “I don’t know why that is, because I know they try.”
It’s the notion of trying hard that’s led to the speculation on whether Times managers tried too hard to keep Blair. And whether editors — before the fraud became apparent — may have been reluctant to be tagged as the one who chased Blair into the arms of the Los Angeles Times or the Washington Post.
In recent days, the Times has tepidly tried to address the issue of race, with Boyd telling industry trade magazine Editor & Publisher that Blair “was not pushed or promoted for diversity reasons.” Boyd, who declined to comment to Salon, noted the scholarship program Boyd used to enter the Times has actually promoted more white reporters to staff positions than minorities. That account differs somewhat from the Times’ Sunday reporting, which stated Blair was “offered … a slot in an internship program that was then being used in large part to help the paper diversify the newsroom.”
According to the Times’ account of the company’s closed door meeting on Wednesday, Raines told employees, “I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities. Does that mean I personally favored Jayson? Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.”
The question now is: Will the scandal cause the Times, or other newspapers, to scale back its commitment to newsroom diversity? “There’s a lot here that tarnishes the diversity agenda as it’s practiced right now,” warns McGowan.
Shipp disagrees. The Blair affair, she says, is “a black eye for young journalists trying to get ahead too quickly, for journalism professors who don’t teach ethics, and for editors at the New York Times. It’s not about race or lowering standards to engage in affirmative action. That’s bullshit.”
This story has been corrected since it was first published.
Here’s a startling news item: “The Intouchables,” a lively if largely predictable Parisian comedy about a wealthy quadriplegic and his ne’er-do-well immigrant caretaker, has become the biggest international success in the history of French cinema. Indeed, according to some sources — and these things are notoriously difficult to measure on a global and historical scale — “The Intouchables” is now the biggest non-Anglophone film of all time, with a worldwide gross approaching $300 million.
But beyond the business headlines, what’s really fascinating about “The Intouchables” is the way it exposes the gulf in racial attitudes between France and the United States, along with another gulf that’s just as wide, the one that has film critics and cinephiles on one side and popular audiences on the other. Viewers in numerous countries have eagerly devoured this feel-good fable about two men of different races and classes who forge an improbable friendship (dubbed by some wags “Driving Monsieur Daisy”). While the audience for foreign-language film is inherently limited in America, there’s no reason to believe it won’t do well here also. At the same time, heated transatlantic debate has erupted over whether “The Intouchables” traffics in offensive racial stereotypes, with Variety critic Jay Weissberg writing an uncharacteristically angry review that accused the film of “Uncle Tom racism” and compared the Senegalese caretaker character to a “performing monkey.”
When Harvey Weinstein first acquired “The Intouchables” in the wake of its smash success in France, he clearly imagined another dark-horse Oscar contender, in the wake of “The Artist.” The film has racked up audience awards at film festival after film festival, and currently stands at No. 93 on IMDb’s user-generated “Top 250″ list. Omar Sy, the charismatic Afro-French actor who plays Driss, the caretaker, won this year’s César award (the French Oscar equivalent) for best actor, beating out actual Oscar winner Jean Dujardin. But with the looming possibility that “The Intouchables” could spark a divisive, soul-searching racial debate — which was precisely what squelched the Oscar hopes of “The Help” — those expectations have been downplayed. (That isn’t why “The Intouchables” is being released this week, with Weinstein and most of the film-biz aristocracy in Cannes, but the coincidence is oddly useful.)
Let me come clean right now and tell you that I enjoyed “The Intouchables” quite a bit. If you’re looking for a lightweight summer change of pace, with just a smidgen of Continental flair, here it is. Both Sy and co-star François Cluzet (of the hit thriller “Tell No One”) are marvelous, the former playing a guy who’s constantly in motion, both physically and psychologically, and the latter playing a depressed and repressed guy who literally can’t move, but whose real imprisonment has more to do with his spirit than his spinal cord. Don’t go expecting serious French art cinema, please; those who have described this movie as something like a mid-’80s Eddie Murphy comedy dressed up with classy Parisian settings are correct. But here’s the question, and I can’t answer it for you: Is that such a bad thing, in itself?
Once is not enough for a movie that’s made this much money, of course, and Weinstein already has an American remake in the works, possibly to star Colin Firth as stick-up-butt wheelchair dude. The real Eddie Murphy has gotten too old to play the loosey-goosey, pot-smoking sidekick, but there’s no shortage of guys who could do it: Jamie Foxx is the default setting these days, but I’d go for the suddenly hot Kevin Hart from “Think Like a Man.” I’m not claiming it’s aesthetically or sociologically valid to remake a French movie that already feels like a reheated Hollywood throwback, by the way. I’m saying it’s a cruel reality, like Dutch elm disease or Adam Sandler, and there’s no way to stop it.
To get back to the case at hand, I do understand what the haters find so offensive about “The Intouchables.” (The infelicitous English title, by the way, reflects the fact that they couldn’t really get away with calling it “The Untouchables,” could they?) I was pretty taken aback by Weissberg’s vituperative review, and I tend to believe that “Uncle Tom” is one of those expressions that white people should pretty much never use. On the other hand, I can only applaud him for abandoning the balanced, analytical mode of trade-magazine criticism and saying exactly what he damn well thinks. (As for comparing a black man to a monkey — well, I understand what Weissberg was getting at, but it’s an error of rhetoric, the sort of comment that makes nuance and context disappear.) And I know for sure, from hearing friends and acquaintances in and around the movie business complain about this film, that Weissberg is not alone.
I believe that Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the writing-directing duo who made “The Intouchables,” are innocent of any bad intentions. In fact, “innocent” isn’t a bad word overall, for this movie and the worldview it represents. The French may pride themselves on being the most worldly and sophisticated of all people, but the debate in France about race and immigration and multiculturalism — which ramped up sharply after the suburban riots of 2005 — can sometimes sound strikingly naive to American ears. Until very recently, mainstream French opinion has resisted thinking about the nation in anything except homogeneous terms, despite growing Arab and black minorities (both immigrant and native-born) and evident social problems with segregation and discrimination. (The French census, for instance, is prohibited from collecting data on race or religion, so no one really knows how many French people are black or Islamic.)
There can be no question that the characters in “The Intouchables” are stereotypes, in the broad sense. Cluzet’s character, Philippe, is an aristocratic zillionaire who lives in an astonishingly luxurious flat in central Paris. Since being injured in a paragliding accident, he’s lived inside a cocoon of money and privilege, surrounded by antiques and modern art and a bevy of assistants. Sy’s character, Driss, is easygoing, good-hearted, lustful and uncultured, and his passions run toward pretty girls, getting high and vintage American R&B. Philippe hires Driss specifically because Driss doesn’t particularly want the job — he only shows up to get a signature for his benefits card — and feels no pity for Philippe.
Which is actually a pretty good reason. You get where this is going, most likely: Driss is a pretty inept caretaker, at least at first, but is the only person Philippe knows who will relate to him man to man. There’s a bit of borderline-homophobic humor about their enforced intimacy; there are interludes with hookers and fast cars and late-night conversations fueled by booze and marijuana. Driss learns to like Mozart and modern art; Philippe learns to get down with Earth Wind & Fire and gets some valuable tips about chicks. It’s probably fair to summarize this movie as being the story of a paralyzed white man who needs the help of a younger, stronger, more virile black man to reconnect with his own masculinity, and if you want to say that narrative reflects an underlying latticework of racist attitudes, I won’t argue with you. Then there’s the complicating factor that in the real-life story on which “The Intouchables” is based, the caretaker was of Algerian origin, and hence Arab rather than black. (The filmmakers have said they wanted to cast Sy, and built the story around him, but it’s certainly possible to render other interpretations.)
But one can concede all of that while still agreeing with French historian and multicultural activist François Durpaire, who has responded to Weissberg by arguing that the huge success of “The Intouchables” is likely to have positive effects in Europe’s emerging discussion of race and culture, even if the movie relies on crude generalizations. (Durpaire adds that if “The Intouchables” is offensive, so were the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies.) Movies are not meant to be seminars in sociology, after all, and most viewers will receive “The Intouchables” as an upbeat story about two guys from vastly different circumstances who turn out to have a lot in common and help each other, etc., rather than a lesson in racial semiotics.
Perhaps the strongest endorsement for “The Intouchables” has come from aging French ultra-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has described it as an allegory about how the future of his nation depends on disenfranchised young immigrants from the suburbs. He thinks that’s a “dreadful” vision, mind you — but, seriously, who knew that guy was so smart?
“The Intouchables” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.
The news of recent research documenting how readers identify with the main characters in stories has mostly been taken as confirmation of the value of literary role models. Lisa Libby, an assistant professor at Ohio State University and co-author of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explained that subjects who read a short story in which the protagonist overcomes obstacles in order to vote were more likely to vote themselves several days later.
The suggestibility of readers isn’t news. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel of a sensitive young man destroyed by unrequited love, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” inspired a rash of suicides by would-be Werthers in the late 1700s. Jack Kerouac has launched a thousand road trips. Still, this is part of science’s job: Running empirical tests on common knowledge — if for no other reason than because common knowledge (and common sense) is often wrong.
A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured.
The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.
What can we do with this information? If we subscribe to the idea that literature ought to improve people’s characters — and that’s the sentiment that seems to be lurking behind the study itself — then perhaps authors and publishers should be encouraged to conceal a main character’s race or sexual orientation from readers until they become invested in him or her. Who knows how much J.K. Rowling’s revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay, announced after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, has helped to combat homophobia? (Although I confess that I find it hard to believe there were that many homophobic Potter fans in the first place.)
Absurd as this tactic may sound, many publishers are already kind of doing it — and catching hell. Although the term “whitewashing” is most often used to describe film and TV adaptations in which white actors are cast as characters who were people of color in the original book, something similar also happens with book graphics. Novels about black or Asian characters have been given cover art that features white people.
Controversies over cover-art whitewashing, and other attempts by agents, editors and publishers to downplay or even eliminate minority characters, have roiled the world of young adult literature in recent years. The author Justine Larbalestier (who is white) wrote a YA novel, “Liar,” with a black heroine in 2009, but her publisher insisted on using a photograph of a white teenager for the cover. Larbalestier took their disagreement public and the ensuing scandal persuaded the publisher to back down. Ursula K. Le Guin, a revered science-fiction and fantasy author who has often chosen dark-skinned people as her protagonists, has had to put up with seeing them depicted as white in cover art and film adaptations for decades.
Publishers argue that they’re only trying to make sure their authors’ books find the widest possible audience. What they mean is that a certain percentage of white (or straight) readers will summarily conclude a book isn’t for them if the face on the cover fails to resemble their own. Sad to say, the publishers are probably right about that. While the readers in the Ohio State study didn’t get to choose the stories they read, many of them were deciding how much to invest in the protagonist and his experiences — how much to identify — on the basis of his sexual orientation or race.
Authors, fans and observers are rightly disgusted by the practice of cover-art whitewashing. It shouldn’t have to be that way. But some commentators on the controversy seem to think that if publishers act as if race or gender or sexual orientation isn’t a factor in what many people decide to read, somehow it will simply stop being a factor. This seems unlikely. If it were so easy to rid people of their prejudices, the world would already be a much pleasanter place. It takes regular exposure to different types of people in the course of everyday life — at school and in the military, the workplace and the neighborhood — plus a whole lot of time and peer pressure to wear bias down.
Well, it takes that — and maybe the magic of storytelling? The readers in the Ohio State study did become more understanding of gay and black people after they were (let’s not put too fine a point on it) tricked into identifying with them. This type of sleight-of-hand is something only a non-visual medium like prose fiction can pull off. It can firmly lodge readers inside an imaginary person’s head without ever showing them his or her face. In Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys,” for example, the narrator never explains that all the principle characters are black, and each reader will come to that realization at a different stage in the narrative. It’s Gaiman’s way of tweaking the very common readerly assumption that defaults all major characters to white unless their race is otherwise specified. (And sometimes not even then, as quite a few young fans of “The Hunger Games” demonstrated by being astonished when a supporting character, clearly described as black in the novel, was played by a black actress in the film.)
Of course, not all readers are white or straight, and the ones who aren’t deeply appreciate novels that advertise the diversity of their characters. It’s about time they got heroes and heroines who looked like them, and novels that speak to their distinctive experiences. They have been identifying with characters across the boundaries of race, gender and sexual orientation from time immemorial, and are masters of the art, but understandably they’d like to give their ninja skills a rest. Furthermore, there are also white readers who prefer variety in their fiction or are deliberately trying to correct the imbalances of the past.
Nevertheless, if you believe, as many Americans have since the days of the Puritans, that books ought to morally improve their readers, then maybe there’s a place for a little judicious whitewashing in the writing and publication of fiction. It has literally been demonstrated to change hearts and minds, at least for a while. That’s more than many consciousness-raising efforts — including righteous lectures delivered by the enlightened — can say.
Further reading
Ohio State University’s research blog on the study of the experience-taking while reading stories
The Booksmugglers blog on notable recent instances of book-cover whitewashing in YA.
Ursula K. Le Guin writes for Slate about the changes made to the race of major characters in the TV adaptation of her “Earthsea Trilogy.”
Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumblr compiling and discussing the response of some fans to the casting of a black actress as a supporting character in the film version of Suzanne Collins’ novel.
Cory Booker’s failed 2002 campaign for mayor of Newark heralded a new type of black politician. Booker was an outsider with Ivy-league credentials who was trying to unseat a veteran urban politician who had made a name for himself during the civil rights movement. Like other “new black politicians,” Booker’s appeal granted him entry to the political world and helped him circumvent long-standing black democratic machines. But what does this process, which has been repeated everywhere from Washington to Alabama, tell us about our country’s changing attitude towards race — and politics?
In her new book, “The New Black Politician,” Andra Gillespie follows the career of Cory Booker, from his start as a lawyer and community organizer through his successful run for mayor and his reelection, in order to illustrate what separates the new generation of black politicians from other black leaders before them. These new black politicians seek to create the same multicultural coalition that propelled Barack Obama to the presidency, but many lose their black support and fade from the political scene.
Salon spoke with Gillespie about racial electability, Cory Booker’s senate prospects, and what black politicians have in common with Will Smith and Tyler Perry.
How have new black politicians used what you call “elite displacement” to win elected office?
It’s a theory that’s transferable to other minorities as well, be they racial or religious — basically, groups that have experienced stereotyping in the past and have been marginalized because of these stereotypes. Elite displacement is what happens when an older generation of politicians who have largely come to power despite the stereotypes levied at them have a new generation of leaders, who are more assimilated into mainstream culture and who don’t necessarily wear the same type of ethnic or racial veneer as their predecessors, now running against them — particularly in cities where the majority is from that same racial group. What I’m interested in is how these young politicians break through. They normally have not been socialized within the institutions in that community. They’re outsiders to that community, and they’re trying to figure out a way to break into politics when all the traditional paths to power have been shut off.
What elite displacement describes is the practice by which these young African-American politicians try to circumvent the black political establishment to reach office for the first time. What they take advantage of is their access to mainstream institutions and culture, and they use that as their calling card. They may not get the support of the older black congressman, the city council, or the local political bosses, but they have access to mainstream media and their friends who have money, and they use that to amass a resource that can overwhelm the existing structure of the black political community.
Part of the reason they get so much interest and their story is so compelling is because people think of these older black politicians in terms of stereotypes. They are viewed as corrupt, ineffective, criminal and incompetent — not quite up for technocratic leadership. And this younger group of politicians, because they bring the right qualifications and pedigree to the table, fit the bill. They fit the archetype of what white audiences want to see black leaders look like, which would be very well-spoken, not talking about race all the time, and having credentials from the right schools, and that gives them a certain cache which makes their story very compelling. It helps them get on television and helps them attract volunteers to come from outside the communities to help them out. In my book, I explore the consequences of this strategy. It’s very hard for young black politicians to develop a deep connection to their constituency. Does their strategy help them build a broader base of support? Does it help them win over some of their critics, who will still hold on to some positions of power? And what does this portend for long-term governance?
One of the things in African-American communities that should be noted is that there are tons of problems. African-American representation of those communities have not ameliorated those problems. In the 40 years of black government in Newark and similar cities, you still see high rates of unemployment, high dropout rates and very paltry health indicators. The idea that putting blacks in power will act as a panacea, will help blacks improve their physical and emotional health standing, is not really true. The subsequent question becomes: Are these new black leaders the magic bullet to gain on the progress of political equality that was achieved in the 1960s?
How are civil rights leaders — the politicians who emerged from the civil rights movements — limited in their ability to govern and seek higher office?
Part of this has to do with the moment that they were elected to office. They were elected because of demographic changes in the communities in which they lived. As early as the 1930s, there was a mass exodus of whites from the cities to the suburbs because of deindustrialization, but it was hastened by the riots in 1967. The white and black middle class left, leaving a city that was predominantly African-American. So the demographics of the city gave the opportunity for a black politician to win elected office. But there were other things that happened. Just because blacks were able to win positions in the city doesn’t necessarily mean that blacks in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s were going to be able to win statewide office. There’s no state in the United States that is majority African-American. It creates a very hostile environment for blacks to be able to run for higher office. On top of it, there is evidence to suggest that even when blacks have held positions of power or leadership, they haven’t always been taken seriously. Earlier generations couldn’t do what President Obama has done. You can look at members of Congress who couldn’t even get their hair cut in the capitol, couldn’t eat at the dining hall where all members of congress were allowed to eat. There was still a caste system that wouldn’t even let them dream of being president.
What is a “black political entrepreneur”? Which politicians embody this term?
A black political entrepreneur is a type of young black politician who is most likely to use elite displacement. They are the type of politician who is de-racialized and who doesn’t have demonstrable ties to the black political establishment. They would be the type of person who would not be a child of the civil rights movement and wouldn’t be the mentee of a civil rights politician. We’re not talking about Jesse Jackson Jr. or anyone who inherited their political role. A black political entrepreneur is different from other types of black politicians because they have very progressive political ambitions. They are clearly itching to run for higher office. You can look at them and say, “That’s a senator, or a governor, or maybe even another president.” Black political entrepreneurs are the ones who take the most risks when running for office. They usually try to challenge older black politicians for power when most others would argue that it’s ill-advised. If you contrast Cory Booker with former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford Jr. , for instance, Harold Ford Jr. inherited a congressional seat. Black political entrepreneurs challenge strong incumbents for power instead of waiting their turn.
You compare black political entrepreneurs to Will Smith and civil rights politicians to Tyler Perry.
I’m not talking about ambition. I’m talking about crossover appeal, the degree to which people are de-racialized, and where their power comes from. Will Smith built his acting career as someone who started off in hip-hop but never had a hard edge. He was, arguably, on the cornier end of the hip-hop spectrum. When he moved into Hollywood and became an A-list star, everyone knew he was African-American, but he wasn’t cast as a black actor. He was a comedic actor, an action hero. He was somebody who wasn’t threatening and whom everybody loved. And because of that, he was able to build this amazingly successful Hollywood career.
Tyler Perry, on the other hand, is somebody who, if you look at his net worth, has done better than Will Smith, but who has been unabashedly black in terms of self-presentation and the types of projects that he’s chosen. Today, people pay attention to him in Hollywood because he was the highest-grossing actor in Hollywood last year. But he’s made that money almost solely in the African-American community. He’s been able to be successful in this niche market, and people take him seriously because he’s made a lot of money, but he’s still on the margins. The fact that he’s based in Atlanta and that he’s regularly panned by movie critics proves he’s not fully mainstream. He needs to be contended and dealt with because you cannot deny his success. There are black people who have problems with how he presents his characters. People think Madea is a stereotype and that his television show is also a stereotype. Will Smith and Tyler Perry are very powerful in their own right, but they get their currency from very different sectors of the American public, and that helps to contribute to their persona.
You provide some examples in the book of where, while vigorously campaigning against the incumbent, new black politicians end up reinforcing some negative stereotypes.
If you look at how the story usually gets framed in the media when the black political entrepreneur runs against the black incumbent, it’s usually cast in stark terms. Good versus Evil. It also gets cast as the anachronistic civil rights warrior going against a fresh person who doesn’t wear race on their sleeve. Given some of the stereotypes that exist of blacks in terms of their intelligence and corruption — and sometimes admittedly, the connection of some of these incumbents to corruption and incompetency — it ends up reinforcing stereotypes of the average black leader. The stereotype is that they should not be trusted, that they can’t lead. New black politicians continually reinforce the stereotype because they keep talking about the incumbents in those terms.
The consequence of this is twofold. In these minority communities — places where the black political entrepreneur is usually not needed — you will see the black constituencies rally around the incumbent because they believe the attacker is racially motivated or that the fight has a classist tinge to it. They are very resistant to having their leaders attacked.
Usually the younger black politician has something very valuable to offer their community. But eventually this notion that “this person is so much better than other black leaders” ends up being constraining for the black political entrepreneur. He or she gets held to incredibly high expectations. It becomes about how fast they can commit to change. And it reinforces the idea of the black political entrepreneur as a “magical black person,” as a black superhero. And the black superhero is the foil to the black villain — instead of transcending stereotypes, we end up reinforcing them. I think the notion of the black political entrepreneur as a black superhero who is going to save inner-city communities from blight and destruction ends up reifying this notion that normal black people are too stupid to run their communities and hold office. This ends up hurting everybody. If the black political entrepreneur can’t turn a community around very quickly, then it ends up looking bad for him, and it ends up reinforcing the idea that black people cannot govern themselves.
Do you see a backlash against black political entrepreneurs happening? I think of Adrian Fenty losing his reelection race for Mayor of D.C.
Absolutely. What’s really interesting about de-racialization theory, which underlies a lot of my work, is the strategy of black politicians reaching out beyond the black community to try to create a multiracial electoral coalition. People have always been concerned about the multiracial coalition falling apart because you can’t help but avoid race. We saw that happen with David Dinkins in New York City. Dealing with the Crown Heights riots and the Big Apple boycott, we see what would be a traditionally democratic voting bloc fall apart over race. One of the underlying assumptions of de-racialization is that black voters support black politicians. That’s a little harder to untangle when you have black-on-black elections where blacks are running against one another. And the assumption is that the two black candidates split the black vote, and the de-racialized new politician makes it up with the non-black vote.
What we’ve seen with Booker’s first mayoral race and Adrian Fenty’s loss is that you can lose enough of the black vote to lose an election. It’s a question of what the sweet spot is. Black political entrepreneurs should be comfortable not winning over some blacks. It’s just a question of how many black votes you lose. In Adrian Fenty’s case, he lost too much of the African-American vote. It then becomes a question of why. It wasn’t because of his technocratic leadership, because by all accounts he was a great leader. He left D.C. in better shape in 2010 than when he received it in 2006. He underestimated the extent to which style would be important and the extent to which people had a problem with Michelle Rhee. Style becomes really important. People don’t think that it should be important, but it is.
Black political entrepreneurs have national political ambitions. You can afford to lose some of the black vote, but if you alienate too much of it, you can lose a statewide election, which is what happened when Artur Davis ran for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Alabama in 2010. Black political entrepreneurs, at the end of the day, are still very very dependent on black votes. You can’t alienate the black voters, even when you disagree with them, and you can’t come off as disrespecting them or condescending to them. Especially if they would have been sympathetic and voted for you, if only you hadn’t disrespected them.
It strikes me that these politicians are setting themselves up for disappointment by promising so much change and progress during their campaigns.
I don’t know if you’re setting yourself up for failure, but I would warn black political entrepreneurs to tone down on the messianic rhetoric and to try to separate themselves from it, because it puts undue pressure on them. One of the things that I wanted to do in the conclusion of the book is to address the aspiring Cory Booker’s out there. I want them to understand that there are consequences, both positive and negative, for every type of political decision one makes. I’m not here to tell anybody, “No.” If you’re running against somebody who you truly think is incompetent, then you should point that out. But you should definitely be more circumspect in how you criticize them, and you should do it in the most respectful way. Booker learned that between his two campaigns. They toned down the stupid rhetoric a lot between the elections because they realized how much it harmed them.
Another thing I would tell budding Cory Bookers is to really assess the resources they have at their disposal. There are people who want to be black political entrepreneurs but who don’t really have access to the Stanford and Yale and Oxford alumni directories the way Booker does. They might not have friends in high places. They might not have the same fundraising capacity. It might not make sense to use the elite displacement election strategy if you don’t have the resources. Booker could overcome a lot of the negative externalities that come with elite displacement because he had this very, very deep base in mainstream culture. If other people don’t have that, because they didn’t go to Yale or Harvard, then you might want to cultivate a different sort of persona.
Where does Cory Booker go from here?
This is my observation: At one point, it looked like people were toying around with the idea of running him for governor. But, based on the decision last year to create the Federal PAC, I surmise that now they’re looking more at Frank Lautenberg’s senate seat. I think that’s a great idea. I think Booker would be a great senator. He could have the potential, with some longevity, to have a huge impact on the Senate. He could be Ted Kennedy-esque. As long as New Jersey residents are comfortable with both of their senators not being white (and hopefully no one brings that up or reminds them of it), then that’s actually really cool. If Cory were sitting with me right now and asked me, “Andra, what should I do?” I would tell him to go run for the Senate, without hesitation.
A still from "The Intouchables" 
(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon) 
Cory Booker (Credit: AP/Julio Cortez) 
(Credit: Reuters/Andrew Kelly) 
