Progressive Racism

[toothepaste technology]

Cheer up, Jayson Blair—I got your back. Don’t get me wrong, you will never be cool—especially if your soul’s for sale—but at least now you’re obvious and will (hopefully) take your medicine in private. Your ex-boss’s boss Howell Raines, on the other hand, is running ass-over-apple cart from his own eventual self-destruction. We’ll know the end is nigh if the Times nominates itself for exposing their own fraudulent coverage.

As the drama plays itself out in dispatches from the newsroom and daily Op-Ed’s, we are being treated to an existential spectacle among staff big-wigs and professional opines in a bizarre display of self-loathing and denial. In other words, Jayson, after propping you up for the fall, the people who run the world’s most venerable paragon of free press can’t stop looking at their own splintered reflections in your shattered life.

Here’s the deal—Howell Raines, a white local-boy-makes-good from George Wallace’s Alabama who became the New York Times’ Executive Editor, apparently has an ugly problem with the ugly realities of his past. I’m guessing by his place and power he’s a talented writer, a better politicker, and a concrete-hardened liberal. His ascension to executive editor of the Times is no doubt a story of self-affirming action and dedication, but fueled by the sort of self-pride which comes from a lifetime of keeping a distasteful past at arm’s length, especially from the competitively enlightened vistas of Manhattan.

Jayson Blair is a young and impressionable man who was, by all accounts, was a go-getter, hard worker, and a charismatic dynamo at every job he’s had in journalism. His dream was to get to the top, but he saw the top took another class of person. And although he wasn’t a superstar, or blessed with particularly staggering talent, he was the type of guy people had always rooted for to succeed.

But Jayson was like the fat kid who hates himself for starting at shortstop because his dad's the coach. In protest, he was prone to being AWOL, missing deadlines, substance abuse, and outright fraud—in other words, a somewhat garden-variety, immature manic depressive. But I somehow doubt this under whelming man became the single “low point in the Times 152-year history” without copious amounts of help from powerful people to guide him towards professional suicide. For the management of the New York Times, Jayson was going to succeed at any cost.

Howell Raines’ background, predilections, social moors, or anything else private should not matter at all to this story. Except that Jayson Blair is a young black man, and Howell Raines grew up in a time and place that ascribed an inhuman value to all people of color. Nevertheless, this should not add a whit of value to the public discourse surrounding the fall of this troubled man or any assumed repercussions to Journalism’s integrity. But at a town-hall staff meeting after the story broke, Howell made an admission that changed the tenor of the debate completely and forever, and opened the floodgates of scrutiny to the internal hypocrisy, bigotry, and insecurity that infuses the highest echelons of the New York Times.

Many black intellectuals have weighed in on the debate, takeing great care to diffuse the notion that anything other than the Jayson Blair’s flawed person caused this debacle. To this, I agree without question—Jayson is a sad figure regardless of race. But to be so myopically absolute in this assertion conveniently sweeps away the documented role Jayson’s race affected Howell Raines’ pattern of decision-making as Jayson’s destructive behavior raised one red flag after another in the newsroom.

"Does that mean I personally favored Jayson?" he added, a moment later. "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."

[Howell Raines, excerpt from “Editor of Times Tells Staff He Accepts Blame for Fraud”, New York Times, 5/15/03]

With respect to Bob Herbert’s expert opinion, this is a racial issue. It’s like a subtle, progressive racism and, along with affirmative action, are two sides of the same ideological coin. Progressive racism is not the “soft bigotry of lowered expectations” so much as social reparation through fraudelent reward.

Progressive racism like the kind Howell Raines displayed is created when progressive ideals collide with arrogant sympathy. Progressive racism is particularly insidious because the perpetrator sees it as noble form. They use self-righteous pity to marginalize another person, justifying their inherent racial privilege with patronizing character judgements. But conducting unwarranted social experimentation on people of incorrect content but ideal package is racism--an intrinsic racism which can strip a person’s humanity just as surely as lend its guilty charity.

Progressive racism is the force which insisted Jayson Blair have the opportunity to meltdown at the Times. The world was simply handed to young Jayson on a platter, and his scrambled conscience could not reconcile the hard truth that his promotions came unsolicited, bestowed unjustly, without pedagogy, by an authority which insisted capitulation to their better wisdom.

Right or wrong, Howell Raines hammered home the racial point with his guilty-white-liberal-from-the South confession. No subtext required on that one. He flat-out admits race was an inextricable component of this scandal—he just didn’t mention why. Instead of disagreeing wholesale with your boss’s conscience, Mr. Herbert, how come you didn’t ask why he harbors that particular conscience, or why that should ever be relevant to his professional responsibilities?

The obvious fear over Jayson Blair is how an individual—of any color—with enough malice can expose a surprising fragility within our most venerable institutions. But the more far-reaching fear this theater shows is how the dehumanization of a person has evolved in the 21st century. Howell Raines, and those subordinate to him, consciously and consistently chose not to see Jayson Blair when he was trying ever more desperately to show them who he was: an unqualified journalist, a documented liability, or a troubled young person lost and in way over his head. Instead, they took a naïve, pathological liar and created in his stead a sort of abstract personification of misplaced virtue to atone for the shameful memories of a place that pre-dates their unwitting pawn by a generation.

Jayson Blair is not a product of lowered expectations, nor is he evidence of a systemic flaw in a society that calculates equal opportunity by a person’s relative potential. And to be sure, Jayson Blair—black or otherwise—was evidently doomed from the start. But it’s an ironic commentary that Howell Raines, an old white man hell-bent to prove at any cost he isn’t a product of a racist environment, gave Jayson a hefty push towards his demise by resurrecting the subtle, racist machinations of white man’s guilt he thought he’d left in Alabama.

No doubt Jayson Blair is a broken man, but in our instinctive haste to get beyond such ugliness let us be disciplined enough not turn a blind eye to those equally pitiful figures who nevertheless used and then vilified a man when he failed to exorcise their personal demons. If we are to believe Jayson’s egregious betrayal is solved by creating an even bigger monster just so those who should share responsibility feel that much better when it falls, we will surely watch other dispensable persons be exploited by those wielding uncontested authority over them.

[What Is Ain't]

Good analysis. Thanks for posting.

[hotpotato]

Here’s the deal—Howell Raines, a white local-boy-makes-good from George Wallace’s Alabama who became the New York Times’ Executive Editor, apparently has an ugly problem with the ugly realities of his past.

The deal is that Howell Raines is, like Jayson Blair, a con-man. He screwed up and hoped to pass the buck by passing off his gross mismanagement as some kind of guilt trip and reparations owed the black man with "all those second chances"... a sleazy reach for a pat on the back from his liberal co-horts (hoping they'd think "what a great guy!" and forgive and forget) when what he should have gotten was the boot.

[Valin]

Long legs bump.