There’s a need for a safer newspaper
To the Times:
Our newspaper needs to be a safe place again.
A place where diverse people – minorities in this community – can feel safe while drinking their morning cup of coffee and not feel agitated, disrespected, and uncomfortable while just trying to read about what is going on in our community. When Christine Flowers writes about what Black people should and should not feel offended by in their classroom. When Christine Flowers writes about how we hear the n-word anyway because of the music we listen to. When Christine Flowers goes on to tell us how we need to appreciate white people more at a time when we are being slaughtered and unheard by people in the white community. It is hard to not feel uncomfortable.
And no, I am not a Black person who hates white people. As a biracial woman who was raised by her white grandparents in a very white family, I know that there are and have been white people that have fought for Black people since the very beginning. But to make a statement of what black people should and should not feel offended by, and to suggest that all blacks are ungrateful for what our white allies have done for us, is horribly ignorant of the racism faced by the black community. We are not ungrateful. Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch was my hero, as he was to many Black children growing up. He was everything I wanted to be. I vowed at 12 to name my first son after the lawyer. But I can’t help but wonder if I only loved Atticus so much because I had never read in my classroom a book that had a Black male as its hero?
Through this day, I can count on one hand the number of stories that have had Black lead characters. Only three books of the countless we read featured leads from a community representing over one eighth of this nation’s population, and all three were women. Not a single featured Black man outside of the surface-level learning about MLK.
There is a similar pattern in our history classes, with Black figures and Black history ignored, sidelined, or watered down. This is why we can no longer have a tone-deaf writer in our paper, a writer who not only ignores Black experiences as she screams for more fans for the few white allies in history but also continues to make fun of those who stand up to her to express how her ignorant writings made them feel. We need a better paper. We need a safer paper.