Sun apology: Racial reckoning or racist reasoning?
Editor’s note:
The Baltimore Sun is committed to making amends for a history of failing Black communities in its coverage and, as part of a public apology, has asked area leaders and scholars to suggest a path forward. We will run the responses as an occasional series.
I read The Baltimore Sun’s recent apology for its racism and commitment to do better with great interest. I am the CEO of the Pride Center of Maryland (PCOM). PCOM and The Sun are on a parallel journey to create a more equitable present and future.
However, The Sun’s steps to address its racism concern me. They appear like an attempt to dissociate from the problem rather than eliminate it. How do institutions new to the language, mindset and practices of racial equity, begin effective damage repair?
As the U.S. enters its current phase of resolving its racist foundations, many experimental “solutions” are emerging that miss the mark. Resolving the impact of white racism involves first critically examining the use of language, context and connotation (as The Guardian did), and also the institution’s larger role in shaping the U.S.’s own white supremacist power structures. Next, it requires distinguishing gestures of inclusion from anti-racist transformation. Finally, it means creating true and measurable justice, not simply tokenistic or optical diversity.
A newspaper is uniquely positioned to use language for both harm and good. One example of how The Sun has caused harm linguistically is the decontextualized use of the phrase “Black-on-Black crime” in various pieces, including a 2015 story about a mayoral proposal to address it, a 2017 letter to the editor, a 2020 Leonard Pitts Jr. column on the issue and a 2020 story quoting someone decrying the phrase. There is proportionally similar “white-on-white” crime, and most crime is intra-group, but we only hear about “Black-on-Black” crime. This reproduces the destructive and false notion that only Black people practice intra-group violence.
While the term “Black-on-Black crime” demoralizes us, and fuels misdirected
Black rage and the undervaluing of Black people by both Black people and others, Baltimore has not resolved our Black intragroup violence problem. This circumstance perpetually triggers violence among Black people, now associated with Baltimore as much as our crab cakes. Imagine how this affects Black children. This linguistic example is one among many that any newspaper should study, learn, and deconstruct as a fundamental step toward undoing the racist harms endemic to everyday English.
Even the most well-intentioned inclusion measures typically “include” only those who capitulate to normalized whiteness. Unfortunately, even in predominantly Black Baltimore, Black people have been conditioned to abandon the affirmation of Black people in favor of inclusion into antiBlack systems. This includes white-accommodating patterns of compensation, news coverage and leadership. These patterns disorient, disempower and divide Black people, including against ourselves. This in turn fuels misdirected Black rage, which The Sun calls “Black-on-Black Crime,” instead of illuminating its context: the logical repercussions of white-privilege infused, anti-Black messaging in media.
Over the last 40 years, my work has focused on repairing this schism within and among Black people. Author Resmaa Menakem reminds us that “Trauma decontextualized in a people looks like culture,” which echoes what I’ve been teaching for years: Due to unresolved racism and anti-Blackness on an institutional scale, including in newspapers, Black (and white) people may mistake unresolved generational trauma for culture or fate. Only when we recognize this can we choose true, sustainable and measurable repair.
Measurable repair means featuring more reparative Black-centered content. It means platforming skilled Black reporters and thought leaders who demonstrably resonate with and value Black people to voice Black issues from Black perspectives. It means making editorial and news decisions not based on white subjectivity or comfort, but rather, reparative Black autonomy. It means dismantling within ourselves the ways we all reproduce white supremacy mythology and anti-Blackness through our own unexamined conditioning.
Constant work; editorial, news and white self-evaluation, Reconstruction and vigilance at The Sun are needed to undo the centuries of harm mentioned in the apology. The Sun has a unique opportunity, given its location, in a 64% Black city, to share power in a genuinely proportionate, transformational and equitable way. That will look and feel different from what’s occurred before. If it feels comfortable to white people and to Black people adapting to racism, it’s probably not making actual change.
Though we too have faced challenges in leveling the racial playing field, PCOM knows change is possible because we’re doing it. While being enthusiastically inclusive of Blacks, whites, Asians, Latinx, Native people and immigrants, as is our mission, simultaneously, our staff proportionately reflects the population of Baltimore. Our culturally relevant language, symbols, practices and services speak to the actual lived experiences of diverse sexual and gender minorities (SGM) living in Baltimore and Maryland.
The Sun too could — and should — create authentic repair through language, critical self- and context-examination, and measurable equity. This would not only help make a good publication great but also position The Sun as a leading-edge newspaper, which would give ample reason for all Baltimoreans to feel true pride.