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Race

In 1964, on assignment in Mississippi attending church services for three slain civil rights workers, Joseph Lelyveld, a New York Times reporter who would eventually become the paper’s editor in chief, witnessed a scene so striking he included it in his 2005 memoir, Omaha Blues: “The network reporters, the wire service reporters, the Time magazine correspondent, and other newspaper reporters were all holding hands and singing. Having the idea that reporters weren’t supposed to show their feelings or take sides, I was one of the abstainers. It was an uncomfortable moment.”

That sense of professional detachment, very much a product of institutional tradition that was drilled into every reporter, especially during the Rosenthal years, has not endured. Today, when it comes to the issue of race, the Times is sitting front and center in the choir, singing with a moral fervor and gusto that would have been considered journalistically unseemly in the past. An orthodoxy of racial engagement and “diversity” now governs the personnel policies of its newsroom, but even more so the political sensibility behind much of its news coverage.

To some degree, the Times may be trying to use diversity to assuage a guilty conscience. In the 1940s the paper’s first black reporter, George Streetor, had to be terminated after he was caught fabricating quotations and had amassed a considerable corrections file. After that was a long drought. A confidential company memo in 1961 revealed that the news department had only one black copy editor and only two black reporters; some departments had no blacks at all. There was also a marked shortage of news about the black community. Indeed, up until 1950, the NAACP considered the paper “anti-Negro.” The racial unrest of the 1960s, particularly in Harlem, spurred management to open the paper’s doors to a number of high-profile recruits. Yet the few who managed to take hold at the paper had little effect on what remained an overwhelmingly white newsroom.

In the early 1980s, as publisher-in-waiting Arthur Sulzberger Jr. began to preach the Gospel of Diversity more forcefully, Abe Rosenthal stepped up efforts to diversify the staff. In 1984 he actually gave a speech to the National Association of Black Journalists announcing a commitment to diversity, which would have been unthinkable for him ten years before.

One of the senior newsroom managers put in charge of this initiative was William Stockton, who had come to the Times in 1982 from the Associated Press, eventually rising to business news editor and sitting in on front-page meetings. Stockton’s brief involved traveling to journalism schools and meeting qualified minority candidates whom the Times could either hire directly or tag as hopefuls to be watched while they developed their talent at “minor league” papers. As Stockton recalls, “There was fierce competition for essentially a very small group of people, to hire someone who could make it. The struggle to hire people minimally qualified—people who could do the job—was intense.”

In his memoir, The Times of My Life, Max Frankel, who succeeded Rosenthal as executive editor in 1986, wrote that his exertions for racial integration at the Times “were not just affirmative but prodigious.” Yet Frankel was wary of placing moral and legal concerns over professionalism, having seen “the cause betrayed by too many merely sentimental decisions.” For him, it was a pragmatic matter of avoiding situations where “Too often we found ourselves discussing articles about racial strife without a single black face in the room.” Although great reporters “learn to transcend their own experience and to deal with alien peoples and strange surroundings,” the need to gain the confidence of “contending factions” in newsworthy situations demanded the presence of reporters who could immediately cut through the cultural baggage, Frankel believed.

Once Arthur Jr. took over the publisher’s position in 1991, the Times created more diversity-related managerial incentives and requirements. According to Bill Stockton, the bonus program was changed to reflect how well managers did in minority recruitment, training and retention, with 25 percent of the compensation based on how many journalists of color officially took jobs. Stockton remembered senior-level editorial meetings where Frankel and his second in command, Joe Lelyveld, put the squeeze on their subordinates because of the pressure they felt from Sulzberger. Editors were asking, “Who can we send abroad? Put on the national desk? Make bureau chief?” Stockton recalled, adding, “They were pushing, really pushing. There was pressure all the time.”

But like the effort to hire minorities in the 1960s, the 1980s initiative was hampered by an inability to hold on to minority talent. “The truth,” Frankel wrote, “was that we did have a problem keeping people of color: the most successful blacks were repeatedly tempted by opportunities elsewhere and the least successful were often left wondering whether they were victims of prejudice or cultural alienation.” Meanwhile, dissension was growing on the white side of the newsroom. According to Frankel, the “diversity training” seminars that the Times sponsored were often “delivered by shameless charlatans,” by “peddlers of pop psychology” who were indulged so the paper could “avoid being branded as racist.” These sessions were an occasion for some black employees to demand that racial identifications be abandoned in news reports, even in the case of criminals at large. One editor even wanted a ban on all idiomatic negative uses of “black,” such as “black magic” and “Black Monday,” or even “film noir.” Frankel’s number two, Joe Lelyveld, thought the sessions a questionable expenditure, and withheld money that he thought was better spent in the news budget.

The most controversial and ultimately the most tragic beneficiary of the diversity campaign was the former managing editor Gerald Boyd. Although Boyd was not the Ivy League type historically favored by the Times, he “represented a terrifically hard-nosed black reporter that senior management could relate to,” Bill Stockton maintained. “Someone who could be black but still fit in.” The paper saw tremendous potential in Boyd. According to Stockton, “As Gerry Boyd moved up it became apparent to very senior management that he was their one best hope—their last best hope—to springboard a minority to the top.” The plan, says Stockton, was to bring Boyd to New York and rotate him through various senior managerial positions. “If he did not fall flat on his face, he would be promoted to some top destination.”

Boyd guided the paper’s exceptional coverage of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and edited the year 2000 Pulitzer-winning fifteen-part series on race in America. But many blamed him for egregious and embarrassing miscoverage of a string of race-related incidents in New York in the early 1990s, including the infamous anti-Jewish riot in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights in 1991. While Jews were clearly victims of the overwhelmingly black rioting, Boyd injected a tone of moral equivalence into the coverage he supervised, angering many New Yorkers.

Boyd’s missteps, however, did not affect his upward mobility. In late 1990, Frankel had called the correspondent to New York and told him, in so many words, that he would be the Times’ Jackie Robinson. Adapting a page from the Branch Rickey handbook, he warned Boyd about “the tough time” ahead, “because a lot of people are going to be saying we’re doing this because of your race—and to a degree we are, and I think you can handle that.” Although he was passed over for managing editor when Joe Lelyveld became editor in chief in 1997, Boyd got the job when Howell Raines replaced Lelyveld in 2001. Boyd was now one step away from the very top, in a position of imminent historic significance, as Bill Stockton recalls: “The first black 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, for example, garnered front-page headlines and continuous coverage,” yet there was little national coverage of the Wichita murders, and none at all from the New York Times. Malkin quoted one Wichita resident in a letter to the local paper: “If this had been two white males accused of killing four black individuals, the media would be on a feeding frenzy and every satellite news organization would be in Wichita doing live reports.” Malkin concluded: “If you read The New York Times or The Washington Post or watched the evening news this week, the Wichita Massacre never happened.”

In October 2004, in New York’s East Village, a black man from Brooklyn shot three people and terrorized patrons in a bar, threatening to burn the place with kerosene and a lighter. At one point he held fifteen people hostage. At trial, prosecutors charged that the man was “on a mission of hate” to kill white people, and explained that the police had found tapes of anti-white rap music interspersed with the man’s own anti-white rants. “Get ready to pull your guns out on these crackers, son. All they do is party and have a good time off of our expense, son,” one tape said. “Blast the first couple you see having a good time. Let them visit your side of the tracks.” If the racial roles were reversed, the Times would have given the case far more attention and used it for a springboard—as it has often done—for pieces that searched for Larger Racial Meanings. Instead, the case was buried in the Metro pages.

In April 2006, a New York University student emerged from the subway for a visit with an old friend who lived in a Harlem neighborhood. A gang of black teens attacked him. Fleeing into traffic, the student was struck by a car and died a few days later. The story was newsworthy: in a gentrifying neighborhood, gangs of black teens (“wolf packs,” as the New York Post called them) were on the loose, systematically preying on people who appeared well-to-do, overwhelmingly white. Indeed, a similar case involving a black man chased into traffic by a white gang in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens in the late 1980s was given wall-to-wall coverage by the Times and eventually brought down Mayor Ed Koch. The death of the NYU student was covered by other New York papers. “Harlem Thugs Yuppie Hunting,” read the New York Post headline. The Times mentioned the case in a one-paragraph “Metro Briefing.”

Black crime in general causes skittishness at the Times, leading to classic liberal avoidance and denial. The perpetrators of these crimes are often portrayed as society’s victims, with the high rates of black crime and incarceration blamed on institutional racism and “racial profiling” in the criminal justice system. This representation is actually a disservice to the very minority group that the Times would like to think it is protecting. Although blacks attack whites at a much higher rate than the reverse, the vast majority of victims in black crime are also black.

In January 2007, a young black man named Ronnell Wilson was convicted of killing two undercover police officers on Staten Island several years before. Both of the undercovers were black. Wilson faced a federal death penalty and, as Trymaine Lee put it in a Times report set in Wilson’s neighborhood, “much of the [defense] testimony this week focused on Mr. Wilson’s upbringing, on his struggling existence from an early age that his defense lawyers contend played a role at the moment he pulled the trigger.” Lee’s piece largely echoed the mitigating arguments of the defense attorneys. “While prosecutors paint Mr. Wilson as a cold-blooded killer, bully and gang member who depicted his violent lifestyle in rap lyrics,” Lee wrote, “neighbors who knew him said he was just a young man lost.”

After quoting other residents of the projects on the justice of the death penalty, Lee closed with the perspective of twenty-two-year-old Fred Tuller, who made Wilson seem like a mere victim of his environment. Tuller had told Lee that “it was a rough neighborhood to live in, that violence and poverty are seared into who they are and how they see themselves. He saw his first dead body at age 5 or 6. The victim had been shot and left for dead in the stairwell of his building.” Lee described Tuller looking into the hills where the big houses seemed to be leering down on the neighborhood: “Look at us, in the middle of the projects, down here like lab rats,” he said. “They’re laughing at us.”

Wilson’s death sentence was reversed on appeal in July 2010, a decision the Times seemed to endorse in two news reports. The first one ended with Wilson’s defense attorney saying she was “thrilled.”

Another story that showed a little too much victimology involved the suspended season of Brooklyn’s Paul Robeson High School basketball team in February 2007. Written by another young black reporter, Timothy Williams, the story was headlined “A Team Feared by Rivals Now Sits Idle, and Angry.” Williams explained that a violent brawl during the final minutes of a game had led city athletic officials to bench the team for the rest of the season. The Paul Robeson team was perennially ranked among the best in the city, Williams reported, and had a chance to win the city title that year. It attracted scouts and coaches from basketball powerhouses, and players regularly received scholarships, some to NCAA Division One schools. But there was something “toxic” about the school’s basketball program, Wilson noted. “Its popular former coach, Lawrence Major, committed suicide in 2005 at age 45 after being charged with statutory rape, accused of carrying on a three-year relationship with a student that started when she was 14.” In past seasons, “several rival coaches have agreed to play games in Robeson’s gym only if they bring their own security guards, saying they are fearful of being assaulted by Robeson fans. At least one coach has vowed never to take his basketball teams to Robeson again.”

The incident that led to the suspension came after a hard foul on a rebound with thirty seconds remaining in a game against Thomas Jefferson High. A Robeson player then shoved the ball into the chest of the Jefferson player who had fouled. Benches of both teams cleared and the crowd surged out of the stands. The Jefferson team was trapped in a corner as a violent confrontation ensued. The Jefferson team coach said it was a “Brooklyn mauling” and that “we had to fight for our lives.”

Despite the obvious pathology of the Robeson team, Williams chose to focus on the dashed hopes of the players and their anger over being suspended, reporting that one player started to cry. Williams also endorsed the school principal’s complaints that the punishment was too rough for the crime: “They wanted to send a real strong message, but it is not proportionate to the offense. The question we should be asking is, what lesson are these kids learning about fairness and justice?”

A hallmark of the Times’ coverage of black crime is a fixation on racial profiling, which it sees as an expression of institutional racism in the criminal justice system. One example involved a study of speeding on the New Jersey Turnpike, conducted by the state in 2002, which concluded that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to speed than other drivers. The Metro editor, Jonathan Landman, proposed a story on it, which would have been an exclusive. But the study’s conclusion rankled the sensitivities of Howell Raines, who had not read the report but nevertheless said that the methodology was flawed and that the Times was being “spun.”

The story was held for a week. When it did run, it acknowledged a sizable gap between minorities and whites in speeding behavior, and noted that the issue was a political hot potato between civil libertarians and state troopers, but finished with liberal conventional wisdom: “Whatever the reasons for the speeding rates found in the study, civil rights advocates and lawyers said they cannot obscure the state’s acknowledgment that racial profiling was an accepted tactic in the department for years.”

The fixation on racial profiling appeared also in a 2007 report by Trymaine Lee, under the headline “As Officers Stop and Frisk, Residents Raise Their Guard.” Its pull quote said, “In Brooklyn, some neighbors see searches as police harassment.” Set in one of the most violent housing projects in the city, Brooklyn’s Red Hook Houses, the piece was about the aggressive “stop and frisk” tactic taken up by the NYPD under Commissioner Raymond Kelly. It had taken many guns off the street and played an important role in dramatically reducing New York’s murder rate.

Lee’s story emphasized that more than half of those stopped and frisked by the police citywide were black. One of the Red Hook residents he interviewed, Mikel Jamison, said that in Brooklyn it was “hard being an African-American, hard to live and walk down the street without the police harassing us.” After having a police officer jam a gun in his chest a few years ago, “in an incident he said he would rather not discuss,” Lee wrote, “Mr. Jamison said he converted to Islam and is now more conscious of the way the community is affected by such police actions.” (Why Lee allowed Jamison to dismiss the incident as something he “would rather not discuss” is journalistically dubious.)

Lee included fifteen paragraphs where residents disparaged the “stop and frisk” policy and just four where residents supported it. The closing paragraph described a press conference outside police headquarters the previous day, where representatives of black and Hispanic officers’ groups called for Police Commissioner Kelly to step down. “These numbers substantiate what we’ve been saying for years,” Lee quoted Noel Leader, a cofounder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. “The New York Police Department under Raymond Kelly is actively committing some of the grossest forms of racial profiling in the history of the New York Police Department.”

The commentary on the unfortunate encounter that Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard had with the Cambridge police in July 2009, provided the Times with another soapbox to denounce racial profiling. “The clash in Cambridge about ID and racial profiling, about identity and expectation and respect was just a snippet of our culture’s ongoing meta-narrative about race,” according to Judith Warner, a Times Web columnist. Bob Herbert devoted two columns to the case. In the first, headlined “Anger Has Its Place,” he wrote: “Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.” In the second column, headlined “Innocence Is No Defense,” Herbert complained: “Young, old, innocent as the day is long—it doesn’t matter. Your skin color can leave you perpetually vulnerable to a sudden and devastating injustice.”

In the past, a faith in integration had guided the Times’ coverage of race, as revealed in the paper’s response to the rise of the Black Power movement and its radical notions of cultural separatism. On the confrontation between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Dr. Martin Luther King in 1966 over the issue of white involvement in the civil rights struggle, the Times ran an editorial under the headline “Black Power Is Black Death.” It applauded the activist Roger Wilkins for telling the NAACP that “the way out of America’s racial dilemma” was “the inclusion of the Negro American in the nation’s life, not their exclusion.” A year earlier, after Malcolm X was assassinated, a Times editorial decried his “ruthless and fanatical belief in violence.”

By contrast, a Times news report about a Harlem exhibition in 2004 referred to Malcolm X as a “Civil Rights Giant” and extolled the exhibition for its description of a “driving intellectual quest for truth.” When John Carlos and Tommie Smith had given the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, the Times condemned the action; forty years later, the reporter Katie Thomas called it a “heroic gesture.”

The Times has endorsed a separatist black identity by reporting favorably on Afrocentric education, which its supporters see as a way to overcome alienation and boost self-esteem in underperforming inner-city black schoolchildren, by teaching them that they are descendants of a scientifically and artistically rich African culture. The fans of Afrocentrism claim that Africa, not Europe, was the cradle of Western civilization, and that racist “Eurocentric” scholarship has systemically denied it. Afrocentric education also emphasizes a “distinctly black learning style.”

To its critics, however, Afrocentrism is “a heavy dose of fantasy mixed with racism,” and an “ethnic religion” based on shoddy scholarship, with a dangerous potential to encourage racial insularity and intolerance. Claims that black children learn differently from whites are largely seen by professional educators as nonsense, an effort to teach history as group therapy. The notion of introducing a separate black curriculum would undermine the function of the public school as an instrument to instill a common culture and a shared sense of the past.

The debate over Afrocentric education was one that the Times should have monitored closely. At the very least, the paper should have provided a complete and candid description of what Afrocentric educators were teaching, as well as an inventory of the pedagogical and scholarly assumptions these teaching materials embodied. Instead, the Times shrank from the challenge, and treated the competing claims about Afrocentrism as equally valid “perspectives” whose multiplicity should be celebrated. The Times ignored some of the more patently ridiculous claims and airbrushed uncomfortable realities about Afrocentrism as well as the controversy around it. For example, there was no research to support a link between self-esteem and educational achievement. Yet news analysis in the Times routinely quoted supporters of Afrocentrism making that linkage. The paper made no attempt to evaluate the strength of Afrocentric scholarship, including claims that Cleopatra (along with the rest of ancient Egypt) was black, and that Africans discovered mathematics, built the first airplanes and were the first to sail to America.

As far back as 1990, the education reporter Suzanne Daley produced a fairly critical report on Afrocentric education, quoting experts who questioned whether history should become an exercise in self-esteem, emphasizing what many experts called the pedagogical “slipperiness” of Afrocentrism, and explaining that much of its curriculum accented white scholarly conspiracies against African achievement. Daley’s report set off protests by black staffers, who ensured that subsequent treatments of the subject were much more flattering and made supporters sound more convincing than critics. In one of those later treatments, Calvin Sims, a black reporter, claimed that the “scholarly underpinnings” of Afrocentric theories and curricula were “firm” and based on “the work of scholars who are trained in the ancient classics of northern Europe and Africa.”

The Times also affirms separatist values in its coverage of the black family and the problem of illegitimacy. As already noted, back in the 1960s the paper had no problem with making value judgments about black illegitimacy. It gave sympathetic treatment to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report on the cultural disarray of “the negro family,” which was attacked by civil rights leaders and leftist publications. The Times reporter John Herbers explained that Moynihan’s work was not intended to fuel contempt for black Americans by drawing attention to the problem of illegitimacy; rather, its purpose was to show that “white America by means of slavery, humiliation and unemployment has so degraded the Negro male that most lower class Negro families are headed by females.” This, Herbers quoted Moynihan approvingly, had made it impossible for “Negroes as a group to compete on even terms in the US.”

Today the general public has no trouble seeing the prophetic nature of Moynihan’s argument. In 1965, when he first tried to draw attention to the problem, the rate of black illegitimacy was 25 percent; by 2009 it was 70 percent. A consensus has emerged on solutions, emphasizing welfare reform, which it is hoped will make young, out-of-wedlock motherhood an undesirable experience for teenage girls. But for most of the last two decades, when the debate has been sharpest, the Times has been reluctant to admit that the issue is serious and has disparaged proposals floated to address it.

The Times has been remiss, too, in reporting on social policy for dysfunctional black families and their relationship to the foster care system in New York City. In the early 1990s, the city began an experiment aimed at better protecting the black and Latino children whose parents have lost custody to the foster care system. The experiment was the work of Robert Little, the brother of Malcolm X and himself a former foster child, who believed that black children placed in white foster homes would lose their “black identity.” This racist assumption was shared most ardently by a child welfare advocate named Luis Medina, who believed, as the Times would write in late 2007, “that foster care in New York had become an evil and racist system that was engaged in little more than rounding up poor minority children.” At another point, Medina said the foster care system felt like “some version of apartheid.”

Medina took over a venerable child care agency called St. Christopher’s, based up the Hudson River in Dobbs Ferry, New York. As the Times retroactively explained,

He hired additional black and Latino caseworkers, and made a priority of appointing minorities to the agency’s board of directors. He promised to recruit local foster parents from the same neighborhoods as the children coming into their care. He argued that black and Latino families had a “sacred right” to stay together, and pledged that his agency would do everything it could to keep intact the families torn by poverty, illness and drugs.

As a symbolic touch, Medina ordered that the pictures of white children at the agency’s administrative office be replaced with pictures of black and Latino children.

Eventually, St. Christopher’s would expand, opening offices in the Bronx and in Harlem. But Medina’s ideology began to divide the staff, and some felt there was too much operational chaos. “Mr. Medina’s main Bronx office became overrun by parents, some of whom were dangerous and some of whom came simply to hang out,” the Times wrote in 2007. “The presence of the parents—often confused or furious—and a chronic shortage of staff created disorder, particularly during visiting hours with their children. Telephones could go unanswered, dirty diapers often collected in the corners, toilets went unfixed, fights broke out, children were snatched.”

According to Starr Lozada, a caseworker based in Medina’s River Avenue office in the Bronx in 2004, “The birth parents would come and hang out all day. Maybe they would come for the breakfast. Talk with each other. Stay until we closed.” The parents would bring in people from the neighborhood, and there would be screaming and carrying on. “We felt unsafe,” Lozada said.