For a future that perhaps only the young will be able fully, purely to imagine, this new War Against Error has no guarantee of victory. Sentient life is original and very hard. A student of mine (probably twenty years old) recently gave me a piece of art. Printed, cut, and pasted within it were these lines:
No one told me it was like this.
It’s only matter shot through with pure imagination.
[So] rise up little souls—join the doomed army toward the meaning of change.
Fight…fight…wage the unwinnable.
He seems ready. And so are we. Yes?
Thank you.
A Race in Mind
The Press in Deed
THE VASTNESS and omnipresence of the press can easily overshadow our mutual dependence: that which exists between the professionals in the press and its outsiders. There are not, to my knowledge, any other entities quite like a “free” press, and while I have surrounded the word “free” in quotation marks here, the presence or absence of that sign of ambivalence is also something that has been the subject of years of deliberation in the press itself. It could not even be a topic in a system in which such deliberations were closed.
But I have not come here to waste your time by flattering you, to paint in even brighter colors your portrait as both the pomp and the circumstance of democratic freedom, but to comment on what I know you understand to be serious problems in the way the press functions as mediator between the experience of life in the world and its narrative and visual representation.
The harshest critics call the press-media a “closed circuit world of spectacle that has no goal other than its spectacular self.” Relying like a politician only on vested interests to critique and defend its activities, the press encourages its own journalists to explain and deplore press culpability; these critics are appalled by the sight of journalists behaving like independent experts within the spectacle they have created and have an interest in sustaining, pretending to speak for a public so remote from their lives only polls can allude to its nature, defending itself from criticism with incoherent but effective lines of defense such as “We are better than we used to be,” “This story just won’t go away,” “We do both sides of an issue.”
I can’t accept so sweeping a condemnation, yet the claustrophobia one feels in the sheltering arms of the press often seems permanent and conspiratorial. Notwithstanding the promise of more choices and more channels—targeted and consumer-designed magazines, barely limited numbers of cable channels—the fear of being suffocated by eternal and eternally replenished ephemera is real; so is the fear of the complete inability of a public to engage in public discourse. This latter fear—the closing off of public debate—is palpable because there is no way to answer the systemic distortions of the press in a timely, effective fashion and because the definition of “public” is already so radically changed. Homelessness and crime have been recharacterized and redeployed so that “public space” is increasingly seen as a protected preserve open only to the law-abiding and the employed, or rather to those who appear to be. Homelessness has been recharacterized as streetlessness. Not the poor deprived of homes, but the homed being deprived of their streets. And crime is construed as principally black. Neither one of these constructions is new. But as each affects public space, each affects public discourse.
It is clear to anyone interested that when the term “public” has been appropriated as space regulated for one portion of society only, when the “poor” have no political party to represent their interests, then the concept of public service—which is your business, the business of a “free” press—gets altered as well. And has been. The public interest of minorities, farmers, labor, women, and so on have, in frequently routine political language, become “special interests.” “We, the people” have become “They, the people.”
I am introducing the terms “public,” “crime,” “homelessness,” “unemployment” (meaning poverty) early in these remarks because they segue into my observations on race. Although there are other matters of equal concern to editors, the handling of race seems to me symptomatic of the general wariness, ire, and intellectual fatigue the press continues to cause among so wide a spectrum of the country.
I’d like to begin by posing two questions. First, why is race identity important in print and broadcast news at all? And second, if it is necessary, why is it so often obscured and distorted at the very moment it is enunciated?
Originally race identification was urged, even insisted upon, by African Americans to make sure our presence and our point of view were represented. That urging assumed that we had a point of view unlike the mainstream one and, certainly, had experience of life in the States different from the legendary one presented in the press. That regardless of its difference or its concurrence, the African American point of view should not be buried underneath mainstream views and taken for granted. That seemed all well and good in theory, but in practice something quite other took place, an “othering” that took two forms: (1) the encoding of race in order to perpetuate some very old stereotypes even while the stereotypes were being disassembled in the popular mind, and (2) the insistence upon underscoring racial difference at precisely those moments when it really made no difference. For example, last June a New York Times reporter struggled heroically with the twin demand to be accurate and to theatricalize race in an article on immigration in Florida. The piece was headlined “As Hispanic Presence Grows, So Does Black Anger.” What could “black” possibly mean in that formulation other than the commonly accepted code word for poor or working poor or economically marginal? We could assume that the Hispanics are also poor, without jobs, homes, and so on, but that would be a mistake because the Hispanics in question are Cubans fleeing Castro for a city heavily populated with middle-class Cubans and so, unlike Haitians, have a welcome mat of social services spread out before them. But whoever they are, they are certainly competing for jobs and housing with any and all. The question becomes, Why are blacks singled out? Why are they not called Miamians or “local.” (“As Hispanic Presence Grows, So Does Local Anger”?) Except when they are soldiers, blacks are never American citizens. Why? Because in media-talk we are not local, or general citizens—we are those whose financial security is fragile; those whose reactions are volatile (“anger”—not concern). If the reader knows the code, this headline’s use of the term “local” (economically fragile American citizens) could very well be Miami’s white working poor. But that is dismissed at once by the knowing, because the already encoded black-versus-anything-else connotation is what we have been led and taught to believe is the real, the vital, the incendiary story. There is no printable word for “poor” that does not connote “race.” Thus, under the guise of representing the interests of black citizenry, the conventional stereotypical oppositions are maintained and useful information is sacrificed in the process.