As some of you might know, I was born in Kansas City, Missouri in
January 1945, largely as a result of my mom being a child of couple of
Polish Jews who ended up there as part of Jacob Schiff’s efforts to
disperse Jewish immigrants throughout the USA in order to preempt
anti-Semitism. Two other Jews who ended up in Kansas City in the same
manner are Ed Asner and Calvin Trillin. My father was stationed in Fort
Riley, Kansas and, like other Jewish soldiers, got connected to kosher
households for Friday night /shabbat/ dinners. He met my mom there, got
married, and went off to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. When he
returned, the 3 of us went to the Borscht Belt where he opened a fruit
store.
Missouri has been on my mind quite a bit lately since it figures heavily
in David S. Reynold’s John Brown bio. While Kansas was a slave state as
well, most of the pro-slavery “ruffians” came from Missouri, including
Jesse James.
In 1978, I picked up my belongings and moved to Kansas City to “make the
turn to industry”. I lasted one morning as a spot welder and resolved to
leave the insane SWP cult and return to a normal life in NYC.
When I was in KC, I used to read the KC Star every morning since I
couldn’t get my hands on the NYT. It was your typical shitty,
second-string newspaper but I don’t remember reading anything
particularly racist at the time. Unlike St. Louis, a city examined by
Harvard historian Walter Johnson in a new book, the racist roots of KC
have yet to be examined. I expect that DSA member G.S. Griffin’s “Racism
in Kansas City: A Short History”, which I am ordering from Amazon today,
will be a good place to start.
Back in the 60s, grad students in SDS embarked on an ambitious attempt
to create pamphlets about the ruling class in the cities where they
lived. I wonder if we are seeing something like this today, with efforts
to identify how racial capitalism shaped cities like St. Louis and KC. I
hope so.
NYT, Dec. 22, 2020
Kansas City Star Apologizes for Racism in Decades of Reporting
By John Eligon and Jenny Gross
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — When Mará Rose Williams, an education reporter for
The Kansas City Star, was assigned to cover a local Black Lives Matter
protest over the summer, she was struck by the difference between what
she said she witnessed and what had been reported in previous days.
While much of the coverage had focused on vandalism and protesters
clashing with law enforcement, there was little focus on the police — in
riot gear and with chemical spray — who she said had acted as the
aggressors. That contrast made her wonder how much the newspaper, where
she has worked for more than two decades, had been responsible for
perpetuating false narratives of Black people over the years.
An archive search was unsettling.
“What I started to find just kind of sickened me,” said Ms. Williams,
who is Black and joined the newspaper 22 years ago.
She approached her editors, and that conversation led to a series of
articles the newspaper published on Sunday, including an apology on its
front page for having “disenfranchised, ignored and scorned” generations
of Black residents through much of the early history of Kansas City,
Mo., saying the apology was long overdue.
Mr. Fannin, who has been with The Star since 1997 and the editor for the
past 12 years, wrote that an investigation of thousands of pages of
articles, archives and other documents had shown that the newspaper,
over decades, had denied the Black community dignity, justice and
recognition.
“Today we are telling the story of a powerful local business that has
done wrong,” Mr. Fannin’s essay began, before delving into how The Star
had fallen short.
Across more than 10 pages, the articles, written by Ms. Williams and
three other reporters, examined how the news organization had
disregarded the city’s civil rights struggle and had helped support
racial segregation in housing that remains to this day. It also had for
decades portrayed African-Americans as criminals, and in its 1977
coverage of a deadly flood, it fixated on the property damage of a
high-end shopping area instead of the 25 people who had died, including
eight Black residents.
In its coverage on Sunday, The Star also announced the formation of an
advisory group of residents and civic leaders to help inform the news
organization’s coverage of communities of color.
In a year in which widespread protests for racial justice prompted
companies to examine their own biases and histories of systemic racism,
newsrooms also began examining their coverage of nonwhite communities.
In September, the Los Angeles Times editorial board apologized for
decades of biased coverage of the city’s nonwhite population, which it
blamed on a shortage of Indigenous, Black, Latino, Asian-American and
other minority groups in the newsroom. For at least the paper’s first 80
years, it said, it was an institution that was “deeply rooted in white
supremacy.”
The effort by The Star, founded in 1880, is among the boldest moves in
its scope and ambition.
“I think that it is a visionary moment that hopefully other media
outlets will be following their lead,” said Stacy Shaw, a lawyer and
activist in Kansas City who is part of The Star’s newly formed advisory
group. “A lot of times people don’t even acknowledge all of the horror
that they have wrought against the community. I think that is the first
step, saying, ‘We got this wrong, now how are we going to fix it.’”
Mr. Fannin said in an interview that the depth of The Star’s racist
coverage was appalling — coverage that helped cement inequalities that
continue to plague the city. He pointed to the paper’s founder, William
Rockhill Nelson, mentoring and supporting J.C. Nichols, a developer who
used racial restrictions to create neighborhoods that were all white,
and remain overwhelmingly white to this day.
Not only did The Star give Mr. Nichols favorable coverage of his
developments and space for him to advertise his segregated developments
— “A Place Where Discriminating People Buy,” read one of them — but it
also gave him a lofty eulogy when he died in 1950.
“Nichols stands as one of the very few city leaders of vision that
carries beyond his time,” the paper wrote then in an editorial.
While the ambition of Sunday’s series of articles has earned The Star
praise, it also has placed new scrutiny on the newsroom’s demographics:
About 17 percent of the reporters are Black in a city where Black
residents make up about 28 percent of the population. Until it hired Ms.
Williams’s son, Trey Williams, this year to oversee race and equity
coverage, the paper had been without a Black staff editor for more than
a decade.
Apologies by news organizations are important because they “give
communities the chance to understand what really took place that may
have been obscured by white-controlled media,” said Collette Watson, a
co-creator of Media 2070, a project that seeks to uplift the history of
the media’s harm against Black communities and foster conversations
around repair.
But what organizations like The Star do after the apology is just as
important, said Ms. Watson, who works for Free Press, a nonprofit group
that advocates for media reform. She said the success of The Star’s
advisory group will depend on how much power it has to inform coverage.
“They have to start out with the premise that no one is a better expert
on the community than the community itself,” she said.
Ms. Williams, who pitched the idea for the series, said she had long
found her colleagues well-meaning and conscientious about race, but not
always aware.
“We didn’t question ourselves as much as we probably should,” she said.
“There have been lots of things missed.”
She recalled raising a red flag a few years ago when she saw a draft
headline for a project on human trafficking: “The New Slavery,” it said.
Ms. Williams said she explained to the reporter and editor that such
framing could come off as dismissive of the enslavement of
African-Americans. They understood her point and changed the headline.
The current introspection has been an opportunity for everyone in the
newsroom, herself included, to reflect on its coverage of race. One of
the articles she wrote for the series examined The Star’s failure to
cover how the Kansas City public school system had flouted desegregation
laws. As she reviewed the archives, it made her feel that she needed to
be more inquisitive of the school officials she covers today, and guard
against taking what they say at face value, she said.
Where The Star’s series showed its own journalistic negligence, it also
highlighted the importance of the Black press, which covered stories
that were ignored and gave the perspectives of the city’s Black residents.
Eric Wesson, the managing editor and publisher of The Call, a
Black-owned weekly newspaper started in 1919, said he appreciated that
The Star gave his publication credit for preserving the community’s
narrative. But he also noted that it was of little real value to
shoestring operations like his own that have long kept true to Black
communities.
“Now will it lead to grants so I can keep the doors open?” he asked.
“That’s a series right there of how financially difficult it is for
Black media to even exist.”
Mr. Fannin said it was not lost on him that his organization still had a
lot of work to do to be embraced by a community that it had long shunned.
“I judge investigative work by the impact of it and the tangible results
that come from it,” he said. “If we don’t have that to show by the time
it’s all said and done, then we’ll have failed again.”
John Eligon reported from Kansas City, and Jenny Gross from London.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#4703): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4703
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79152747/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
