What’s Right, What’s Wrong, What’s Missing

When journalist Suzanne DeChillo arrived in Maplewood, N.J., last spring to photograph schoolchildren for one in a series of front-page articles that the New York Times was preparing on race, she wasn’t particularly aware of being driven by her own preconceptions. Nevertheless, she wrote in her journal, she couldn’t find what she was looking for. For one fleeting moment, she thought she had it: “an image of self-segregation” in the high school cafeteria. But then a white student looking for help on a math problem came over and destroyed the photo by sitting down among the blacks gathered at the table. “People kept crossing ... the racial divide,” DeChillo notes uneasily in a diary, published in this volume based on the Times series. “They crossed it for food, friendship, love, sports, concert tickets, jokes, music and answers to questions on the biology lab exam.” In Maplewood, “blacks and whites mixed easily .... Isn’t this what we wanted in the 1960s? Integration works.”

Strangely enough, DeChillo doesn’t seem particularly heartened by this epiphany. In her journal, she segues abruptly to an exhibition of photographs of Jim Crow-era lynchings that she happened to see last year and wonders direly “how any black people in America could ever trust a white person.” It’s hard to know what to make of this, so apparently at odds with the reality DeChillo has just witnessed with her own eyes. Yet the episode (with both its surprising turns) captures a great deal about both the strengths and the limits of the Times’ race series, which was recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Like those articles, the book is filled with brilliant, fresh reporting--an often shocking picture of race in America. And yet, like DeChillo, the reporters and editors responsible for the series often seem so blinkered by their perceptions that they hardly grasp the significance of what they have uncovered.

After a period of intense preparation--reading, instruction, group discussion--the paper sent 15 reporter-photographer teams out to explore what it thought would be particularly telling pockets of the American racial frontier: an integrated Pentecostal church, an Army base where white soldiers often have to answer to black officers, a historically black college with a white quarterback and a mixed-race undercover unit of a big-city police force, among others. Reporters spent up to year on assignment, and each of their 15 stories ran more than two full pages in the newspaper. Not every journalist on the project found reality more encouraging than they had expected, as DeChillo did. On the contrary, in many instances what they discovered may be more troubling. Still, whether the Times team recognizes it or not, what the reader hears again and again in these often exquisitely reported vignettes is the sound of stereotypes being shattered:

That the problem is and has always been white racism, that blacks are invariably victims, that they are right to be angry and that the nation can never escape old racial paradigms, as the series’ extraordinary reporting makes clear: If only it were that simple.

In several episodes in which the Times reporters and editors expect white racism, what they find instead is the story of a black man with a chip on his shoulder. In other situations, including those that seem to show racial progress, honest reporting reveals both blacks and whites grappling with the stubborn legacy of the past, often struggling to do the best they can but still hamstrung by painful memories and lingering mistrust. In still other instances, when it looks at first glance as if race is responsible for uneven outcomes, closer examination suggests otherwise--that personal advantages and plain dumb luck often have more to do with whether an individual black or white gets ahead. Taken together, the pieces suggest that black anger and alienation are at least as strong if not stronger than white racism. And several of them argue that, as much as any legacy of the past, what holds us back today are dubious new notions-multiculturalist notions--about inherent racial differences and an unbridgeable gulf between dissimilar ways of being.

Nevertheless, despite all of this able reporting, the Times team, much like the photographer in Maplewood, hardly seem to recognize just how complex and sometimes disturbing a reality it has unearthed. The book surrounds its core of articles with more than 100 pages of diary entries, appendices, a roundtable discussion, executive editor Joseph Lelyveld’s editorializing introduction and other padding--almost all of it ridden with the same tired stereotypes that the pieces smash so tellingly. The editorials, letters and op-ed columns printed in the paper at the time of the series were even more stale and conventional.

The newspaper deserves credit for the ingenious design of the series: for its decision to look beyond racial “issues” and consider how race is actually “lived in America” and for its unusual commitment to “immersion journalism” and the deep truths that often come with it. Conscious of the unusual difficulty that comes with writing and reporting about race, the editorial team also took unusual pains to try to present what it found in a neutral fashion. As Lelyveld explains in his introduction to the book, conventional Times style was suspended for this series, and reporters were told to dispense with what is known in the business as the “nut graf,” that critical paragraph that generally appears near the top of a newspaper story telling readers what to expect--what the issues are and where the story is going. The absence of nut grafs--along with the unusual length of these pieces--often made them tough going in the daily newspaper. But this is precisely what makes them so good as reporting: With journalistic editorializing severely restricted in this way, the stories tell themselves, often startlingly, agonizing detail by detail. All the more disappointing, then, that so many of the reporters and editors involved in the series don’t seem able to see or come to terms with the reality they uncover.

One of the most harrowing pieces in the collection is Charlie LeDuff’s report from a hog slaughterhouse, the largest in the world, in a poor rural region of North Carolina. If old-fashioned, exploitative white racism is still alive in America, it would appear to be here, where the plant management allegedly segregates workers by race and ethnicity: Whites get the best jobs, Mexicans the dirty ones and blacks the worst, the most grueling and most dangerous. Of course, if the factory is allocating work in this way--LeDuff never actually proves that it does and the company denies it--the practice is illegal now, testimony to some small progress, at least, over the last four decades. But this legal change doesn’t make what LeDuff saw in the slaughterhouse any less chilling or shameful and, like several pieces in the book, his report will give pause to even the most optimistic readers.

Many, if not most, of the other articles present what the Times’ teams take to be some other, softer kind of white bigotry. Indeed, there’s hardly a black in the book who doesn’t complain about racism. (This doesn’t necessarily mean that all blacks do. But as one reporter’s journal explains, those who don’t--who don’t see race at every turn--tended to be reluctant to appear in the series.) There is the occasional racial joke, tasteless enough, though usually, in these pieces, told by whites to blacks or Latinos in an awkward attempt to break the ice. There are the stories about taxi drivers who will not pick up black passengers and other similar slights: black professionals mistaken for secretaries, deliverymen or, in the worst cases, criminal suspects. And of course there are some N-words, though they seem surprisingly rare and usually remembered by blacks from a distant past rather than heard in the present by reporters.

More often the charge is insensitivity, specifically--a point made again and again through the book--that whites want to forget about race while blacks never can. The daughter of a family of Louisiana plantation owners isn’t sure she wants to see a skit about her ancestors’ disgraceful past; whites in an integrated church want the pastor to talk more about God and less about the color line. The reporters and editors who comment critically about this reluctance are surely right: It’s easier for whites than blacks to look beyond skin color. But it is also far from clear that the desire to move on is necessarily racist--or wrongheaded.

For one thing, as many of the ordinary Americans in these pieces point out, for whites to talk honestly about race almost always spells trouble. Just read the article about the white columnist who questions why blacks take offense at the word “niggardly” and loses what he feels to be a close black friend as a result. A reluctance to talk doesn’t necessarily mean that whites have something to hide; many who harbor no ill will are simply cowed by political correctness. (‘Why’re you taking notes?” a New York cop asks reporter Michael Winerip. “Did I say something racist?”) Besides, as several of these articles show, talking candidly about racial tension doesn’t always ease it. Sometimes, as in the case of the family of Louisiana plantation owners or the mixed-race undercover unit that won’t discuss the killing of the unarmed Amadou Diallo on Feb. 4, 1999, it may be better to go slowly, avoiding the most inflammatory issues until people can deal with the painful feelings they rouse.

But if white racism is the obvious villain in the book, black anger and black hatred are just as prevalent, although all but unacknowledged by Times reporters and editors. The most disturbing story is that of Marcus Jacoby (no relation to me), the unsuspecting white 19-year-old who starts at quarterback for Southern University, a largely black school in Baton Rouge, La. Jacoby is hazed in the locker room, booed on the field, mercilessly isolated on campus. During one game, an all-black squad hits him so hard that he has to be hospitalized. When his team doesn’t win, disappointed fans threaten him, at least once with rope nooses and once with guns, and there are frequent “disturbances” at the stadiums where he plays--to the point that he needs a police escort. Nobody takes the slightest trouble to disguise the racial nature of their hatred, and when another student questions the implacable color-coding on campus, his father complains that this young man isn’t race-conscious enough. Still, at the end of the piece, as Jacoby is driven to leave Southern and quit football, the Times appears to endorse the judgment of a gruff black coach who notes that the problem was the quarterback’s sensitivity: Another player in the same circumstance would have handled it better, “sucking it up” and getting on with the game.

Nor is this the only story in which the driving force behind a conflict seems to be black anger or black vindictiveness. When black director Roc Dutton experiences what he feels to be racial slights on an HBO set--in fact, many of the hurts come across as exaggerated--he makes a point of lashing back at whites on the crew and unjustly snubs a well-meaning white collaborator. In another piece, a black drill sergeant who thinks that white superiors are out to get him feels no compunction about taking his anger out on a vulnerable white rival, spitefully stymieing his career.

In other instances, this readiness on the part of blacks to see slights everywhere can be heartbreaking. Read reporter Don Terry’s poignant account of his childhood in a mixed-race family: much of what he suffers is all too real--some of the most offensive insults in the book--but he can’t distinguish this pain from the hurt his white grandmother inflicts, surely unintentionally, when she tells him affectionately one night, “Remember Donny, just because your skin is darker doesn’t mean I can’t see the dirt, so scrub hard.” No one who knows anything about the history of race in America can be surprised by lingering black bitterness. Both this anger and the oversensitivity that often fuels it are more than understandable. But that doesn’t mean they should be brushed under the rug. For surely they are as much a problem as white bigotry, something a series like the Times’ should deplore, not make excuses for. Terry’s affecting autobiographical piece was the last in the series and should have been--if the Times editors had been shrewd enough to let the articles stand on their own feet--the last thing in the book. Terry desperately wants to lead an integrated life--to be both white like his mother and black like his father or, better yet, as his father apparently liked to think of him, neither black nor white. But he discovers that he can’t. His family, America, the past, the present and his own racial antenna won’t let him--and so, instead, he chooses what he calls “contentious” blackness, by his own account becoming something of a “racist.” It’s a tragic story and a horribly unfair one--and, pointing as it does to the still unbroken chain of bitterness, a fitting ending for this often powerful and deeply troubling book.