What's Wrong With the Media? Plenty!

OK, so I haven't been sleeping well: too much on my mind although at least I have stopped checking for anyone I ever knew on the interactive Madoff client list. (My husband just handed me the March 2009 issue of Conde Nast Portfolio which has a cover story about Bernie, which I will read later tonight.) This morning I gave up pretending to sleep at 5:00 and while working out to try to energize myself, I channel surfed.

Everything on cable news was about Eric Holder's speech yesterday on race. What disturbed me was that there wasn't much difference in the way it was reported on Fox News, Morning Joe, and CNN.

The sound bite was: Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.

And most of the commentators, foaming at the mouth, were furious that Holder, the first African American Attorney General serving the first African American President, seemed so pessimistic about the state of race relations in this country. How can that be? Didn't white people vote for Barack Obama? Doesn't that mean that we are post-racial?

First, let's look at the numbers of white people who did vote for Obama. It wasn't a majority. According to Pollster.com: There is considerable variation in the percentage of whites who voted for Obama. Where African Americans made up less than 20% of the vote (according to exit polls), whites varied from 30% to 60% in their support for Obama but with no relationship to the size of the African American vote. As the African American electorate rose above 20%, white support for Obama fell sharply to barely 10%.

So let's not delude ourselves into believing we are living in some kind of suddenly racially clean world.

Second, how about reading what Eric Holder actually said? I suspect that none of the commentators did, because every one of them wildly distorted a very nuanced and interesting speech. It was too long for them, probably. But if we aren't in a post-racial world, perhaps we can insist on being in a post-sound bite world.

Here is the text of the speech.

Not only did Holder say we didn't know how to speak with each other comfortably about race, he noted that although we are working together, we live voluntarily segregated lives:

As a nation we have done a pretty good job in melding the races in the workplace. We work with one another, lunch together and, when the event is at the workplace during work hours or shortly thereafter, we socialize with one another fairly well, irrespective of race. And yet even this interaction operates within certain limitations. We know, by "American instinct" and by learned behavior, that certain subjects are off limits and that to explore them risks, at best embarrassment, and, at worst, the questioning of one’s character. And outside the workplace the situation is even more bleak in that there is almost no significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some fifty years ago. This is truly sad. Given all that we as a nation went through during the civil rights struggle it is hard for me to accept that the result of those efforts was to create an America that is more prosperous, more positively race conscious and yet is voluntarily socially segregated.

And just when we thought we might be willing to take a baby step towards racial harmony, that paragon of journalism, the New York Post, published a cartoon, which is at best ambiguous, and at its worst, downright incendiary and racist. You can find the cartoon yourself. It disgusted me.