These were all exceptional people, all right; but, among Black people, they're not exceptions. We've got plenty of them--and their varied careers, activities and personalities show there are many ways Blacks have fought and do fight to eliminate the vestiges of racism in the society. Looking back at the life of Phyllis Wallace and Arthur Ashe, for example, it's clear that, albeit differences of personality, they were every bit as racially aware and committed to pushing racial change as Thurgood Marshall. And who will argue that Dizzy, among his many achievements, did not contribute to the advancement of Black America?
Such evidence of the complexity of Black America is almost never to be seen in the White Media. Why? Because it's too threatening to the simplistic, negative racial views some significant portion of White America--including some in the media--is still desperately trying to hold onto. That's the reason negative ethnic based generalizations about Black people are all too often asserted quickly and with relish in the White Media when it's a matter of a Leonard Jeffries, a Mike Tyson, or a tragically self-destructive Marion Barry--and why positive ethnic-based generalizations are absent from any consideration of a Phyllis Wallace, a Dizzy Gillespie, or a Charlayne Hunter-Gault.
Indeed, one can discern the potency of the force of racism still at play in the White Media from the controversy which erupted last month when USA Today published on its Feb. 16 front page a photograph of five angry-looking young Black men holding guns to accompany a story about gang violence in Los Angeles.
As it turns out, the men were planning to give up their weapons as part of a jobs-for-guns program and had initially showed up to meet with the reporter without them. It was the reporter who wanted guns in the picture--even to the point of driving one of the men home to get his rifle.
To its credit, USA Today condemned the reporter's deceit, and suspended and fined him. Nonetheless, damage has been done.
"It was an out-and-out blatant lie," one of the men said in a Feb. 20 Washington Post story. "They wrote what they wanted, what would get more papers sold. Our intention was to give up guns, to get some jobs, to better ourselves. They portrayed us as hard-core criminal gang members who are ready to incite a riot."
Usually, the White Media's labelling of African Americans as a problem people is put more subtly--an unsubstantiated derogatory assertion here, an omission of fact or context there. But the cumulative effect is just as harmful. Which is why the exceptions are all the more instructive.
Last June 18, The New York times reported that after the post-Rodney King verdict riots in Los Angelles, the Walt Disney company committed itself to hiring 200 young people from poverty-stricken South-Central Los Angeles.
The Times news story, headlined "job Opportunities Bring out Young people (and their Idealism) in Riot Area," and subsequent editorial pointed out that, although the jobs involved a two-hour commute from South-Central L.A., more than 600 people turned out to interview for them.
It also noted that their numbers and quality astonished the Disney company executives. "They were wonderful kids, outstanding kids," the times quoted a Disney company executive as saying. "We didn't know they were there."
No wonder they didn't know. They had taken what's too often said and implied in the White Media about Black people as Truth.
Lee A. Daniels '71 is an Institute of Politics Fellow and a former reporter for The New York Times.