Gray Lady Down. William McGowan
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Название: Gray Lady Down
Автор: William McGowan
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9781594035326
isbn:
As far back as 1990, the education reporter Suzanne Daley produced a fairly critical report on Afrocentric education, quoting experts who questioned whether history should become an exercise in self-esteem, emphasizing what many experts called the pedagogical “slipperiness” of Afrocentrism, and explaining that much of its curriculum accented white scholarly conspiracies against African achievement. Daley’s report set off protests by black staffers, who ensured that subsequent treatments of the subject were much more flattering and made supporters sound more convincing than critics. In one of those later treatments, Calvin Sims, a black reporter, claimed that the “scholarly underpinnings” of Afrocentric theories and curricula were “firm” and based on “the work of scholars who are trained in the ancient classics of northern Europe and Africa.”
The Times also affirms separatist values in its coverage of the black family and the problem of illegitimacy. As already noted, back in the 1960s the paper had no problem with making value judgments about black illegitimacy. It gave sympathetic treatment to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report on the cultural disarray of “the negro family,” which was attacked by civil rights leaders and leftist publications. The Times reporter John Herbers explained that Moynihan’s work was not intended to fuel contempt for black Americans by drawing attention to the problem of illegitimacy; rather, its purpose was to show that “white America by means of slavery, humiliation and unemployment has so degraded the Negro male that most lower class Negro families are headed by females.” This, Herbers quoted Moynihan approvingly, had made it impossible for “Negroes as a group to compete on even terms in the US.”
Today the general public has no trouble seeing the prophetic nature of Moynihan’s argument. In 1965, when he first tried to draw attention to the problem, the rate of black illegitimacy was 25 percent; by 2009 it was 70 percent. A consensus has emerged on solutions, emphasizing welfare reform, which it is hoped will make young, out-of-wedlock motherhood an undesirable experience for teenage girls. But for most of the last two decades, when the debate has been sharpest, the Times has been reluctant to admit that the issue is serious and has disparaged proposals floated to address it.
The Times has been remiss, too, in reporting on social policy for dysfunctional black families and their relationship to the foster care system in New York City. In the early 1990s, the city began an experiment aimed at better protecting the black and Latino children whose parents have lost custody to the foster care system. The experiment was the work of Robert Little, the brother of Malcolm X and himself a former foster child, who believed that black children placed in white foster homes would lose their “black identity.” This racist assumption was shared most ardently by a child welfare advocate named Luis Medina, who believed, as the Times would write in late 2007, “that foster care in New York had become an evil and racist system that was engaged in little more than rounding up poor minority children.” At another point, Medina said the foster care system felt like “some version of apartheid.”
Medina took over a venerable child care agency called St. Christopher’s, based up the Hudson River in Dobbs Ferry, New York. As the Times retroactively explained,
He hired additional black and Latino caseworkers, and made a priority of appointing minorities to the agency’s board of directors. He promised to recruit local foster parents from the same neighborhoods as the children coming into their care. He argued that black and Latino families had a “sacred right” to stay together, and pledged that his agency would do everything it could to keep intact the families torn by poverty, illness and drugs.
As a symbolic touch, Medina ordered that the pictures of white children at the agency’s administrative office be replaced with pictures of black and Latino children.
Eventually, St. Christopher’s would expand, opening offices in the Bronx and in Harlem. But Medina’s ideology began to divide the staff, and some felt there was too much operational chaos. “Mr. Medina’s main Bronx office became overrun by parents, some of whom were dangerous and some of whom came simply to hang out,” the Times wrote in 2007. “The presence of the parents—often confused or furious—and a chronic shortage of staff created disorder, particularly during visiting hours with their children. Telephones could go unanswered, dirty diapers often collected in the corners, toilets went unfixed, fights broke out, children were snatched.”
According to Starr Lozada, a caseworker based in Medina’s River Avenue office in the Bronx in 2004, “The birth parents would come and hang out all day. Maybe they would come for the breakfast. Talk with each other. Stay until we closed.” The parents would bring in people from the neighborhood, and there would be screaming and carrying on. “We felt unsafe,” Lozada said.
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