My favorite journalist is Leonard Pitts, Jr. of the Miami Herald. He writes an op-ed piece every Sunday that also appears in the Seattle Times. He won the most coveted award in 2004, the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He writes thought-provoking columns on wide-ranging issues that affect our society, and whether you agree with him or not, he makes you think. I happen to agree with almost everything he has written.
Today's column is on the disturbing trend of the noose. The noose that has been displayed as a sign of hatred toward African-Americans. Here is an excerpt from the column:
"A noose is left for a black workman at a construction site in the Chicago area. In Queens, a woman brandishes a noose to threaten her black neighbors. A noose is left on the door of a black professor at Columbia University. And that's just last week. Go back a little further and you have similar incidents at the University of Maryland in College Park, at a police department on Long Island, on a Coast Guard cutter, in a bus maintenance garage in Pittsburgh.
Mark Potok, the director of the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told USA Today, 'For a dozen incidents to come to the public's attention is a lot. I don't generally see noose incidents in a typical month. We might hear about a handful in a year.'
The superintendent of schools in Jena famously dismissed the original incident as a 'prank.' It was an astonishing response, speaking volumes about the blithe historical ignorance of people who have found it convenient not to peer too closely at the atrocities of the past lest they be accidentally . . . moved."
In the column, Pitts discusses the history of the rope/noose as a symbol of hate toward African-Americans. It is an ugly part of American history that African-Americans were lynched from trees, and even though that doesn't happen anymore, racism is still alive and well, both subtly and overtly.
What disturbs me, however, are the comments that I read in response to Pitts' column. It's the same phenomenon I saw with the Don Imus scandal. There are definitely people who do not view the world through the same lens as people who have experienced racism. They absolutely cannot see the racist acts in the displaying of the noose and dismiss them as "pranks." Their outrage is reserved for Pitts, as opposed to the perpetrators of these heinous acts.
I just recently received a blog post from a friend, Patti Digh, who talked about the racism that still exists in our country. I am reminded of it everyday when I read posts such as the diatribes against Leonard Pitts. I am reminded of it when I stand in line at the grocery store and see cover story after cover story about pretty white women and girls who are missing, but have yet to hear about one woman of color or one little girl of color on the national news. Wait, I take that back, on The Today Show, there was one story about an African-American woman who went missing, and there was NEVER a follow-up story. NEVER. Not the 24-7 coverage that Laci Peterson, Lori Hacking and Chandra Levy warranted.
Our society seems to care more about a runaway bride than a 9-year-old African-American girl who is shot in the head when caught in the middle of a firefight in the housing projects of Miami. Pitts wrote in his column that this violence, this sacrifice of children was symptomatic of an American problem. The response to Pitts: No, it's not our problem. It's your problem. It's your problem. It's a black problem. Pitts' response: So I guess it's only an American problem when white schools and colleges get shot to pieces.
My friend Patti wrote something in her blog that sums this up perfectly:
"Hate crimes won't end until those of us who are not hated are as outraged as those who are."
