In the N.Y. Times' Bizarro Universe of Race Relations, the Truth Always Blinks

In the New York Times' Bizarro Universe of Race Relations, the Truth Always Blinks

By Nicholas Stix

August 1, 2002

Toogood Reports

 

Anytime local readers see a story in the New York Times on race relations in New York, they know that they are entering a bizarro, parallel universe, in which black men are routinely victimized by evil, racist whites.

 

A June 16 story, "9/11 Bridged the Racial Divide, New Yorkers Say, Gingerly," was no exception. The story, by Times propaganda officers Dean E. Murphy and David M. Halbfinger, opened by quoting a 25-year-old black man, Daniel Hook, who claimed that he routinely suffered disapproving looks from (white) subway passengers. Then came 911, and the disapproval gave way to acceptance.

 

Funny, but in almost seventeen years in New York, I have yet to see a white subway passenger give a disapproving look to a black man. However, in traveling through every neighborhood in this town, I have received disapproving stares from black passengers at least a thousand times. And I have not seen a thaw in race relations since 911; indeed, in the days after the attacks on America, the black New

Yorkers I encountered acted as if the attacks had never happened. (I had never heard a black man make Daniel Hook's complaint, of  white folks giving him disapproving looks. Before the racial profiling hoax took hold in 1999, the traditional complaint by middle-class, twenty-something black men, was that when white women saw them, they would clutch their bags to their bodies.

 

I suppose Hook fashioned his story for a time in which New York Times "reporters" encourage black men to tell of routinely being stopped and frisked on the way to school or work by white policemen.)

 

Would-be muggers stare me down, as a prelude to an assault and attempted robbery; middle-class black men stare me down, because they have an obsessive need to be feared by whites. A veteran New York Times staff writer, Brent Staples, has bragged in print [Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White] that when he was younger, he would stalk white couples on the subway, just for the joy of terrifying them. But had one of the whites turned around and shot him, and Staples survived, he would surely have cried racism. Indeed, there has long been an unwritten rule in New York, according to which white folks avoid looking at black males in the subway.

 

When I went to college in the Catskill Mountains during the late 1970s, a Jewish neighbor named Cindy from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, said it straight: You don't look BLACK MEN in the eye. At least since the 1980s, white, middle-class New Yorkers have said publicly, that you "don't look ANYONE in the eye," as if folks were afraid of a white or Asian man's reaction.

 

What the white folks don't know, is that middle-class black folks follow the same rule! I know of too many whites and Asians who avoided looking a racist stranger in the eye, who were then beaten, robbed, maimed, even murdered. And so, I stare back. This has dissuaded many would-be attackers, and helped me successfully fight off several attempted muggings and a couple of attempted killings, allowing me to make it into my forty-fifth year. In each case, I was guilty of the crime of TWW — Traveling While White.

 

What white people also don't know, is that the only thing that gets twenty-something, middle-class black men madder than white folks not looking them in the eye, is white folks ... looking them in the eye! I have had middle-class black men who, when I met their stares, and won the stare downs, threatened me, "Someone's goin' to cap [shoot] your ass." To which I replied, "Who's gonna do it? You? I don't think so!" Sometimes, the man in question tried to instigate nearby thugs to attack me. Middle-class black men's complaints about being considered dangerous by whites, are as phony as a three-dollar bill.

 

The New York Times' dishonesty about race relations in New York is sometimes laughable, and sometimes obscene. In the early 1990s, in one of the first editions of the paper's "City" Sunday advertising supplement, the front page story opened with a description of a hulking Asian man staring at straphangers on a subway train. Instructing readers not to go on first impressions, the Times' propaganda officer

explained that the staring man was mentally retarded (the writer didn't

say "mentally retarded"; I'm translating for English speakers). But any New Yorker who'd been around the block COULD trust his first impression: This was a huge Asian guy; thus, he was no threat, whatever his I.Q. was. I have never heard of an Asian fellow staring down subway riders as a prelude to attacking them. For black criminals, however, the staredown—they have a special fondness for Asian riders, who are less likely to fight back — is but a step in a process that ends with a mugging, a maiming, even a murder.

 

(Actually, some young Chinese men are physical threats, but they generally prey only on other Chinese. Back in the early 1990s, when I worked in New York's Chinatown, I was once walking down Henry Street with a Chinese friend and colleague. We were approaching a group of long-haired, young Chinese men hanging out on the stoop of an ancient brownstone, when my friend suddenly crossed the street. "Gang boys," my friend explained.)

 

A year or two after the Asian-on-the-subway story, the Times' City section did a follow-up on the 1990-91 "boycott" of two Korean groceries in Brooklyn's Flatbush section. The Times propaganda officer said that race relations had improved, based on the Korean shopkeepers' enhanced cultural understanding. He claimed that the problems had begun when the Koreans wouldn't look black

customers in the eye.

 

As Mary McCarthy once said to Lillian Hellman, every word in the article was a lie, including "and" and "the." There was no "boycott." What had happened, was that black American gangster and convicted kidnapper, Robert "Sonny" Carson, had decided to run all Korean fruiterers out of Brooklyn. Apparently, Carson was driven mad by the thought of black Brooklynites being able to buy fresh produce. In early November, 1988, on the fiftieth anniversary of Nazi Germany's Kristallnacht, Carson publicly demanded that the Korean shopkeepers pay him extortion. Granted, it is contradictory to seek to run out of business people you want to extort money from, but such contradictions are part and parcel of racism. The racist wants to kill people ... AND torture them ... AND enslave them — all at the same time.

 

The Times and Brooklyn DA Elizabeth Holtzman both ignored Carson's demands, as well as the shopkeepers' pleas that the authorities arrest Carson. To its credit, New York Newsday, the smallest paper in town, published Carson's demands in its Brooklyn insert, but without comment, and its editorial page was silent on the matter. Had the Times, the most powerful daily in town, demanded justice for the Koreans, the DA might have done her job.

 

One of the Korean store managers eventually relocated to Brownsville, Brooklyn, where he was murdered on Halloween night, 1991. Since the Times missed that story, too, it couldn't ask if the murder was committed by Carson's supporters. And then the Times comes along a couple of years later, to blame the Koreans for the whole thing!

 

Self-proclaimed "conservatives" have long described the sort of perversity that holds sway at places like the Times as "liberal [?!] guilt." Guilt has nothing to do with it. These socialists — white and black alike — have a pathological fear of the stares of young black men. That's why so many of them avoid the subways, preferring to travel in taxicabs.

 

A few years ago, a dark-skinned, teddy bear of a security guard named William Jackson, told me of an experience he'd had in the subway. Seeing a famous, light-skinned black man sitting opposite, he looked at the man. Suddenly gripped with fear, the man clutched his bag close to his body, like the proverbial white woman of black men's complaints. But this black man was Mario Van Peebles, director of the movie Panther, who was famous for his support of genocidal, black supremacists.

 

I guess supporting murderous black thugs is easier done in the movies than in reality. The New York Times would have less of a credibility problem, if it ceased publishing any stories on race relations in New York. About that which one will not speak honestly, one ought to remain silent.