President Barack Obama’s speech to the NAACP’s 100th national convention was heard through a racial prism.
White journalists wrote about Obama’s call for African Americans to take “personal responsibility.”
Meanwhile, black journalists focused on Obama acknowledging the “pain of discrimination is still felt in America.”
Indeed, the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for breaking into his own home shatters the illusion of a post-racial America. Ironically, Gates is represented by one of Obama’s mentors, Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr.
Obama took note of the disparate media narratives. He told Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson:
I’ve noticed that when I talk about personal responsibility in the African American community, that gets highlighted. But then the whole other half of the speech, where I talked about government’s responsibility . . . that somehow doesn’t make news.
My colleague Richard Prince wrote:
Under one widely criticized headline, the New York Times summarized the speech as, “Obama Tells Fellow Blacks: ‘No Excuses’ for Failure” in a story by the Washington bureau’s Sheryl Gay Stolberg.
Black journalists I know are questioning how some media outlets — including the New York Times — seemed to jump on Obama’s pleas for more personal responsibility with headlines like ‘No Excuses for Failure’ while downplaying other parts of his speech that talked about continuing problems with racial discrimination in America,” Eugene Kane, columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, wrote Friday in his blog.
In the new news ecosystem, black folks must write the first draft of their history. Otherwise, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.
