Last Sunday, I wrote about an article that had appeared in The Post’s Sunday Outlook section a week earlier by staff writer Natalie Hopkinson, who is African American. Her piece was headlined “I Won’t Let D.C. Lose Its Flavor.” It describes her purchase of a house, with her husband, in a black, inner-city neighborhood and says, among many other things, that: “We damn sure are not about to let white folks buy up all the property in D.C.”
Many readers had written or called me to complain about what they felt was a “racist” article that would not have been tolerated if a white reporter or writer expressed such thoughts about blacks. In my column I attempted to summarize what Ms. Hopkinson said and also report the defense of her work by Outlook editor Steve Luxenberg. Then I concluded with my own views: that the author’s thoughts were worth knowing but that they were presented in inflammatory, in-your-face, racial rhetoric that alienated many readers rather than illuminating a complicated issue. However, I stopped short of calling it racist. “I wouldn’t label that racist,” I wrote, “because she was calling on blacks to act not so much against whites but in their own interest as she perceives it.”
Last week I got mail from several readers who were now not only angry at, and disappointed with, Hopkinson and The Post but with me as well. My column, one reader said, “reads more like damage control than an honest analysis of Hopkinson’s article and the reasons for publishing it. To borrow a line from a Post advertisement, you and The Post just ‘don’t get it.’ ” Another writes: “If you cannot see that Ms. Hopkinson’s views are overtly racist, clearly you are either a hypocrite or a fool.”
Last week’s ombudsman’s column “would appear to make it official: The Washington Post believes that racism is acceptable when, and only when, it flows from the pen of a black writer,” said another reader. And another adds: “I had much more problem with Mr. Getler’s attempt to deny the clear racism” in Ms. Hopkinson’s article. “To refuse to accept racism — by definition the act or practice of assigning race first place in an action or argument — is to act less responsibly than Ms. Hopkinson.” Yes, said another letter, “blacks are coming from a different place in American history . . . but I do not see this fact as allowing exception for racist ideas and attitudes.”
In their fullness, these were good, thoughtful letters, and they focused properly on the line I had most trouble with; that I would not label her article as racist. Using dictionary definitions, the article could be labeled racist. And I asked myself, at the time, whether I was ducking or pulling my punches or condescending. But my feeling then, and now, is one of uncertainty, in which the author gets the benefit of my doubt. Racist is a harsh label, not easily taken back, and I wasn’t confident that it fit in this case: a 24-year-old African American journalist, with a new family, buying, with her husband, her first house and speaking out forcefully, perhaps naively, about what she thought was best for her new neighborhood and its culture.
I thought there was a great deal that was offensive and divisive about this article, and that it was journalistically flimsy in addressing a controversial topic — based mostly on how many white faces she saw at open houses and a meeting she didn’t attend. Yet it was commentary and an authentic expression of the emotions felt by one young, black family, and maybe many others.
Blacks and whites do come from different places in American history, and I have never felt personally confident that a white person could fully understand what it is to be black, how so many things that whites take for granted are seen and felt by blacks through the prism of race, how race must infuse so much of what happens to them, bad and good. That uncertainty is about the only thing I felt confident about in this case when it comes to labels.
