The Faces of Racism

A response to a Philadelphia Inquirer editorial.

by Michael Washburn

A group of teens, one of them packing heat, crosses the line from one Philly neighborhood to another looking for trouble. They are out to commit racially motivated robbery and mayhem, and before the end of the day, one of them claims a 17-year-old victim.

In a separate incident, a couple trying to resettle in a working-class Philly neighborhood are horrified to find racist graffiti painted on the walls of their new house — calling for members of their race to stay away.

Which of these two incidents made it into The Philadelphia Inquirer's Dec. 15 editorial about "Racism in Philadelphia"? The editorial preached about the sin of racism in this town. You might guess the former, but it's the latter. The former case is the murder of a white, Robert Pierson, by a group of black teens who had ventured in Fairmount, and the latter, a case that arose when a black couple tried to move into Port Richmond.

City Paper managing editor Brian Hickey, who covered Pierson's killing in stories like "Murder, in Black and White" [Philly Blunt, Aug. 16, 2007], correctly noted that if the races were flipped in the Pierson case, it would be a national scandal. But the Inquirer evidently doesn't consider a crime to be a racist outrage when the victim is white, even if the killers uttered racial slurs and the crime is symptomatic of attitudes widely shared in the black neighborhood from whence the killers emerged. The definition of a racist outrage encompasses offenses large and small — while leaving anti-white obscenities untouched.

Admittedly, it's not just the Inquirer that shies away from addressing a thorny problem. The hypocrisy has been around for a while. Late Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko wrote about a national scandal that arose when two white Chicago police officers picked up a couple of black kids and dropped them off in a black-hating Polish neighborhood. Royko then described a case in which two white girls were riding a bus through Chicago. A black man asked the girls, "Am I your uncle?" to which a black female passenger replied, "He can't be your uncle because you is a white honky." The black man then took out a straight razor and slashed the two girls, mangling one of them so badly that she could have stuck her tongue out without opening her mouth.

A national scandal? Not quite. The New York Times had no plans to report the story, Royko wrote, and it went under the radar elsewhere. So does the daily harassment of Asian shopkeepers by young blacks in many cities, and the vast majority of racially motivated violent crimes by blacks.

Here in Philadelphia, there are neighborhoods where a white traveler would be ill-advised to step out of his car — the mere sight of white skin would get the interloper into a whole spot of trouble in certain corners. You know it, Mayor-elect Nutter knows it, the Inquirer editorial staff knows it, but no one is willing to address this issue frankly.

But the most interesting part of the Inquirer's editorial mentioned Building Trades Council leader Pat Gillespie's performance before the City Council. It suggested that Gillespie didn't want to acknowledge the low number of minorities in construction unions. To the Inquirer, low participation of minorities in any sector is a priori evidence of racism. Instead of asking some obvious questions — how many qualified minority applicants were there, and how many openings? — the Inquirer smeared the council and its leader, irresponsibly, illogically, and in lieu of addressing real racism.

Michael Washburn is a local writer and editor.