Essay 4115

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

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I’m a racist? Those are fighting words
Blacks understand what white columnist doesn’t: Race matters

BY MARY MITCHELL Sun-Times Columnist

When a white male colleague calls his black female co-worker a racist, what should she do?

Walk down the hall and punch him in the nose?

Of course not. I’d be fired for workplace violence.

But that was exactly what I felt like doing Wednesday when I read Neil Steinberg’s item in which he attacked me (without mentioning my name) for my perspective on the media coverage of Bobby Cutts Jr., the black man who is charged with killing his white pregnant girlfriend in Canton, Ohio.

In my column, I noted that the media pounded the message home that Cutts, the father of three children by three women and carrying on an affair with the victim, Jessie Marie Davis, is a lowlife.

Yet, we tiptoed around the fact that Christopher Vaughn, the white man now charged with killing his wife and three children, was most likely the killer.

Indeed, the Vaughn case was shrouded in mystery, while the Cutts case was so wide open, we knew his personal business almost immediately.

Debate still going on 17 yrs. later
The difference in how these similarly heinous crimes were framed in the media had to do with race, I argued.

And had Cutts murdered a pregnant black woman, we wouldn’t know what she looked like.

In fact, the last time a kidnapped black woman made headlines or the cable news channels (she later turned up dead), her family had to browbeat and shame the cable stations into carrying the story.

As for the Vaughn family -- the media kept harping on the fact that they were the “perfect” family. Now we hear that they weren’t so perfect after all.

Call it what you will, the media are often biased when it comes to covering these issues.

Don’t believe it? Show up at a meeting at the National Association of Black Journalists, Chicago chapter. No matter what the topic, the discussion will end on this subject.

This debate over media bias was going on when I arrived in the newsroom 17 years ago, and it is still going on today.

But Neil Steinberg has become a self-appointed critic of my views on race.

“[T]o claim that Cutts was portrayed in a negative fashion ‘because he is black’ while Vaughn was displayed positively ‘because he is white’ is to a) cry wolf and b) succumb to an inverse kind of racism…,” Steinberg wrote.

First of all, the language in quotes is Steinberg's, not mine.

For the record, this is what I wrote:

“Although just about everyone I spoke with thought Vaughn must have killed his family, he was given the respect due any grieving father by the media. The Vaughns were portrayed as the perfect suburban family, with Christopher Vaughn, a forensic adviser, being described as ‘low-key.’

“For something so sinister to happen, there had to be a lot more negativity going on with this guy than what was being reported. But Vaughn was given the benefit of the doubt in the media, which increases his chances of getting a fair trial.

“Cutts was not.

“The difference in these sensational crimes isn’t character. It’s race.”

3rd explanation not mentioned
Steinberg has the right to disagree with me. In fact, he could have come down the hall, pulled up a chair, and we could have talked about our different perspectives.

Steinberg didn’t do that. He used his platform to label me a racist. That shouldn’t surprise me, since my critics at SCORE radio trashed me, as well, on Tuesday afternoon, prompting a black listener and reader to call me, enraged.

I’m comforted by the fact that a lot of black people knew where I was coming from. And since white people haven’t walked a step in our shoes, they don’t get to tell us what our views on race ought to be, anyway.

Few blacks and whites agree on this subject. And frankly, quiet as kept, most black people couldn’t care less about what white people have to say when it comes to race.

Steinberg -- who can wax poetic about one black woman he doesn’t know in the same column that he takes a cheap shot at one he does – doesn’t have the right to label me a racist even when he wraps the offensive label in clever wit.

There’s a third explanation that Steinberg didn’t mention about why Cutts was portrayed in a negative fashion and Vaughn wasn’t.

Frankly, most often, the people who make the decision about how blacks are characterized in the media look more like Steinberg than they do me.