This "Crime Scene" column in The New York Times is surely, if nothing else, persistent.
It is a throwback to yesteryear, when poor but hopeful whites from across the pond -- from Ireland, Italy and the Jewish ghettos of Europe -- came to this city of hope seeking freedom and (even they would concede) lots of money.
The one thing they found in their new land that gave them a feeling of haute privilege was an underclass of blacks, who were forcibly contained within ghettos through policing patterns that made criminals of black males.
These patterns are documented in the book "Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America," written by Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research into Black Culture.
"Condemnation of Blackness" was published last year by Harvard University Press.
We now sadly find that many of those old race-based patterns of the city police department (and, yes, of New York City's newspapers) are alive and functioning.
Take the New York Times. We wrote earlier this year about the urber gentry tendencies of that broadsheet, a broadsheet with a cold and narrow perspective when it comes to people of color in the city it claims to serve.
Earlier this year, The Times column called "Crime Scene" wrote bafflingly hostile articles about Blacks of Bedford Stuyvesant, effectively saying they were not worthy of treatment as crime victims and that they were, in fact, largely the perpetrators of crimes.
Only whites could be defended as victims and cried over, the writer Michael Wilson suggested time and again in articles.
The tone and content were a throwback to a time (the 1800s to the 1960s), when Irish reporters and cops ran the battleground of crime-fighting in New York, and decided who merited empathy and rescue.
This mentality today churns against time and exists still at the self-denominated newspaper of record. I have a friend (a former top editor at a New York newspaper) who told me -- agreeing with my posts about the Crime Scene -- that The Times should relinquish local coverage, that it should just give it up -- to bloggers and others who seem to truly understand and care for the neighborhoods of the city, neighborhoods vast in socio-economic makeup and complexion.
[For one past BrooklyRon reflection on the Crime Scene topic, you can click here. For the first Crime Scene column that ticked me and many other Black New Yorkers off, click here. Note: Other BrooklynRon articles about this issue have appeared in The Amsterdam newspaper and a Central Brooklyn publication called Our Time Press.)
As for a quick description of Crime Scene, let's say it uses an us-versus-them Walter Winchell style; it appears to follow an ancient calls from within, howling about white victims and black perps; and for some reason, it is at is most repugnant when it comes to Bedford Stuyvesant (a neighborhood that, I confess, I love).
And now, lo, at the end of the year, the Crime Scene pats itself on the back for the articles it has done over these months. It singles out, in obnoxious arriviste fasion, the very stories it did portraying Bed-Stuy as a place where Blacks run wild robbing and killing Whites.
Clearly, the writer Michael Wilson has like-minded editors at his back. I say this because (by admission of the paper's top editor) The Times is like a religion, a very top-down religion, we might add, where such raggy sIandering of an entire people would not be allowed without the tolerance of the paper's college of cardinals and its pope.
If you want to read the Times articles that I refer to, you can Google them. I really don't feel like feeding the paper's advertisers or sullying this page with its links.
Post Script:
Ok. I was lazy. Friends have asked me to cite some of the New York Times Crime Scene columns. I’ll give you a few here.
(Please note that there are others from 2011 that I’ve written about because I’ve found them to be arrogantly out of touch with life as experienced especially by young black men in the city.)
The first one is the Crime Scene article that finds an interracial group of young men and singles them out as victims of runaway crime committed by blacks in Bed-Stuy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/nyregion/saved-by-the-cops-band-nearly-loses-everything-in-bed-stuy.html
(My answer to this one on the interracial musicians is here: http://www.brooklynron.com/2011/07/nytimes.html)
The below Crime Scene column singles out a European immigrant who made the unfortunate mistake on 9/11 of ending up in Bed-Stuy where he became victim of an assault, it seems, that was fatal. (Crime Scene has a pattern, I should tell you, of writing about white victims and black perps such as when Michael Wilson, the consistent writer of Crime Scene, as when he got a black murderer to talk about his killing of his white Staten Island girlfriend decades ago, with the purpose of the article being -- so it seemed to me – to make sure the black killer was not released after a coming Parole Board hearing. Once again, it’s the old 1950s tendency to see only whites as true crime victims and black males natural criminals. I know this because I used to be a reporter 30 years ago for The New York Daily News.
Here’s the immigrant piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/10/nyregion/brooklyn-murder-on-sept-11-2001-remains-unsolved.html
What led to write most recently was Michael Wilson’s end-of-year wrap-up essentially spitting in the faces of those many black people over the year who have told me they totally agree with everything I’ve written about this.
Here it is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/nyregion/diverging-paths-of-victims-can-hit-dead-ends.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=crimescene&adxnnlx=1325164021-PSNsW4gOUv9QR9njxhhFJQ