Just more proof as to how difficult it is to talk about race in today’s America. Former Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans can call his city “Chocolate City” but talking about crime in Philadelphia, Chicago, or Detroit automatically makes one a bigot while Chris Matthews says that the word “Chicago” is a dog whistle, which is a nice way to stifle all debate. The Left’s love of the First Amendment is only skin deep.
by Philip Sherwell
When Robert Huber visits his son at the apartment he rents with friends near his college campus in north Philadelphia, he admits that he is filled with a sense of foreboding.
Temple University has a strong academic reputation, but it is also located in an area of Philadelphia that has long been plagued by urban decay. The students are prime targets for crime, a policeman noted to Mr Huber, a long-time resident of the city.
The number of burglaries and robberies is high, drug dealing is rampant, and gangs of young men mill around, day and night, on the steps of town houses with broken windows and padlocked front doors.
The neighbourhoods of north Philadelphia are also predominantly African-American.
During those visits, said Mr Huber, he realised that he and his fellow white Philadelphians do not just try to avoid those areas physically but also do their best to erase them from their minds, as they dodge that most loaded of subjects in America – race.
Mr Huber, a writer, sought to address this in a detailed exploration of race in one of American’s biggest and most segregated cities for this month’s edition of Philadelphia magazine. And he wrote it from the perspective of fellow whites in the city.
The unvarnished result was Being White in Philly. It has been praised by some as a thoughtful insight into this most sensitive of subjects, but denounced by many – both black and white – for perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes in a one-sided depiction based on the prejudiced views of unidentified whites.
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He has certainly achieved that wish. In a country where the legacy of slavery, segregation and discrimination still burn deep, the article in a city magazine has sparked a bout of national soul-searching.
Half a century after Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech about race equality, and more than four years after the first African-American president took office, the uproar illustrates how sensitive the issue remains in America.
That this debate is playing out in Philadelphia only deepens the soul-searching, given the role that the city has in the country’s psyche.
The City of Brotherly Love – its motto is the translation of its name from the Greek – was the location for the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the adoption of the US Constitution in 1787. The First Amendment to that document enshrines the cherished principles of freedom of speech and religion.
The fact that the editorial staff of Philadelphia magazine is entirely white has fuelled the uproar. The publication’s only African-American employee, who works as an events planner, published a commentary in The Philadelphia Inquirer last weekend.
In The Only Black Person in the Room, Adrienne Simpson called the cover story a “lopsided, conflagrant editorial – that teetered on the brink of fear-mongering”.
The backlash has been led by Michael Nutter, the mayor, who condemned the magazine for portraying “an ethnic group that, in its entirety, is lazy, shiftless, irresponsible, and largely criminal”.
In his letter to the city human relations commission, its equal opportunities agency, he excoriated the publication for the “reckless equivalent of shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre” – and labelled “its prejudiced, fact-challenged generalisations an incitement to extreme reaction”.
He asked the commission to consider a “rebuke” of the magazine and writer “in light of the potentially inflammatory effect and the reckless endangerment to Philadelphia’s racial relations”.
But the mayor, who was travelling in Italy and unavailable for comment last week, has in turn been criticised for trying to intimidate free speech with his damning response.
Tom McGrath, the editor, is fighting back. “I applaud the mayor for asking for an inquiry into the state of racial issues in Philadelphia,” he said. [.......]
“Like any reader, the mayor is entitled to think and say what he wants about the story. [But] his statements about the magazine and mischaracterisation of the piece make me wonder if he’s more interested in scoring political points than having a serious conversation about the issues.
“Furthermore, his call for a ‘rebuke’ of the magazine by the commission is rich with irony… the mayor loves the First Amendment – as long as he and the government can control what gets said.”
Mr Huber’s article lards his personal observations on the state of race relations in the city with the anecdotes he collected over several weeks in Fairmount, a gentrifying mostly white neighbourhood of younger incomers and older residents. All those he quotes are identified by first name only.
Fairmount is separated by a wide highway from North Philadelphia, home to what he calls “a vast and seemingly permanent black underclass”.
Among the stories he relates is that of “Dennis”, a 26-year-old teacher in an inner city school, who described an episode after he called a disruptive young teen “boy” – technically correct, but a term once used disparagingly by whites to refer to black men of any age.
The child’s stepfather came to the school and accused Dennis of being a racist. “Dennis apologised, knowing how loaded the term ‘boy’ was and regretting that he’d used it, though he was thinking, ‘Why would I be teaching in an inner-city school if I’m a racist?’,” Mr Huber writes.
“The stepfather calmed down, and that would have been the end of it, except for one thing: the student’s behaviour got worse. [........]
Anna, a Russian-born lawyer quoted was scathing in her comments. “I’ve been here for two years, I’m almost done,” she said. “Blacks use skin colour as an excuse. Discrimination is an excuse, instead of moving forward… Why do you support them when they won’t work, just make babies and smoking pot?”
Whites from Philadelphia, Mr Huber notes, are more wary about expressing such opinions, even if they hold them. Indeed, he argues that many whites are willing to excuse poor behaviour by African-Americans because of the country’s recent past.
“Our racial history, as horrible and daunting as it is, has created a certain tolerance of how things operate in the neighbourhood, an acceptance of an edgy status quo,” he writes.
John, 87, a retired office worker quoted in the article, showed little such reticence as he narrated muggings and robberies by blacks. He said that former black neighbours were “working people, nice people, lovely people” but then used a common racial epithet and “boy” to describe a stranger he said had broken into his home.
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In North Philadelphia, his portrayal was denounced last week as one-sided, racist, simplistic, insulting and inflammatory. “He is mixing up race with class and poverty,” Monica Peters, an African-American public relations professional who lives in the area he describes, told The Sunday Telegraph. “You can go to poor white and Latino and Asian communities in this country and you will witness just the same problems.
“The article is racist and it’s morally unacceptable. He has taken a small demographic and given the impression that it represents the African-American community as a whole. Even here in North Philly, one block can be very nice and the next one you can see these issues.”
Yet the comments expressed by the unidentified characters in “Being White in Philly” are not so different to those expressed by a fellow Philadelphian in a fiery speech in 2011 – except on that occasion it was Mr Nutter, speaking from a church pulpit in response to a spate of attacks by so-called “flash mobs” of black youths in downtown Philadelphia.
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He railed against young men in hoodies and low-hanging jeans who take no part in the upbringing of their offspring, and warned parents who neglect their children that they would be “spending some quality time with your kids” in jail.
“The Immaculate Conception of our Lord Jesus Christ took place a long time ago, and it didn’t happen here in Philadelphia,” he said. “To fathers: if you’re not providing the guidance, and you’re not sending any money, you’re just a sperm donor.”
Mr Huber ends his piece with his yearning for “a city in which it is okay to speak openly about race”. And then he concludes: “Meanwhile, when I drive through North Philly to visit my son, I continue to feel both profoundly sad and a blind desire to escape. Though I wonder: am I allowed to say even that?” His critics would answer that question “Not like this, no”, it seems.
Read the rest – ‘Being White in Philly’: America agonises over race and free speech after article sparks furore