We noted, near the end of May, the opinion piece by Elizabeth Hughes, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer. In it, Miss Hughes began:
June 2 will mark a year since The Philadelphia Inquirer published this racist headline: “Buildings Matter, Too.”
If printing those words in 72-point type had occurred in a vacuum, it would have been a grievous and unpardonable offense. That it was published at a moment of national reckoning over social justice — prompted by the vicious murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police a year ago yesterday — amplified the outrage and brought us well-deserved scorn and scrutiny.
There is somewhat of a playbook whenever a self-inflicted crisis like this threatens to define any institution and the people who work for it. And so it played out here. Apologies were issued, a change in newsroom leadership was announced, earnest promises of reform and redress were made.
By “a change in newsroom leadership was announced,” the publisher was saying that Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Stan Wischnowski was fired forced to resign.
I will admit it: I do not see how the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” is racist, especially in a city founded in 1682, 99 years before we won our independence at the Battle of Yorktown, a city in which our Declaration of Independence was signed, and a city with surviving 18th century residences.
What did the Buildings Matter, Too article actually say?
Does the destruction of buildings matter when black Americans are being brazenly murdered in cold blood by police and vigilantes?
That’s the question that has been raging on the streets of Philadelphia, and across my architecture-centric social media feeds, over the last two days as a dark cloud of smoke spiraled up from Center City. What started as a poignant and peaceful protest in Dilworth Park on Saturday morning ended up in a frenzy of destruction by evening. Hardly any building on Walnut and Chestnut Streets was left unscathed, and two mid-19th century structures just east of Rittenhouse Square were gutted by fire.
Their chances of survival are slim, which means there could soon be a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia, in one of its most iconic and historic neighborhoods. And protesters moved on to West Philadelphia’s fragile 52nd Street shopping corridor, an important center of black life, where yet more property has been battered.
It seems as though Inga Saffron, the article author and architecture writer for the Inquirer, was concerned about buildings, historic buildings, in some heavily black neighborhoods.
So now we come to Malav Kanuga, a researcher with the Media, Inequality, and Change Center and a cooperative member of Making Worlds Bookstore and Social Center in West Philadelphia. He was granted OpEd space by the editors of the Inquirer:
It is time for a deep reckoning of our existing media system and the role it often plays in reflecting classist and racist interests that threaten safety for all.
by Malav Kanuga | July 5, 2021
In the last year, organizers and activists, youth and elders in Philadelphia and across the country came together to sustain perhaps the largest mobilization against police violence in U.S. history. Between May 26, 2020, and the end of that June, the country averaged 140 demonstrations a day.
This movement also compelled deeper reflection inside local and national newsrooms about their role in upholding police narratives and their responsibility to challenge systemic racism in their reporting.
A year since the uprisings in response to the police murder of George Floyd, we don’t just need diversity and inclusion initiatives and sensitivity trainings on white privilege in newsrooms. We need an anti-racist media system.
Wait, what? Mr Kanuga is saying that “we need an anti-racist media system,” but isn’t that exactly what the Inquirer’s publisher already promised?
If our call then was to become an anti-racist news organization, what has been done?
Apparently, Mr Kanuga thinks Miss Hughes has yet to accomplish, or even come close to her goals:
An anti-racist media system means addressing the real dangers that our media system puts on Black, Indigenous, migrants, and communities of color in our city, and no longer shirking the responsibility to answer calls for redress and reparations to historical and ongoing harms.
Well, one thing is certainly true about that: the
Inquirer only rarely reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love.
I’ve told the
truth previously: unless the murder victim is
someone already of note, or
a cute little white girl, the editors of the
Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is not news. The paper
paid more attention to the
accidental killing of
Jason Kutt, a white teenager
shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s four separate stories; how many do the mostly black victims get?
On Friday, December 11, 2020, columnist Helen Ubiñas published an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer entitled “What do you know about the Philadelphians killed by guns this year? At least know their names.”
The last time we published the names of those lost to gun violence, in early July, nearly 200 people had been fatally shot in the city.
Just weeks before the end of 2020, that number doubled. More than 400 people gunned down.
By the time you read this, there will only be more.
Even in a “normal” year, most of their stories would never be told.
At best they’d be reduced to a handful of lines in a media alert:
“A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head. He was transported to Temple University Hospital and was pronounced at 8:12 p.m. The scene is being held, no weapon recovered and no arrest.”
That’s it. An entire life ending in a paragraph that may never make the daily newspaper.
Of course, Miss Ubiñas followed the Inquirer’s stylebook in claiming that these Philadelphians were “killed by guns.” No, they were killed by bad people, people who used guns as their tools. But the Inquirer doesn’t want to ever say that part. Nevertheless, she confirmed what I said about the paper’s coverage of homicides in Philadelphia.
But more coverage of homicides is not what Mr Kanuga wants:
This requires abolishing harmful narratives that criminalize people experiencing the trauma of poverty stemming from the systemic withholding of resources. It means journalism ending the reinforcement of police-centered solutions to social welfare issues, instead promoting, for example, mental health alternatives to the typical police responses that led to their murder of Walter Wallace Jr. last October.
Of course, Mr Wallace wasn’t murdered; the police acted within their training, in dealing with an armed man advancing on them, a man on whom the police had been called four times that day. A “mental health alternative” to Mr Wallace? Yeah, that would have gotten a social worker or two stabbed, possibly to death, by Mr Wallace.
Channel 10, the NBC station in Philadelphia, reported:
A review of the 1,316 homicides in Philadelphia between January 1, 2018 and March 22, 2021 shows:
- 6% of Philadelphia murder victims are White. Police made an arrest in 63% of those cases.
- 82% of Philadelphia murder victims are Black. Police made an arrest in 33% of those cases.
- 11% of Philadelphia murder victims are Hispanic. Police made an arrest in 38% of those cases.
- Less than 1% of Philadelphia murder victims are Asian. Police made an arrest in 55% of those cases.
When asked why arrests rates lag when a murder victim is a person of color, the head of the Philadelphia Police homicide unit cited witness cooperation.
“We need the cooperation of the community,” Capt. Jason Smith said. “Without the cooperation of the community, we are not going to be able to effectively do our jobs.”
What does Mr Kanuga want? “abolishing harmful narratives that criminalize people” means concealing what everybody already knows: that black Philadelphians are being murdered at a prodigious rate in Philadelphia, and that the vast majority of their killers, when known, are also black. More, as Captain Smith noted, people within the city’s black community would rather the killing of one of their own go unsolved than see another member of their community go to jail for it.
This includes challenging routine newsroom reporting practices that play a part in silencing community voices and eliding their experiences and needs in a city that has overpoliced and economically under-resourced much of its Black and Brown communities. It involves pushing newsrooms to meet with community organizations to have honest conversations about coverage on “criminal justice” issues and question single-source reporting that relies on accounts of community affairs offered by police and their spokespersons, when those accounts are often unreliable.
It asks journalists to think about how the language they use undermines the dignity of those reported upon, including a commitment to “human-first” language that avoids dehumanizing descriptions like “felon,” and trauma-informed reporting that acknowledges harm to communities in order to not perpetuate it.
“Felon” has a definition; a felon is someone who has been convicted of a felony. In many stories, that is an apt and concise description.
What does Mr Kanuga want when he says that the city needs “an anti-racist media system”? He means a media which will publish or broadcast the heartwarming stories of success of every ‘minority’ community he could list, but one which will ignore the heavy crime rate in the black community, blaming it all, if it has to be mentioned, on “the trauma of poverty stemming from the systemic withholding of resources.” To him, “anti-racist” means the consideration of race in reporting the news, and hiding news that might some might see as reflecting poorly on some ‘minority’ group.
Basically, Mr Kanuga wants a propaganda media for Philadelphia. Thing is, with the inquirer and its publisher, he’s already half way to his goal.
