Breaking news: white boy does something racially insensitive and is knocked right on his ass.
Gabriel Keith, an assistant editor at the City College Times at Minneapolis Community & Technical College, used a drawstring from a hooded sweatshirt to make a noose, from which he hung a message about making deadlines in late October.
The tactic did not go over well in a newsroom that included several black students. Keith took the noose down five minutes later, but the ensuing hubbub led to his firing from the paper and a dispute between the editor-in-chief and the adviser.
Long story short: everyone involved knows that this college newspaper editor was not trying to make a racist statement; however, his offensive and poorly executed attempt to be funny and the apparently poor handling of the event afterwards meant that at the very least, he needed to be replaced by someone with a clue. Anyone who has ever spent five minutes in a campus newspaper office can probably imagine how this whole thing went down. And really, how can you not have sympathy for the guy? Expecting a journalism upperclassman to be aware of all the major symbols in modern American history is like expecting him to remember the names of all 50 freaking states. That’s like, a lot, and he’ll never even use half of it, so whats the big deal?
I was in the middle of learning to fix a heat stage when my friend came in to talk about this terribly critical event; mostly he wanted to complain that the thought police were on their way when a man can’t use a noose to convince his subordinates to do their work on time. I was just surprised that every guy in the room needed to have why a noose could be interpreted as a racist symbol explained to them. I made several compelling arguments about why this newspaper editor was in the wrong, including: “well, duh” (this one didn’t work as well as I think it should have) and “a newspaper editor, off all fucking people, should know better than to use such a heavily laden symbol for something so stupid, especially since the noose has no special relationship to making people work more effectively so he could have just as easily picked something else” which I think they found a little harder to argue with. I mean, really, pretend you’re a person who has no negative noose-related associations, then pretend you’ve just seen one hanging over your boss’ desk. My first thought? WTF? My second? Maybe I need a new boss, if this one is threatening to kill me in an elaborate and antiquated manner for missing a deadline. Perhaps I’d like to work with someone with better management skills. See? Even if you remove the racist imagery all together, Gabriel Keith is still a dumbass.
Then I actually read the article. Now, the version I linked to is similar to the version I read this morning, but it replaces a few paragraphs with more recent information. In the version I read, two assistant editors (or they may have been section editors, I forget which) said that they’d been there when Keith and his friend had made the noose, and they told them it was a bad idea to hang it up. In fact, other suggestions were made and dismissed in favor of the noose.
The two assistant editors were black women, by the way.
So now those of us who have spent some time in the campus journalism school really know how this all went down, don’t we? There’s always that One Guy. They’re everywhere, and most of them never get beaten with the clue-by-four they so richly deserve, so you can imagine how surprised these guys are when someone finally calls them on their bullshit. How much do you want to bet that the two guys making the noose were too busy giggling over how funny it was to heed their prudish colleagues warnings? And now they’re paying for it, cause no one can just take a joke. It’s a harsh world, I know, and let’s pause and feel sorry for poor Gabe. OK, that should be enough of that. I’m sure he’ll do OK once all the furor dies down; you don’t reach 2623 that clueless without some kind of safety net.
So I went back to my friend and said, hey, I read the article and while it is overkill that this campus incident has made national news, the editor in question was pretty fucking stupid, doubly so because he’d been warned by his two coworkers that hanging the noose was a terrible idea. Now, I know what I’ve been thinking when I’ve told guys “I don’t think this is a good idea.” And I have been told by others, “I don’t think this is a good idea.” We all know what “I don’t think this is a good idea” means; it means: dude, fucking stop it, this is an awful idea. No, seriously, fucking stop it right now because you’re going to get in trouble. The person saying this is nearly always right.
My friend, however, considered this a terribly cryptic, almost useless warning. What, he said, are we supposed to read women’s minds?
White male privilege in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen.
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