Impressive Package on the Unspoken Truths of Racism

The most obvious question a reader might ask about Essence magazine’s “Unspoken Truths: Black and White Men on Racism,” is: “Why haven’t I read this in GQ or Redbook?” (to randomly pick two magazines with predominantly white readerships).

The most impressive part of this three-article package in the November issue is also the simplest. In “Racism, the Hurt That Men Won’t Name,” Charles N. Jamison Jr. records brief accounts of black men’s confrontations with bigotry, starting with the author’s own encounter with a real estate agent who said flatly that a building’s owner wouldn’t sell to blacks.

Coming on the heels of those wrenching tales, Les Payne’s article, “Black Men and the Cops,” is particularly insightful.

The yacht club members who let a black diner know that they’d prefer he eat outside; the first-graders who taunt their sole black classmate when “Roots” is broadcast on TV--these incidents wound. But when racism wears a badge and carries a nightstick, the pain can become all too real. Fear breeds anger, and with so many young black men terrified of the police, it’s no wonder that the anger explodes into rage.

Payne effectively connects the racism of some law-enforcement officers to the brutality used to keep slaves submissive.

But he’ll lose most readers, presumably of all races, as he drifts into the sort of extremist view that is spreading on some streets faster than X hats:

“Police terror against Blacks is meant to dampen the pressure for social change by identifying potential Black leaders in early childhood and diverting them to the reform school, the prison and the grave. In weeding out the most aggressive, courageous and intelligent Black youngsters, the state now, as it was then, is supported by the school system, the cop, the warden and, all too often, well-meaning parents.”

Finally, the round-table discussion between Joel Dreyfuss and five white men is an experiment that merits repeating in every men’s magazine in America. With luck, though, other magazines will find a more rounded panel than these five guys from media and academia--fields least likely to reflect the views of most Americans, regardless of race.

This debate is liveliest when it crosses not just racial but also generational lines.

For instance, Jonathan Van Meter, the 29-year-old editor of Quincy Jones’ new hip-hop magazine “Vibe,” squares off against Sey Chassler, a consulting editor at Parade, and racial doomsayer Andrew Hacker, the 62-year-old author of the best-selling book “Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.”

Van Meter thinks young white men are more enlightened on matters racial than they were 30 years ago, and he makes a good case.

Hacker’s rap here, as in his book, is relentlessly gloomy.

He often arrives at his views through leaps of logic that seem suspect. He says, for instance, that he sometimes asks white students whether they’d rather lose $1,000 to a white street criminal or $20 to a black.

“You get a silence and you know what it means,” Hacker says.

Yeah, it probably means that they’re wondering if their professor has lost his marbles or just his economic equilibrium.

But Hacker reads into his students’ silence, as he reads into almost everything, a morbid fear of blacks.

With luck, Hacker will also read Jamison’s story, in which a psychiatrist offers a useful definition of racism as “the projection of your negative qualities onto another.”

REQUIRED READING

Forget Madonna’s silly “Sex.” Voyeurs can get a much bigger kick reading the gleefully ribald interview with Bill Clinton’s alleged mistress in the December Penthouse.

Is it true what Gennifer Flowers says about the sexual proclivities of the next likely leader of the Free World? Even Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione waffles about some of her allegations, calling them sensational but unsubstantiated: “In the end, Ms. Flowers actually reveals more about herself than she does about Clinton.”

Who knows? Maybe 60 Minutes should demand that Clinton peel off his shirt, then inspect his back for the moles with which Flowers claims to be so familiar.

* While you’ve been assessing the candidates, the Columbia Journalism Review has been assessing the news media upon which many have relied for their assessments. The November/December issue lays the almost-forgotten campaign out in a snappy, eight-page chart that starts way back in February, when one pollster said: “Right now, Clinton reminds me of a Civil War soldier with his stomach shot, leaning up against a tree . . . waiting to die.”

In an accompanying story, D. D. Guttenplan writes: “We report a great deal about the individual candidates, and next to nothing about the interests they represent. We write at length on the candidates’ attacks, and hardly at all on the underlying conflicts which shape our political choices.”

MAGAZINE VERSUS MAGAZINE

Remember the Annie Leibovitz photo in the December, 1989, Vanity Fair? It featured the 21 hottest magazines du jour, “the sexist face of venture capitalism,” as Vanity put it.

The Oct. 19 Magazine Week reprints the photo, with a postscript that will surprise no one in the beleaguered industry. Of the 21 titles featured, 11 have gone belly up. And only six of the editors portrayed remain in their positions.

* Just when you thought the bald Pope-basher was as nutty as a coot, Sinead O’Connor comes up with this:

“It’s very difficult to be a man,” she says in an alternately lucid and loopy interview in the October 29th Rolling Stone. “Far more difficult than being a woman.”

NEWSSTAND NEWS

If readers of this column could agree on one thing about the new New Yorker, it was that the magazine stunk. Not the editorial changes Tina Brown made--most readers are still pondering those. Readers have been appalled that it really smelled. Of perfume.

In a move to please the scent sensitive, New Yorker President Steve Florio has announced that, effective immediately, it will abandon the odoriferous perfume ads--at least temporarily.

ESOTERICA

Colors is the most peculiar magazine to hit the stands--or rather, the clothing stores--in some time.

It’s not the studiously quirky layout or copy in this bigger-than-Interview-sized publication; there are much stranger ‘zines around.

It’s not the way the Benetton people let editorial content and ad copy blend together in this, their global brainchild.

What’s unsettling in this exuberant magazine is what’s unsettling about the ubiquitous United Colors of Benetton ads.

The stated “editorial vision” of this multilingual magazine focuses on what is arguably the most important issue on the planet at the moment: racial harmony.

“Colors,” the premiere statement reads, “offers readers a chance to understand and savor our planet’s cultural and biological differences, and how we can better preserve and appreciate them. Colors erases the dividing lines of race, culture and country, yet cherishes their individual contributions to the global village.”

Still, there’s something plain creepy about using a self-described challenge to bigotry and intolerance to sell pricey shirts and socks. (Available at news racks and Benetton stores in 80 countries).