By week’s end, you couldn’t keep the hateful images straight without a scorecard.There was the noose found dangling from Madonna G. Constantine’s office door at Columbia University Teachers College that became national news and then the anti-Semitic graffiti found in a fourth-floor bathroom on campus (following another racist graffiti incident two weeks earlier).Then on Thursday there was a noose outside a ground zero post office that had been damaged on 9/11, after earlier ones at the Hempstead Police Department locker room on Long Island, the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., and most famously a tree outside a high school in Jena, La. This on top of numerous instances of anti-Semitic or anti-black symbols, including a 600-foot swastika carved last month into a field in Mercer County, N.J.It is not known who placed the noose at Columbia and with what agenda. But the incident was enough, understandably, to set off alarms about old viruses aloft in new forms. “Shut Up and End Racism,” was the headline over one column in the Columbia Spectator, a message perhaps more succinct than helpful.“
Hanging the noose on my door reeks of cowardice and fear on many, many levels,” Professor Constantine said on one of the Fox News shows, while making the media rounds Thursday. “I would like the perpetrator to know I will not be silent.” There are few historic moments as honored and ingrained in the American psyche as those from the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, but how much they translate to the current moment is far less clear. So maybe the product relaunch of the noose as an odious signifier of hate speech bespeaks something fundamentally askew in the national psyche. And maybe it’s just the distorting mirror of the never-ending media cavalcade, where any moron with a Sharpie and a length of cord from Home Depot can make a statement heard round the world.“One theory about media is that it’s not so much telling the news as it is retelling old folk tales,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “The idea should be to put facts in context, not to put them into familiar arrangements that reinforce old attitudes.”
The latest version of the race story began, of course, with the tale of the Jena Six, whose elements, particularly the noose and the locale in the South, made it particularly resonant. After all, the news media’s first rule of American racial narratives seems to be: We have met the enemy and it is them, meaning folks with Southern accents.The story on closer scrutiny turned out to be far more ambiguous than 1963 Birmingham or 1965 Selma, but it had enough punch to cast the noose out in the darker corners of the national imagination where it has sprouted here and there.Still, however revolting the image, it’s hard to see how the context renders it anything other than utterly shrunken. The documented lynchings of 4,743 people, most of them black, from 1882 to 1968 were a hideous strain on the national soul, but Clarence Thomas’s “high-tech lynching” or the wretched message at Columbia are not the same thing. Professor Constantine has a right to feel violated and disgusted, but rather than a lonely voice in danger of being silenced, there’s almost nothing at American universities more welcomed than a professor who specializes in the study of racism.
Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, said the news media can’t ignore subjects because their imagery is divisive and painful, but it’s also important not to gratuitously use disturbing images, and to instead put them into some context. “This is comparable to name calling,” he said. “It’s important to look at what it means and also what it doesn’t mean.”By week’s end, there were no more nooses but Ann Coulter was selling more books by claiming that if Jews were “perfected,” that is, became Christians, the country would be a better place.Mr. Rosenstiel said there’s so much noise in the cultural din that it often takes a shrill, loud message (witness Ms. Coulter) to get heard, something especially true when it comes to race, hence the appeal of the most loaded images from the past.But whether the noose plucked like a hideous prop from the past tells us as much as the school budget, gang violence or redlined neighborhoods is another question.
A more complex and relevant contemporary tale may be the tensions between blacks, Hispanics and Orthodox Jews in Lakewood, N.J., where a rabbi was recently badly beaten. “The problem of racism is not a problem solely or even primarily of horrific symbolic incidents,” said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia. “It’s a problem of systemic oppression and the consequences of it. But that’s not a story newspapers are well prepared to tell. It’s not a who-did- what-to-whom-when story.” Carmelo Anthony didn't know Jimmer Fredette's first name Never Miss a Story Get The Post delivered directly to your inbox By clicking above you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Click here for General Inspection & Consumer Articles Click here for Commercial Inspection Articles Click here for Business Success & Marketing Articles Click here for Legal & Risk Management Articles Click here for Articles in Spanish
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