The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star
December 20, 2020 9:21 AM Subscribe
Today we are telling the story of a powerful local business that has done wrong. For 140 years, it has been one of the most influential forces in shaping Kansas City and the region. And yet for much of its early history — through sins of both commission and omission — it disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians. It reinforced Jim Crow laws and redlining. Decade after early decade it robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition. That business is The Kansas City Star.
Today The Kansas City Star, a McClatchy-owned daily in Missouri, published a brief apology at the top of a sordid airing of its dirty laundry in a letter from its editor. The letter is one of six articles today on the newspaper's racist history.
Our reporters searched court documents, archival collections, congressional testimony, minutes of meetings and digital databases. Periodically, as they researched, editors and reporters convened panels of scholars and community leaders to discuss the significant milestones of Black life in Kansas City that were overlooked or underplayed by The Star and The Times.
... Reporters were frequently sickened by what they found — decades of coverage that depicted Black Kansas Citians as criminals living in a crime-laden world. They felt shame at what was missing: the achievements, aspirations and milestones of an entire population routinely overlooked, as if Black people were invisible.
Reporters felt regret that the papers’ historic coverage not only did a disservice to Black Kansas Citians, but also to white readers deprived of the opportunity to understand the true richness Black citizens brought to Kansas City.
Like most metro newspapers of the early to mid-20th century, The Star was a white newspaper produced by white reporters and editors for white readers and advertisers. Having The Star or Times thrown in your driveway was a family tradition, passed down to sons and daughters.
But not in Black families. Their children grew up with little hope of ever being mentioned in the city’s largest and most influential newspapers, unless they got in trouble. Negative portrayals of Black Kansas Citians buttressed stereotypes and played a role in keeping the city divided.
In the pages of The Star, when Black people were written about, they were cast primarily as the perpetrators or victims of crime, advancing a toxic narrative. Other violence, meantime, was tuned out. The Star and The Times wrote about military action in Europe but not about Black families whose homes were being bombed just down the street.
Even the Black cultural icons that Kansas City would one day claim with pride were largely overlooked. Native son Charlie “Bird” Parker didn’t get a significant headline in The Star until he died, and even then, his name was misspelled and his age was wrong.
Our reporters searched court documents, archival collections, congressional testimony, minutes of meetings and digital databases. Periodically, as they researched, editors and reporters convened panels of scholars and community leaders to discuss the significant milestones of Black life in Kansas City that were overlooked or underplayed by The Star and The Times.
... Reporters were frequently sickened by what they found — decades of coverage that depicted Black Kansas Citians as criminals living in a crime-laden world. They felt shame at what was missing: the achievements, aspirations and milestones of an entire population routinely overlooked, as if Black people were invisible.
Reporters felt regret that the papers’ historic coverage not only did a disservice to Black Kansas Citians, but also to white readers deprived of the opportunity to understand the true richness Black citizens brought to Kansas City.
Like most metro newspapers of the early to mid-20th century, The Star was a white newspaper produced by white reporters and editors for white readers and advertisers. Having The Star or Times thrown in your driveway was a family tradition, passed down to sons and daughters.
But not in Black families. Their children grew up with little hope of ever being mentioned in the city’s largest and most influential newspapers, unless they got in trouble. Negative portrayals of Black Kansas Citians buttressed stereotypes and played a role in keeping the city divided.
In the pages of The Star, when Black people were written about, they were cast primarily as the perpetrators or victims of crime, advancing a toxic narrative. Other violence, meantime, was tuned out. The Star and The Times wrote about military action in Europe but not about Black families whose homes were being bombed just down the street.
Even the Black cultural icons that Kansas City would one day claim with pride were largely overlooked. Native son Charlie “Bird” Parker didn’t get a significant headline in The Star until he died, and even then, his name was misspelled and his age was wrong.
The work that many McClatchy papers are managing to do despite being severely underresourced is actually pretty amazing to me. A lot of the mundane goes unmentioned in a way that it wasn't 20 or 30 years ago, but as noted that is no different than it always has been for people of color.
Still, they manage to tackle political corruption, talk about issues in a far more equitable way than has been normal in the past, and generally manage to routinely highlight the biggest issues that are impacting their entire communities.
The company isn't really doing right by their employees, but they have hired a lot of good people who are, for the most part, doing right. Quite possibly because there is much more diversity in the newsrooms than there was in the past, at least at their papers that I have reason to follow.
posted by wierdo at 9:51 AM on December 20, 2020 [9 favorites]
Still, they manage to tackle political corruption, talk about issues in a far more equitable way than has been normal in the past, and generally manage to routinely highlight the biggest issues that are impacting their entire communities.
The company isn't really doing right by their employees, but they have hired a lot of good people who are, for the most part, doing right. Quite possibly because there is much more diversity in the newsrooms than there was in the past, at least at their papers that I have reason to follow.
posted by wierdo at 9:51 AM on December 20, 2020 [9 favorites]
Wow, this is amazing.
A few things that caught my attention:
First, kudos to them for giving credit, right at the beginning, to the woman who suggested this action:
Second, it's good to see a list, at the end, of the initiatives they've begun and the ongoing work they have ahead of them.
And I also appreciate them acknowledging that their efforts will never be complete or perfect, but it's worth doing, and trying, anyway:
Thank you so much for posting this, Bella Donna. I am glad to have the opportunity to read it.
posted by kristi at 9:57 AM on December 20, 2020 [18 favorites]
A few things that caught my attention:
First, kudos to them for giving credit, right at the beginning, to the woman who suggested this action:
Inside The Star, reporters and editors discussed how an honest examination of our own past might help us move forward. What started as a suggestion from reporter Mará Rose Williams quickly turned into a full-blown examination of The Star’s coverage of race and the Black community dating to our founding in 1880.Mará Rose Williams has been covering education and other topics for The Kansas City Star since 1998 and finds immense love in her work.
Second, it's good to see a list, at the end, of the initiatives they've begun and the ongoing work they have ahead of them.
And I also appreciate them acknowledging that their efforts will never be complete or perfect, but it's worth doing, and trying, anyway:
It’s been an education for us, and yet it’s impossible to acknowledge every failure or bad decision or mangled assignment. We think these stories are representative."our history doesn’t have to own us" is a good reminder to all of us who have been part of oppression that began before we were born and continues throughout our lives: we must see it, and we carry it with us, but it is not who we are or who we will become. Those are defined by our choices every day and every tomorrow.
Thank you so much for posting this, Bella Donna. I am glad to have the opportunity to read it.
posted by kristi at 9:57 AM on December 20, 2020 [18 favorites]
Another Black newspaper in KC is The Kansas City Globe.
posted by Not A Thing at 10:13 AM on December 20, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by Not A Thing at 10:13 AM on December 20, 2020 [5 favorites]
Thanks for sharing this. I've been working on a Wikipedia project this month trying to get coverage of more Black-owned newspapers into Wikipedia. This has all sorts of knock-on effects in terms of those newspapers being considered "notable" by other things in the larger world. And one of the things I've found is that many of the historically Black newspapers are rarely discussed in the (usually, nearly always, White-run) papers of record on various locations, and yet they are the ones that are covering the news about Black communities, news that is sometimes not even discussed in the larger newspapers. It's so important that news outlets come to terms with this larger problem and how it affects so many other things in the world around them, to take responsibility for what they printed, and more importantly, what they did not print.
posted by jessamyn at 10:32 AM on December 20, 2020 [28 favorites]
posted by jessamyn at 10:32 AM on December 20, 2020 [28 favorites]
To do the right thing when it will likely get you nothing but a news cycle and your newspaper will still surely collapse is a kind of heroic dedication to the truth.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:52 AM on December 20, 2020 [6 favorites]
posted by Going To Maine at 10:52 AM on December 20, 2020 [6 favorites]
An excellent project. It'll take me a while to make my way through it, but it looks really good.
posted by rmd1023 at 11:28 AM on December 20, 2020
posted by rmd1023 at 11:28 AM on December 20, 2020
Sounds similar to the NZ media outfit 'Stuff', who issued a major front-page apology in late November for ongoing racism/discriminatory articles regarding Māori - New Zealand media giant Stuff apologises for 'racist' past reporting
posted by phigmov at 11:42 AM on December 20, 2020 [12 favorites]
posted by phigmov at 11:42 AM on December 20, 2020 [12 favorites]
Reading the italicized extract in the OP, it struck me forcibly that the same is what Western media do to the entire continent of Africa, barely stooping enough to name a country rather than the broad nameless brush of "Africa"... and keeping the narrative focused only on death, disease, destruction, and conflict instead of enterprise, innovation, entrepreneurship and achievements.
posted by infini at 11:52 AM on December 20, 2020 [15 favorites]
posted by infini at 11:52 AM on December 20, 2020 [15 favorites]
This is what truth and reconciliation looks like. Laying bare one’s past bad actions and taking responsibility (acknowledgement); apologizing for these actions and showing understanding of why they were wrong (apology), and demonstrating a track record of current actions that seek to redress these past wrongs (reparations).
You need all three parts. Too many people/institutions want to skip over their own culpability and go straight to reconciliation, and/or not do any of the current and ongoing reparations labour. It doesn’t work that way. I think this piece by the Kansas City Star is an example other institutions would do well to follow.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:30 PM on December 20, 2020 [20 favorites]
You need all three parts. Too many people/institutions want to skip over their own culpability and go straight to reconciliation, and/or not do any of the current and ongoing reparations labour. It doesn’t work that way. I think this piece by the Kansas City Star is an example other institutions would do well to follow.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:30 PM on December 20, 2020 [20 favorites]
This is what truth and reconciliation looks like.
posted by hanov3r at 3:16 PM on December 20, 2020 [4 favorites]
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.I know 12-step programs don't have a lot of fans here on the Blue, but these three steps are so important in so many aspects of life, and I see that echoed here in the Star's work.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
posted by hanov3r at 3:16 PM on December 20, 2020 [4 favorites]
New Zealand media giant Stuff apologises for 'racist' past reporting
posted by zamboni at 3:51 PM on December 20, 2020 [3 favorites]
“Our coverage of Māori issues over the last 160 years ranged from racist to blinkered.”For those like me who haven’t been keeping up on NZ media acquisitions and mergers, while the website Stuff only dates from 2000, the current media company (the erstwhile Fairfax NZ) includes the Taranaki Daily News (1857) and The Press (1861).
posted by zamboni at 3:51 PM on December 20, 2020 [3 favorites]
Relevant to this discussion - The Real Reason Local Newspapers are Dying
Lyz: When editors and publishers are nervous because the mayor is mad again, or that a banker is claiming cancel culture because you won’t publish his racist op-ed, who are you really serving? Who is your audience, really? Also, if the only time you’re covering the Black community is when there’s crime, who is your audience, really?
Allison: If you play to the audience you imagine you have and you are an all-white newsroom, then you only serve your white audiences. And you end up with the customer base you have now, people who believe that if the news is not screaming that we are being lied to by a liberal conspiracy, then they don’t believe in it.
posted by CaptWacky at 4:53 PM on December 20, 2020 [6 favorites]
Lyz: When editors and publishers are nervous because the mayor is mad again, or that a banker is claiming cancel culture because you won’t publish his racist op-ed, who are you really serving? Who is your audience, really? Also, if the only time you’re covering the Black community is when there’s crime, who is your audience, really?
Allison: If you play to the audience you imagine you have and you are an all-white newsroom, then you only serve your white audiences. And you end up with the customer base you have now, people who believe that if the news is not screaming that we are being lied to by a liberal conspiracy, then they don’t believe in it.
posted by CaptWacky at 4:53 PM on December 20, 2020 [6 favorites]
On that point, back in 2018 the inaugural issue of the Fort Wayne Ink Spot featured an interview with Edward N. Smith, the owner of Frost Illustrated, which served northern Indiana from 1968 to 2017. He had some interesting things to say:
To develop content, Smith tried copying the editorial style of the Journal Gazette, but he wasn’t feeling it. “When I read the [Journal Gazette], all I read is the obituary section. I see the sports and the news on the television. They got a [storytelling] problem, and they’ll find that out eventually if they don’t do something different.posted by Not A Thing at 5:34 PM on December 20, 2020 [10 favorites]
“Black newspapers don’t have that problem. You always find out something new. You always find out something about your neighbor.”
Smith hired students from IPFW and Ivy Tech to help write the stories that would eventually cater to Frost Illustrated’s new mission statement, to always oppose the blurred perception of African Americans put forth by a certain kind of media type. “Black folks get their picture taken when they rob a bank or something. It’s in the paper. Or when they’re giving something away,” Smith said. “We did the opposite, we wrote about black folks having dinner parties and picnics and everything.”
I grew up in Kansas City and my parents frequently subscribed to the KC Star. I bought it several times during my recent three-month sojourn there and it is much diminished. I'm going to subscribe to it (and several other local newspapers). One of my goals this year is to support local papers and I'm also doing gift subscriptions. I'd hate to see the Star disappear.
We also read The Call and The Globe; glad to see they're still around. I should support them too.
posted by shoesietart at 8:54 AM on December 22, 2020 [1 favorite]
We also read The Call and The Globe; glad to see they're still around. I should support them too.
posted by shoesietart at 8:54 AM on December 22, 2020 [1 favorite]
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I'm happy to see that The Call, Kansas City's Black weekly newspaper, appears to still be circulating.
posted by dismas at 9:41 AM on December 20, 2020 [15 favorites]