The roles I play aren’t black and white

By Martin G. Reynolds
Assistant City Editor
The Oakland (Calif.) Tribune

Posted: Feb 11, 2002

Act I: Right now

Why? Why do I have to be the resident expert on black folks for the entire newsroom? I'm sick of being sent to the "black part of town" or out to cover the "black event." You know, the black expo where they sell Afro-centric lampshades and dashikis, where the Black Muslim Bakery has a booth and there are recruiters for the sheriff's office, the FBI and the NAACP.

Or the homicide in East Oakland where, if you're a white reporter, you don't want to go 'cuz you're afraid of getting stomped when the only thing that'll really happen is the family and friends of the dead guy won't talk to you.

Either way, they send me.

It's a race thing.

There comes a time in one's development as a journalist -- let's call it "post-Chips Quinn Syndrome" -- when a Chipster no longer wants to be considered a "journalist of color." He -- she, we -- wants to be, simply, "a journalist."

This hit me a couple of years ago, maybe a year and a half into my first job, at The Oakland Tribune, where way back when, in '95, I also did my Chipster internship. It took the accumulation of many naive years, when I believed that most everything black was flawless. (I'll get to that in a bit.) But, with time, I grew to understand the need for what I call a healthy inner racial equilibrium.

It's like I'm in the circus on the high wire. I traverse the narrow line of "objective" journalism. Yes, I am a journalist first, but I never can stop being "a black man who is a journalist." I balance myself on that high wire, always with a watchful, protective eye for the stories that affect my people and those of us in the colored community. See? I've brought the word "colored" back. And I like it. For old-timers, I know the word is loaded. But my generation has this knack for taking slurs directed our way and flipping the script. (For you squares: Turning the bad to good.)

My stance on this has not always been so clear. There was a time when any and everything black was what I was about. I wanted to be defined by the color of my skin.

"I am a black man first," I would say proudly.

Don't get me wrong. This is not to say that suddenly I began to embrace the "All we need is love" philosophy or the classic liberal line, "I'm part of the human race." That's a crock, and anyone who believes otherwise must have just landed on Fantasy Island. I can hear Tattoo now yelling, "De' plane, De' plane..."

Let me tell you how I used to be …

Act II: Back then

It's 1991, and the fellas are chilling in my Oakland, Calif., studio. We meet each Wednesday to drink 40-ouncers of beer and pontificate on the issues facing the black community and us as young men.

"Man, this country has been built on the back of the black man!" Marcus says.

"That's right!" Titus chimes in. "White folks have been holding us back for 450 years! But we as black men have to rise above this slave mind-set, stop hating each other and come together."

This weekly get-together started after Marcus put together a pamphlet distributed around the Laney College campus, where I attended junior college and took black studies classes. I can't remember the name of the organization Marcus wanted to start, but it never really took off. It could have been "Mad Black Men Sick of White Folks," or something like that.

I look back now and see how important that bonding time was. We were all young, black men who never met before college and were coming together on a weekly basis to, in essence, vent our frustrations with the world.

Marcus was a businessman whose office was the street. He was a brown-skinned, slender fellow who would roll around in glistening brand-new rented Chevys and Buicks, like the sort of rent-a-car you'd see on TV: We're Enterprise -- we'll pick you up in a fresh vessel.

He had lived a nearly all-black life based almost entirely on his reaction to white people.

He did not like them.

I began to fully grasp his disdain one day when we shared a cigar and a snifter of Remy Martin V.S.O.P. at a downtown bistro. As we relaxed and talked sports, a Berkeley buddy of mine, a white guy named Clayton, happened by.

A cigar lover with a humidor filled with various selections, he asked to sample my Cuban Montecristo #2 . I obliged. As I handed Clayton the stogie, Marcus snatched it out of my hand and ranted about how he'd never put his mouth on anything a white person touched.

I was like, Damn … he's REALLY not down with the white folks.

I straddled the fence on how I felt about his outburst. Although I didn't agree with Marcus, I didn't feel like holding an urban-studies seminar right there at the bistro. Besides, this was a time in my life when I wore a pro-black attitude like a horse did blinders.

I surrounded myself with people like Marcus, people in kind. Also, I think part of me wanted Clayton to feel uncomfortable. He was what I call a Trustafarian: a rich white boy who listens to reggae.

It's a symbolic term because reggae comes from the island of Jamaica and the home of the Rastafarians. Reggae embodies the concept of survival on the impoverished island. The lyrics often espouse the Rastafarian beliefs that blacks have been chosen by God to receive salvation and that the true homeland of "the people" is Africa.

Somehow, cats like Clayton gravitate to the music. Maybe it soothes their guilt, that if they at least listen to the music of poor people, they might somehow connect.

Hmm … I smell irony here.

Trustafarians, who are white and well off, have either found or seek to find solidarity through music with people who are black and poor.

But at the same time, rarely do Trustafarians actually hang out with or closely befriend the people whose music they so passionately consume.

Oh, well.

Despite that, Clayton wasn't a bad guy. I doubt he ever gave his love for reggae a second thought. He just came from a totally different reality than Marcus.

Act III: Fish soup

The pro-black attitude I possess today is equally as passionate as Marcus', but it's rooted in clarity and perspective.

Even back then, with Marcus, I knew that not every black person was a brother and not every white person was an enemy.

This balance comes in part because I was fortunate enough to grow up in two worlds. I'm a black man who was raised by white parents, the product of a trans-racial adoption.

Berkeley, where I grew up, is the politically correct capital of the free-loving world. My parents were hippies in the '60s. I have pictures of myself wearing flower clothes riding in a stroller being pushed by my ZZ Top look-alike dad.

It was ugly.

As I grew older, I ironed my T-shirts, something my father to this day never has done. My adopted mother is Norwegian, although she has been in this country for 30 years.

I ate fish soup, not red beans and rice.

I ate lentil soup, not black-eyed peas and corn bread.

You get the idea.

I made my way into journalism really by accident. I saw "writing for mass media" in my junior-college schedule, it sounded interesting, and I went for it. I transferred to another junior college because it had a better journalism program, got my associate's degree and then a bachelor's degree in this crazy field. That's the nuts and bolts.

But it's because of this crazy field that things started to hit me.

My first job was at The Trib. They knew me from my Chipster internship. I was hired, in part, because they wanted and needed a black man. A man with black skin. Sure, they wanted to diversify. Who doesn't? But they also wanted someone who could go to the black expo and mingle or cover the homicide in East Oakland without fear of getting stomped.

Affirmative Aggravation is what I get when I think about that. But, these days, I'm trying to take the long view.

Act IV: Learn for yourself

Imaginary sign above my desk:

I am not the human equivalent of AP's Special Edition: The Lazy Reporter's Guide to Black Culture

Since I came here, on more than one occasion (that's an understatement), I have been consulted as the resident expert on blackness.

Who is this artist?

What's hip-hop?

Some of these are good questions, valid and welcomed. That's why people of various colors, ages, sexual orientations and physical needs need to be in newsrooms.

We provide perspective.

But, after a while, it gets worn out. What initially felt like an honor, to be asked and consulted, becomes something else. You become a crutch, at least for some people. After a while I began to wonder: Why don't you go learn for yourself and quit asking me questions?

The fact is, people of color have HAD to learn about and acclimate to white society in order to survive. White people, unless they live in the 'hood, have not had to learn another culture.

So what you end up with is something dangerously close to cultural co-dependency. You depend on colleagues to be educated about their culture for you. You don't have to be, 'cuz there they are. I mean, why go find out about black folks when you can just ask ol' Martin? He'll tell us what's up.

Uh, yes, putting a picture of black folks eating watermelon on the front page is going to piss some people off. Duh!

OK, that's an exaggeration, but you get the idea.

A better example might be a big drug bust, where you got a photo of two African-American men in handcuffs, and someone comes over and asks, "Hey, Martin, will black folks be offended if we run this picture of two black dudes in handcuffs?"

My response: Are they criminals? Then they should be in handcuffs. If it's a big-enough crime, we should run a picture.

What this really comes down to is this: When is this guy, this criminal or whoever this "black dude" might be, going to be just a person, just like Bill from Burlingame or Dave from Danville? But because he's black, it's a knee-jerk "What will 'your people' think?"

Your people.

Black folks.

It's strange to me. We act in this society as if things have gotten so much better. On the face of it, maybe they have. For example, I don't have to worry about being lynched as I take an afternoon stroll down the street with my girlfriend. I can be served at a lunch counter with little thought about the Civil Rights Movement and the lumps and bruises people, white and black, endured to make my cup of Joe a no-stress experience.

But that's a skin-color thing. What we haven't done yet is progress to the point where we know, understand and embrace each other's cultures.

See, people in the United States are divided not merely by skin color but by culture -- the food we eat, the music we listen to, the books we read, the dances we do and, likely most of all, the money we make.

The lines have been blurred some, as shown by the Claytons of this world, kids embracing hip-hop culture and rap music. But the gobbling up of cultural hipness is a surface thing.

There has been no real attempt to connect, to understand what's inside.

And that's why these "What do your people think?" questions keep coming up. Bear in mind, my newsroom is great in this regard. I can't even imagine how it must be in places where diversity isn't the norm it is in the San Francisco Bay Area.

But there's something else. Within the culture, black folks are as individual, as unique, as diverse as populations of white folks.

Why don't people see that?

Here is how the great American poet, playwright and columnist Langston Hughes put it in a column he wrote in the 1940s for the leading black newspaper, The Chicago Defender. His fictional African-American Everyman was a fella' named Simple.

This is what Hughes/ Simple had to say:

" ‘My boss is white,’ said Simple.

" ‘Most bosses are,’ I said.

" ‘And being white and curious, my boss keeps asking me just what does The Negro want. .... He always says "The Negro" as if there was not fifty-eleven different kinds of Negroes in the U.S.A.,’ complained Simple."

Point being, "your people" isn't some homogeneous group that has a single spokesperson.

Act V: It all comes clear

Best-case scenario: Working with folks you wouldn't guess were coming to dinner (black or white or brown, it doesn't matter) has the real potential to provide vital perspective.

But in all too many newsrooms, we multi-coloreds act as the profession's guardian angels, trying our darnedest to head off insensitive or just plain bone-headed, ignorant stereotyping.

Case in point: I was on an internship in Texas, and a young Latino was killed in a rough part of Dallas. I went to the scene, got the family's phone number and built a rapport with them on what had to be a terrible night. Next day, the day cops reporter, in the business for at least eight years, went out before me. He was white, 30 or so, from New York. Back in the cop shop we talked about the shooting.

"Hey, what do you expect to happen? The guy's a gang member, and selling crack," he said about the victim.

His attitude was much different from mine.

I believed that there was so much more to this story.

Here was a young Latino who was, in many ways, a victim of circumstance. As a black man, I could understand how a young cat could end up in such a situation.

Homies of mine had.

Marcus had.

Because this young fellow lived a life on the street, did that mean he deserved to be gunned down in the street? There was, indeed, a bigger picture to account for, a picture that could have captured me in a similar pose some years back had certain choices and opportunities not presented themselves.

I can't afford to just dismiss people like that.

My white cop-reporter colleague was as inflammatory and dangerous in his ignorance as my old friend Marcus was when he went on one of his rampages.

There is a flip side to all of this.

Sometimes, when I'm out in the field, I meet some black man, and he gives me this line, which makes my neck hair bristle: "Damn, it sure is good to have a brotha' on staff."

As if simply because I'm black I'm going to turn my head and give him some slack. It's insulting, not only to the profession of journalism but to me as an individual to assume that because I'm the same color as you I will turn a blind eye to what is right and what is wrong.

Sounds strangely like ol' Marcus again. And it sounds, too, like the white reporter who stays in his cubicle, who out of laziness, ignorance, fear, whatever, allows skin color to impede understanding.

I am beginning to see how it all goes together. How the Marcuses of the world and the journalist sitting in his cubicle are really the same people. Only difference is, one has more power. One vents his ignorance on the street, the other on the front page of the newspaper.

Here is where I fit in:

By virtue of who I am, where I've been, the reality I live -- my culture -- I naturally will gravitate toward my community and make an effort to cover it.

I won't dismiss people some of my white colleagues consider "knuckleheads" and "thugs." But, at the same time, I don't need to be prodded by the Marcuses of the world to address and uplift the people, issues and triumphs of my community.

Patna', I'm already here!

And I ain't goin' nowhere.

Peace.

Martin G. Reynolds was a 1995 Scholar at The Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, where he now is an assistant city editor. Reach him at Hoflow@aol.com or Mreynolds@angnewspapers.com.

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