Gray Lady Down. William McGowan

      In the past, a faith in integration had guided the Times’ coverage of race, as revealed in the paper’s response to the rise of the Black Power movement and its radical notions of cultural separatism. On the confrontation between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Dr. Martin Luther King in 1966 over the issue of white involvement in the civil rights struggle, the Times ran an editorial under the headline “Black Power Is Black Death.” It applauded the activist Roger Wilkins for telling the NAACP that “the way out of America’s racial dilemma” was “the inclusion of the Negro American in the nation’s life, not their exclusion.” A year earlier, after Malcolm X was assassinated, a Times editorial decried his “ruthless and fanatical belief in violence.”

      By contrast, a Times news report about a Harlem exhibition in 2004 referred to Malcolm X as a “Civil Rights Giant” and extolled the exhibition for its description of a “driving intellectual quest for truth.” When John Carlos and Tommie Smith had given the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, the Times condemned the action; forty years later, the reporter Katie Thomas called it a “heroic gesture.”

      The Times has endorsed a separatist black identity by reporting favorably on Afrocentric education, which its supporters see as a way to overcome alienation and boost self-esteem in underperforming inner-city black schoolchildren, by teaching them that they are descendants of a scientifically and artistically rich African culture. The fans of Afrocentrism claim that Africa, not Europe, was the cradle of Western civilization, and that racist “Eurocentric” scholarship has systemically denied it. Afrocentric education also emphasizes a “distinctly black learning style.”

      To its critics, however, Afrocentrism is “a heavy dose of fantasy mixed with racism,” and an “ethnic religion” based on shoddy scholarship, with a dangerous potential to encourage racial insularity and intolerance. Claims that black children learn differently from whites are largely seen by professional educators as nonsense, an effort to teach history as group therapy. The notion of introducing a separate black curriculum would undermine the function of the public school as an instrument to instill a common culture and a shared sense of the past.

      The debate over Afrocentric education was one that the Times should have monitored closely. At the very least, the paper should have provided a complete and candid description of what Afrocentric educators were teaching, as well as an inventory of the pedagogical and scholarly assumptions these teaching materials embodied. Instead, the Times shrank from the challenge, and treated the competing claims about Afrocentrism as equally valid “perspectives” whose multiplicity should be celebrated. The Times ignored some of the more patently ridiculous claims and airbrushed uncomfortable realities about Afrocentrism as well as the controversy around it. For example, there was no research to support a link between self-esteem and educational achievement. Yet news analysis in the Times routinely quoted supporters of Afrocentrism making that linkage. The paper made no attempt to evaluate the strength of Afrocentric scholarship, including claims that Cleopatra (along with the rest of ancient Egypt) was black, and that Africans discovered mathematics, built the first airplanes and were the first to sail to America.

      As far back as 1990, the education reporter Suzanne Daley produced a fairly critical report on Afrocentric education, quoting experts who questioned whether history should become an exercise in self-esteem, emphasizing what many experts called the pedagogical “slipperiness” of Afrocentrism, and explaining that much of its curriculum accented white scholarly conspiracies against African achievement. Daley’s report set off protests by black staffers, who ensured that subsequent treatments of the subject were much more flattering and made supporters sound more convincing than critics. In one of those later treatments, Calvin Sims, a black reporter, claimed that the “scholarly underpinnings” of Afrocentric theories and curricula were “firm” and based on “the work of scholars who are trained in the ancient classics of northern Europe and Africa.”

      The Times also affirms separatist values in its coverage of the black family and the problem of illegitimacy. As already noted, back in the 1960s the paper had no problem with making value judgments about black illegitimacy. It gave sympathetic treatment to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report on the cultural disarray of “the negro family,” which was attacked by civil rights leaders and leftist publications. The Times reporter John Herbers explained that Moynihan’s work was not intended to fuel contempt for black Americans by drawing attention to the problem of illegitimacy; rather, its purpose was to show that “white America by means of slavery, humiliation and unemployment has so degraded the Negro male that most lower class Negro families are headed by females.” This, Herbers quoted Moynihan approvingly, had made it impossible for “Negroes as a group to compete on even terms in the US.”

      Today the general public has no trouble seeing the prophetic nature of Moynihan’s argument. In 1965, when he first tried to draw attention to the problem, the rate of black illegitimacy was 25 percent; by 2009 it was 70 percent. A consensus has emerged on solutions, emphasizing welfare reform, which it is hoped will make young, out-of-wedlock motherhood an undesirable experience for teenage girls. But for most of the last two decades, when the debate has been sharpest, the Times has been reluctant to admit that the issue is serious and has disparaged proposals floated to address it.

      The Times has been remiss, too, in reporting on social policy for dysfunctional black families and their relationship to the foster care system in New York City. In the early 1990s, the city began an experiment aimed at better protecting the black and Latino children whose parents have lost custody to the foster care system. The experiment was the work of Robert Little, the brother of Malcolm X and himself a former foster child, who believed that black children placed in white foster homes would lose their “black identity.” This racist assumption was shared most ardently by a child welfare advocate named Luis Medina, who believed, as the Times would write in late 2007, “that foster care in New York had become an evil and racist system that was engaged in little more than rounding up poor minority children.” At another point, Medina said the foster care system felt like “some version of apartheid.”

      Medina took over a venerable child care agency called St. Christopher’s, based up the Hudson River in Dobbs Ferry, New York. As the Times retroactively explained,

       He hired additional black and Latino caseworkers, and made a priority of appointing minorities to the agency’s board of directors. He promised to recruit local foster parents from the same neighborhoods as the children coming into their care. He argued that black and Latino families