On August 1st, The New York Times placed Trump’s question about the Vice President’s racial identity on the front page. They assigned three reporters to the story: Jonathan Weisman, Maya King, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. However, like the three who interviewed Trump at the NABJ convention, the Vice President’s Black father wasn’t mentioned. Three more reporters, Lisa Lerer, joined Maya King and Michael D. Shear in an “analysis” of Trump’s inaccurate portrayal of the Vice president’s heritage. Five writers and none bothered to Google information about the Vice President’s parents? Esau McCaulley,a Times contributing opinion editor, is also ignorant of the Vice President’s Black heritage. He called the marriage between an Indian woman and a Jamaican man “interracial.” During my study of Hindi and Indian culture for my play “The Conductor,” I found that the British called Indians “niggers’; so do white Americans, which is how Trump’s Nazi Red Caps refer to JD Nance’s Indian wife. With her dark skin, Kamala’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, would be considered a Dalit, or an untouchable in India and discriminated against.
This is why Black readers lack confidence in the Times coverage of Black issues. The editorial page, dominated by good old boys almost daily, led by Bret Stephens, who has a Compulsive Obsessive Disorder about Blacks, and Ross Douthat, are permitted to take ignorant shots at Blacks and the Vice President without Black writers or intellectuals allowed to respond. They are bullies. Stephens believes that Black Lives Matter is more of a threat to Jews than Donald Trump, who the ADL has condemned for his anti-Semitism; at one point, Stephens said that the Democrats should apologize to Trump. He was allowed to write a bizarre blast at Woke, the latest euphemism for Black culture, without being required to define Woke.
-- Ishmael Reed, "Trump Sista Souljahs the NABJ" (COUNTERPUNCH).
