Recently catching my eye was a feature in the St. Pete Times that referenced three students taking different post-high school paths. One was opting to immerse himself in Spain and the Spanish culture. One would be working with orphans in Africa. And one would be lamenting bad grades, looking for any kind of job and maybe attending a community college some day — to keep alive a goal of playing college football.
I thought these three odysseys — with accompanying photos — didn’t belong in the same feature. But it was more than thematic incongruity.
The students (read: successful) who were following the beat of a cultural-immersion and African-orphan drummer were white. The student whose sports ambitions had been thwarted by bad grades, bad test scores and a bad procreation choice was black. It seemed the academically underachieving athlete, hardly unique, had been shoehorned into a story about good students defying formal-education lockstep and exploring other, more idealized, options.
At best, this is careless editing and lazy reporting. Are there no students of color opting for an interesting, self-satisfying, untraditional road not normally taken? At worst this is stereotype trafficking in the guise of inclusive-feature packaging.
But to the Times’ credit, this story came under some in-house scrutiny. The Times’ own African-American columnist, Ernest Hooper, hashed it out in a response to an “unofficial African-American ombudsman” buddy who thought the juxtaposition was inappropriate.
Unfortunately, Hooper disagreed with his friend. Hooper thought the underachieving black athlete was appropriately included because he provided a “cautionary tale for any aspiring athlete, regardless of race.”
Noble aim. Wrong, counterproductive context.
Hooper misses the point. Such “cautionary tales” — and, frankly, there’s no dearth of them — have considerable merit. In fact, they are so societally relevant that they deserve self-contained status for impact. But when they are part of a gratuitous juxtaposition, they bespeak more of token inclusion than a truly “cautionary tale.”
Hooper asks the “ultimate question” at the end of his column. “Did the Times perpetuate a negative stereotype by contrasting (Chamberlain High’s Adrian) White’s situation with those of more successful white students? Or did we call attention to a pressing problem that can be solved with community involvement?”
The first answer is: Yes.
The second answer is: Yes, but.
It’s a “pressing problem” that is its own well-documented, societal niche – and, thus, doesn’t deserve token appendage status. As for “community involvement”: It’s not, of course, unimportant — but it’s often a sociological catchall that too easily mitigates individual responsibility.
But that’s another column for another day.