Northeast News
April 6, 2016

Dear Editor,

In your recent editorial titled, “The party of tolerance?” you expressed confusion and defensiveness regarding how your previous editorial titled “Keep it classy Kansas City,” could be viewed as reinforcing racism.

For starters, using the title “The party of tolerance?” relegates your editorial and the responses to mere political banter or diverging opinions. It is a luxury for white people to be able to classify things in this way. People of color don’t have that luxury. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his book Between the World and Me, describes it in this way, “All our phrasing – race relations, racial chasms, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy – serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscles, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.”

When it comes to issues of racism in America, there are real and destructive consequences for people of color, and ultimately, it has a debasing effect on us all. In many previous editorials, you use the same common practice as you did most recently, providing vile and dehumanizing descriptions of groups of people involved in public events that were publicized by mainstream media. This allows you the opportunity to paint a devastating and disparaging picture of the people involved without needing to explicitly name to whom you are referring. It allows you to code the racism because you know that the readers will know who you are describing. It is a tired and common practice of white supremacy, and easily identifiable to anyone who has done the slightest bit of work to gain understanding.

Lastly, Verna Myers, in her TED Talk titled, “How to Overcome our Biases? Walk Boldly Toward Them,” describes biases as “the stories we make up about people when we don’t know them.” If you combine that with the definition for racism most widely acknowledged in efforts to address it, “Prejudice (bias) + Power = Racism,” you get a clear understanding of how your editorials reinforce white supremacy. There have been numerous occasions where you have made drastic negative assumptions about individuals and/or groups of people who you do not know, and used the power of your unsolicited paper to attempt to sway the opinion of those who read it.

Sincerely,

John Tramel

Northeast Resident