Like a company announcing its bankruptcy in the back of the classifieds, the New York Times, when forced to make public amends for past mistakes, does so as inconspicuously as possible. Over the holidays, the Times’s editors seemed to be using the absence of their many vacationing readers to dump all the most embarrassing articles they had stockpiled and for one reason or another — could not bring themselves to dispose of privately.
First there was Duke University English professor Stanley Fish’s day-after- Christmas op-ed. Fish ruefully admitted it was hard to argue for affirmative action in principle. His solution: Discard principle. “Let’s stop asking, ‘Is it fair or is it reverse racism?'” Fish wrote, “and start asking, ‘Does it work and are there better ways of doing what needs to be done?'”
Three days later, the Times did a follow-up on its voluminous sky-is- falling “Downsizing” series of last spring, and found that most of those cast from their jobs, ostensibly by the cruel hand of global competition, have — out of the blue, according to the article — found new jobs at similar pay. One unfortunate, whose woes were chronicled in the series, is still trapped in his six-figure chief-financial-officer post, to which he commutes by private plane. As for the man whose broken-down car brought Pulitzer winner Rick Bragg close to weeping, the Times reassures us now that “the transmission on James E. Sharlow’s Mercedes does not slip anymore.”
That same day, Patricia J. Williams of Columbia Law School loudly defended ” ebonics,” but warned of one serious problem: the inability of white teachers to speak black. What troubles Williams about the Oakland proposal is “the reported plan to teach the city’s teachers not only the structure and history of ebonics but also how to speak it. Imagine having teachers who speak standard classroom English flailing about in some really bad version of a standardized black English. If they end up speaking ebonics as badly as teachers who learn a little ‘professional Spanish,’ I cringe to think of the consequences.”
Bravely, however, Williams suppressed her doubts and urged that, on the chance the federal government could be snookered for a few million, the Oakland school board should just “go for it.”
