On October 12, editors at the Columbia Daily Spectator, one of the nation’s oldest and most fabled college newspapers, ran Sharod Baker’s fortnightly “Blackdafide” column. Baker, current president of the Columbia Black Students Union, has a beef against Jewish “tricksters.” There is ” evilness” hidden “under the skirts and costumes of the Rabbi,” he writes. ” Lift up the yarmulke” and you find “the blood of billions of Africans.” Jews are “always on our backs like leeches sucking the blood from the black community.”
Okay, so Baker is a repulsive creep. No big deal. But how come it took the New York Times two full weeks to notice this stinkbomb in the Spectator, which has been graduating top editorial talent to the paper of record for more than 100 years? Five long days after being scooped on this story by the weekly Forward, the Times finally bundled Spectator-gate into a broader “trend story” on student racial tensions nationwide. “Racial division has become increasingly institutionalized,” the Times noted.
That’s not the story. The story is that the editors of a leading American college newspaper don’t have suffcient sense and courage to spike a gutter- level rant by a black activist. And that the Times is prepared to let those editors brag, uncontradicted, about how “excited” they are to “discuss the issues.” Max Frankel, Spectator alum, class of 1952, call your former office.
