George E. Curry is absolutely right: I did make a boo-boo in my column about Rush Limbaugh’s attempt to buy part ownership of a National Football League franchise.
I mentioned Curry, editor of the now-defunct Emerge magazine, briefly in the column, but not in a kind way. And he was quick to point that out. He was just as quick to point out my error in the column.
First, a little back story. Emerge was a magazine that, like its competitors Ebony and Essence, targeted a black audience. But Emerge was better-written, much better-edited and had superior and more compelling journalism.
Curry was editor of Emerge. In a seven-year span, the magazine ran two notorious covers of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
One depicted Thomas wearing a handkerchief on his head, to better fit the appellation of “handkerchief head” given to him by some blacks.
In my column about Limbaugh, I wrote that the other cover showed Thomas shining the shoes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
In a rebuttal to my column, in which he called me “confused,” Curry wrote “Yes, we published a cover of Thomas (November 2003) with a handkerchief on his head — tied in an Aunt Jemima knot, to be specific — but we did not place him on the cover shining Scalia’s shoes. The latter was an illustration inside the second issue (November 1996).
“The cover was an illustration of Thomas as a lawn jockey for the Far Right. If you’re going to criticize me, Greg, at least get the facts straight.”
Yes, Curry nailed me on that one. For him, that’s the good news. Now for the bad news: The Thomas-as-lawn-jockey cover actually bolstered the point I was trying to make in my Limbaugh column.
I wrote that the Emerge covers of Thomas were every bit as offensive as anything Limbaugh has said or will say. And yes, I include the one Curry accused me of omitting in my previous column, the one where Limbaugh told a black caller to “take the bone of out your nose and call me back.” Here’s why:
If black Americans are going to take whites to task for racist comments, we need to stop using the language of racial invective against one another.
That means terms like Uncle Tom, Sambo, handkerchief head, Aunt Jemima, house Negro and sellout have to go. And I don’t care if black conservatives are the targets of those terms — as is the current trend among African Americans — or black liberals, who were the targets when Malcolm X took the terms Uncle Tom and house Negro to new levels of popularity.
That means terms like Uncle Tom, Sambo, handkerchief head, Aunt Jemima, house Negro and sellout have to go. And I don’t care if black conservatives are the targets of those terms — as is the current trend among African Americans — or black liberals, who were the targets when Malcolm X took the terms Uncle Tom and house Negro to new levels of popularity.
Oddly enough, it was Malcolm X who had some racial self-esteem issues of his own, his rants against Uncle Toms and house Negroes notwithstanding.
It was Malcolm X who, in his own autobiography, admitted that he left a black woman standing in the middle of the dance floor to go chasing after a white woman. And it was Malcolm X who, on more than one occasion, made this very revealing psychological slip:
“I hate every drop of black blood — I mean white blood — in me.”
On a visit to Philadelphia with a group of black men from Baltimore to discuss the homicide rate among young black men in both cities, the now-former police chief of Philadelphia said that the average homicide victim — and perpetrator — in Philadelphia was a young black male from a fatherless home with a third-grade reading level.
That’s basically the same profile of homicide victims-perpetrators in Baltimore and, I suspect, other major American cities. And it occurs to me that Thomas is not responsible for this situation.
And I challenge any of his many critics to cite me one Supreme Court decision where Thomas voted with the majority that has made the situation worse.
One final note: Curry and I, though it may not seem so from this column, agreed disagreeably on this matter. In fact, he generously consented to speak, free of charge, to my Johns Hopkins University writing class about his column.
I’d just like to see that principle of disagreeing agreeably extended to Mr. Justice Thomas.
Examiner columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
