Wow.
What can you say but "Wow"?
Our own local paper, the Kansas City Star stunned me and I feel, probably lots of us this week. Their report, their reporting, their confession was just that, stunning. You likely know of what I'm writing. It's this.
The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star
Today we are telling the story of a powerful local business that has done wrong.
In it, rather famously now, the paper confessed and admitted to racism, horrible racism from them over the years when reporting on minorities in the area--specifically, Black Americans.
I'll only post the beginning of the editorial.
Today we are telling the story of a powerful local business that has done wrong.
For 140 years, it has been one of the most influential forces in shaping Kansas City and the region. And yet for much of its early history — through sins of both commission and omission — it disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians. It reinforced Jim Crow laws and redlining. Decade after early decade it robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition.
That business is The Kansas City Star.
To repeat, there's no word that describes this any better than stunning.
This took guts. This took courage. Just freaking wow.
They could have recognized their past faults internally and vowed to never repeat such things, sure. But this? Confessing to the supporting of Jim Crow laws and redlining and segregation and other obscenities, however legal?
Stunning. Nothing short of stunning.
It went national, too, it was that big a story. This was from the New York Times.
NBC News.
Daily Kos.
You get the idea. It was covered nationally from virtually every media outlet.
I think there are two huge things to take from this, too, besides the fact that, as I said above, they didn't have to do this cleansing so publicly like this.
The first is that this was an important move for them, the Star, the newspaper, to own up to but it's much more than that. We all need to own up to what and how we've gotten to where we are. We all, as a people and as a nation, need to know how we got here, where we are today. We need to know our nation's history, our full national history. We need to really know all the details about slavery and our Civil War, sure. But that's for starters.
We all need to also know about our Reconstruction and the failure of it, our failure and how that impacted African-Americans then.
We all need to know, really know about Jim Crow laws, what they were, what they did, the fact that they were legal and the deep, deep damage that they did to those same Americans, African-Americans. That's a great deal to know there alone.
Then there's the "redlining" the Star's story mentions and its corresponding segregation, legalized, thank you very much.
If, as a people, you are kept away, legally, from the best housing and jobs, good education and so, consequently and understandably, also kept away from better paying jobs and careers? Is it any wonder the wealth of Black Americans today is, still, to this moment, a fraction of white America?
And that's how we got now, here to where we are. It's why still, to this day, so many Black Americans do not and even, for a lot of them, cannot still live wherever they wish. It only makes sense. It's a natural outgrowth of all that then-legalized racism and hate and ugliness. It's why do many cities in the United States--including, of course, our own Kansas City on both sides of the state line--are still so very, very segregated even though that legal segregation was made illegal decades ago now.
So, again, wow. Kudos to the Star.
In their article, they made a great and important point of saying that their paper, over the years, highlighted white people's accomplishments but virtually never Black people's.
In the pages of The Star, when Black people were written about, they were cast primarily as the perpetrators or victims of crime, advancing a toxic narrative. Other violence, meantime, was tuned out. The Star and The Times wrote about military action in Europe but not about Black families whose homes were being bombed just down the street.
Even the Black cultural icons that Kansas City would one day claim with pride were largely overlooked. Native son Charlie “Bird” Parker didn’t get a significant headline in The Star until he died, and even then, his name was misspelled and his age was wrong.
It reminded me of a KCPT PBS broadcast on Kansas City's own Charlie "Bird" Parker. Lonnie McFadden made the very fair and important point that Winston Churchill, of all people, is on our Country Club Plaza.
But not Bird.
How else can we heal? How else can we repair centuries long wrongs and racism if we don't examine ourselves, see where we are, see what we did, see what those ramifications are and then apologize for them and look to rectify them? We must do this as a society. We're long, long overdue.
Anyone, any American who thinks we don't owe Black Americans reparations should, again, study our national history.
And read this article, too.
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