Don Imus, Duke, and a personal story

I have never written about this.

It was 2003. I was returning from North Carolina. It had been an exhilarating trip. Eric Robert Rudolph had just been captured and I was one of the reporters sitting in the courtroom as he was formally read the charges against him. I enjoyed little more than a good manhunt and that day in Asheville had been the culmination of the pursuit to end all pursuits.

There are few more enjoyable short trips than the one between Asheville, North Carolina and Greenville, South Carolina. It was late Spring and the mountains were as lush as they would be all year long. There is a dead spot for nearly all cell phone signals and, for just a few precious moments, you can escape the constant demands of work and life. By the time you break the city limits of the aptly-named Travelers Rest, you’re back in the real world.

That was when my cell phone rang. The tone in my wife’s voice indicated something was very wrong.

***

For those of you who don’t know, my wife and I used to work together. She was a TV news producer. I was a field reporter. We were an anomaly in the corporate culture–a married couple working for the no-no-on-nepotism Hearst-Argyle Television. We’d been grandfathered in when the no-nepo rules kicked off. Most people handled it pretty well. Some people did not. We didn’t let it bother us. We considered ourselves professionals. We worked to actually be harder on each other than we would be on other people we worked with. It actually hurt our relationship sometimes. Regardless, our work situation meant we worked in close quarters and often meant we were discussing news stories in front of our co-workers.

One morning we got a visit from our local police Public Information Officer. We were friendly with the guy. I was the cop shop reporter and talked to the PIO every day. My wife talked to him almost as often. We were friendly enough that, rather than force me to drive down to the police station to pick up mug shots and arrest warrants, the PIO would occasionally drop them by.

A few days before I got sent on the road to chase Rudolph the Red-Faced Bomber, the PIO had stopped by the newsroom to drop off what he routinely called “Dumb Crook News.” In this particular case, it was the mugs of two guys who thought it was a good idea to ship a few pounds of dope via Fed-Ex.

One of the mugshots pictured a guy with bloodshot, sleepy eyes…the kind of eyes I’ve seen more times than I can count on people who have taken a few more hits from the bong that the Surgeon General recommends. The other guy was capital “W” Wired. He looked like he’d just mainlined an eightball cut with pure adrenaline. His eyes were blown out and his veins were popping out of his head.

The PIO held up the pictures for us and asked, “Do these guys look like drug dealers or what?”

My wife and I responded with two sentences:

“That guy looks stoned.”

“That guy looks like he’s been sampling some of his own product.”

And that was it. No words other than those. Conversation over.

One thing I didn’t mention about the pictures–because it had nothing to do with our responses–is that both of the people in the mugshots were black.

***

Across the room sat a fellow reporter. She heard what we said and applied her reasoning to it. Before long, she had jumped over the head of her immediate supervisor, jumped over the head of the station manager, and written the corporate offices to report that two station employees had engaged in racial stereotyping by declaring two men must be drug dealers because they were black.

Despite being 100% wrong–and despite knowing my wife and I abhor any form of prejudice–this reporter felt a need to escalate the situation to the highest level she could. She would later write a mass email to members of the community with the same allegations. She never addressed the situation with my wife or me. She never asked if we meant what she thought we meant. In short, she didn’t care. She was a crusader in need of a crusade.

My wife and I felt fortunate that nearly all of our peers–of all races–rallied behind us. They knew us, they knew how we treated people, and they knew our hearts. That was one of few good things to come of the incident.

While the reporter waged a community-wide campaign against the PIO, my wife, and me, we were told by managers to keep our mouths shut. We were told our jobs were at stake and that we could not be protected. The people we’d trusted with our careers and given–at that point–four years of beyond-dedicated work, told us they couldn’t publicly support us. We were stuck listening to someone falsely accuse us of racism, stuck waiting to find out if we were going to be fired over the allegations, and stuck watching our clean reputations tarnished by someone who was on a mission of vitriol.

A local gossip ‘zine picked up the story, as did a national journalism trade ‘zine. The corporate offices sent down some VP who interviewed us all at length. They hired a diversity mediator–remarkably, one of my favorite college professors–to come down and iron everything out. In the end, every employee of the station was forced to undergo diversity training.

The only things left un-fixed in the situation were three previously spotless reputations. Though we’d never said–nor thought–anything even remotely racist, we’d been labeled racist. It was both painful and infuriating. Still, we kept our mouths shut, lest we cause further problems. I ended up offering what was an honest apology. “I’m sorry if you misunderstood what I said and I’m sorry if it somehow hurt you,” I told the reporter. In tears, she said she accepted. She said she felt like she had a responsibility to protect people of her race. She looked honest.

And then she went behind my back and e-mailed members of the community again, and essentially, said we racists had gotten away with it.

***

That was absolutely the worst moment of my professional career, and one of the worst incidents of my personal life. It ruined a lot of the faith I had in people. I actually sat up at night wondering if I had done or said something wrong. My wife and I talked at length about it and wondered, if even by accident, we had said something racist.

We concluded we had not. The color of the skin in the mugshots did not matter. We said:

“That guy looks stoned.”

“That guy looks like he’s been sampling some of his own product.”

We’ve known people of all races who were high off their asses. We would’ve said the same thing if they dudes had been a Scotch/Romanian. They were stoned and that was that. For that, we were publicly labeled racists.

The support my peers showed me during the two-month incident buoyed my spirit and helped me recognize that most people in this world are right-thinking. They choose to fix the world by helping people, not by hurting them. I’ve thanked all of those people before, but, if they happen to read this, I thank you again. You know who you are.

I’ve thought a lot about that four-year-old incident in the past year or so. The false allegations against the kids at Duke started a lot of the thinking off. Don Imus’ hateful, racist, and sexist blather capped it.

There is absolutely a problem with race in this country. The college parties based on stereotypical racist themes are a clear indication that some of the young and privileged white kids are still being raised with prejudice in their hearts. Michael Richards launching into a rage-filled racist tirade is another example of how racism isn’t something in which only poor, stupid people engage. Don Imus and, worse, his producer Bernard McGuirk, got away with a lot of bullshit before the market finally sent them off public airwaves.

We all have a responsibility to be honest. We should honestly discuss race. We should apologize if we hurt someone. We should call people out if they hurt us.

That said, there is a very fine line. There are people, at least one of whom I know all too well, who use the racist label as a weapon. They use it as a way to draw attention to themselves. They use it to hurt rather than to help. It’s those people who weaken the heartfelt efforts to bridge the racial divide. Every time they cry racist, people listen even less. So, when it comes time to hunt down real prejudice, people are so tired of hearing the wolf-cries, they don’t listen nearly as closely as they should.

I’m glad Imus got fired. I’m glad the Duke lacrosse players were exonerated.

I wonder if my old colleague feels the same way.

Labels: Don Imus, Duke Lacrosse, Race, Society, TV News