It isn't history until it's history

In "Watch Your Head," Cory Thomas celebrates Black History Month with another in a series of sharply targeted comments.

It cracked me up because I'm as guilty as anyone at judging people by their names, though I don't think it's entirely a black/white thing. I wrote a piece on naming babies some 20 years ago in which one of the experts talked about girls being given names that made them sound like bimbos, and decried how it would harm them in the job market. Today, the Brandi's and the Soozie's are working, many of them in highly paid, responsible positions that don't involve brass poles. People have become used to what were, a generation ago, eccentric if not downright silly names.

Except for, y'know, old farts like me, and bigots like the guy in the cartoon, and the world has no shortage of either, especially since so many of them are willing, even eager, to work double-duty.

And the Ja'Vonquius Davises of this world still get their resumes automatically round-filed too often, or, at best, put in a "special category" that is no less insulting.

And, speaking of 20 years ago ...

"Watch Your Head" is, most days, a strip about students at a historically black college done by a Howard alumnus. It is well-drawn, humorous and thought-provoking, and only carried in a handful of papers, which is, in itself, a bit of a commentary on the state of race relations on the comics page.

Twenty years ago, NBC had a ratings success with "A Different World," which was a situation comedy set at a historically black college. In its first four seasons -- 1987, '88, 89 and '90 -- it ranked #2, #3, #4 and #4 in the country, and averaged 20 million viewers.

You don't get those numbers if only black people are watching, but the cloth-eared editors of newspapers have not -- in the intervening 20 years -- figured this sort of thing out.

Just this week, for instance, the editor of the Dispatch of Lexington NC, wrote a column about the potential for dropping "Peanuts" reruns in which he mentioned that the paper had recently cancelled "Jump Start" in favor of "Herb and Jamaal."

Maybe he felt the readers of the paper were not as interested in the doings of a middleclass family as they would be in the doings of two good life-long buddies.

Or maybe he dropped one comic strip about negroes and replaced it with another comic strip about negroes.

Three years ago this week, a number of black cartoonists, with Cory Thomas one of the ringleaders, staged a protest in which they all drew essentially the same cartoon, protesting tokenism and quotas on the comics page. You can read a good rant on the topic by cartoonist Jerry Craft here, or just scroll down to see the strips.

It was a great demonstration, but it doesn't seem to have changed the thinking of editors, who probably also believe that only black people listen to rap music and that only black women watch Oprah and that only black people voted for Barack Obama. And, to go back to today's strip, that nobody with a name like "Condoleezza" could possibly be an intelligent, high-achieving conservative Republican.

Imagine what the comics page might look like today, if newspaper editors had been as smart as television executives were 20 years ago.

For that matter, imagine what the whole newspaper might look like.

Comments

[f]

"Diversity? Of course we've got diversity. We have Boondocks, Cathy, Mort Gerberg, Samuel Zagat, and John Callahan."

I'll leave it to some of my fellow geezers to explain the reference, and to come up with better examples than Gerberg and Zagat. I'm getting over a cold, and my brain isn't what it should be yet. And it's still reeling from the phrase "as smart as television executives."

[buzz]

Here's a link to a good article on how a person's names determines what we think of them even before we have any facts.

http://www.slate.com/id/2267299?wpisrc=obinsite