Color in the front

This morning, in my city paper, there is a photo of a white woman next to that of a black man. He, the father of her children, including her unborn child, is now charged with her and the fetus' murder.

The story of one more woman and child killed by her man is a terrible and too-common one both in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. But I couldn't help cringing also when I saw those front-page photos. She, white and pretty, smiling in life. He, black and serious, a mug shot upon being arrested.

I can't help feeling like that man not only bears the responsibility of allegedly slaying a pregnant woman. He also bears the responsibility of enabling racists to murmur the pejorative implication that all people of color have heard in so many contexts, "Well, that was no surprise."

In the summer program I'm teaching, we're using Toni Morrison's Beloved, which I consider (along with the New York Times) the finest piece of American fiction written in the past 25 years. In fact, I consider Morrison the American Shakespeare, a statement that sometimes elicits an incredulous gasp from some of my white students.

In the novel, Paul D refuses to look at a newspaper cutting that Stamp Paid wants to show him. The clipping ostensibly shows Sethe, the protagonist, whose character is based on the real Margaret Garner. She was a slave woman who was tried and convicted in the 1850s, not for killing two of her four children to prevent them from being taken back into slavery, but for damaging the property of her white owner. As Dr. S teaches our students, Garner was billed as the "Modern Medea" by the American press of the time.

Paul D refuses to look at the clipping because he knows that there is never a good reason to have a black person on the front page of a newspaper. And that if a black woman has made it into the newspaper it has to be for something terrible, something that the whites would consider anomalous, even in a black person whom they already expect has "a jungle inside them," to use the novel's own words.

As many African American and Latin@ and other minority activists have charged, the lack of positive depictions of people of color is still a problem nowadays with mainstream newspapers. Too often, the reason an ethnic minority makes it the front pages of white-controlled newspapers in this United States is not because they have saved someone, or cured some disease, or made some amazing contribution to humanity. Most often it is because that ethnic minority has done something that the whites consider anomalous, even in a person of color.

It's true, as my husband points out, that the newspaper had not "raced" the man in this case until they published the photograph. I knew he was African American only because I had seen a video of him on a TV newscast. And it's true, as my husband adds, that this signals a change in how mainstream newspapers have learned to deal with race more fairly. For one, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been paired often recently in front pages and that's not a bad thing, of course.

Still, like Paul D, when I see the picture of an unknown white woman next to that of a unknown black man in a mainstream newspaper, I can't help but cringe and wish, for many reasons, that it just wasn't so.