What Were They Thinking?

“Caught in a noose: Tilgh­man slips up, and Golf Chan­nel can’t wig­gle free.”

That’s the head­line on the Jan­u­ary 19, 2008 cover of Golfweek mag­a­zine. It accom­pa­nies a photo of a noose (which, because it is so offen­sive, will not be pub­lished here). The magazine’s for­mer edi­tor, Dave Seanor, who was fired on Thurs­day, described the cover imagery as “an attempt, and a poor one, to link it to the sit­u­a­tion the Golf Chan­nel is in.”

The Golf Channel’s prob­lems began on Jan­u­ary 4 when anchor Kelly Tilgh­man ban­tered with host Nick Faldo about how young up-and-coming golfers might be able to best the phe­nom­e­nal Tiger Woods. Faldo sug­gest ed that “to take Tiger on, well, yeah, they should just gang up for a while until … ” at which point Tilgh­man inter­rupted him and added “lynch him in a back alley.” Although Woods said he was not upset or offended by the remark, chalk­ing it up to a poor choice of words with no under­ly­ing ill intent, not every­one saw it that way.

Many peo­ple, includ­ing me, felt that the Golf Chan­nel had a respon­si­bil­ity to dis­ci­pline Tilgh­man because of her com­ments, even if she dis­played no mali­cious intent and had no his­tory of sim­i­lar behav­ior. In order to set an exam­ple for the remain­der of its work­force and take a pub­lic stand about its com­mit­ment to diver­sity, the Golf Chan­nel had an affir­ma­tive oblig­a­tion to take action against Tilgh­man com­men­su­rate with her employ­ment his­tory and her offen­sive comment.

Inex­plic­a­bly, the Golf Chan­nel failed to react imme­di­ately, instead wait­ing a full two days to issue an apol­ogy from Tilgh­man and a state­ment say­ing that no action would be taken against her. After pub­lic out­rage, she was sus­pended from her duties for two weeks.

But the Golf Channel’s mis­han­dling of the sit­u­a­tion was mild com­pared with Golfweek magazine’s ill-fated deci­sion not only to fea­ture a photo of a noose on its cover, but also to attempt, via its head­line, to com­pare the Golf Channel’s conun­drum with the his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance attached to the image. Seanor claimed that the head­line was an attempt to “con­vey the con­cept that they were caught in a sit­u­a­tion where it just con­tin­ued to tighten around them.”

The irony of the tim­ing of this con­tro­versy, i.e., in the days sur­round­ing the com­mem­o­ra­tion of Dr. Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.‘s life and legacy, is lost on few.

While many peo­ple were ready to accept Tilghman’s apol­ogy, for­give her and move on because her com­ments were nei­ther pre­med­i­tated nor part of a larger pat­tern of behav­ior, the actions of the edi­tors at Golfweek were delib­er­ate, con­tem­pla­tive and designed to inject Golfweek into the story — and, many believe, the head­lines. After much edi­to­r­ial debate, a pho­tog­ra­pher was enlisted to shoot the photo that was ulti­mately selected and the head­line drafted after intense dis­cus­sions. Seanor said, “We chose it because it was an image we thought would draw atten­tion to an issue we thought deserved some intel­li­gent dia­logue.” But the cover has been referred to as not just inflam­ma­tory, but an exam­ple of tabloid jour­nal­ism at its worst. On Thurs­day, Jan­u­ary 17, 2008, Sen­a­tor Barack Obama said, “We have to have a cul­ture that under­stands that there’s noth­ing funny about a noose. That’s a pro­found his­tory that peo­ple have been deal­ing with and those mem­o­ries are ones that can’t be played with.”

Charles Barkley’s com­ments were more scathing: “I don’t want to hear that the golf industry’s biggest prob­lem is some­thing Kelly Tilgh­man said. If Golfweek really wanted to exam­ine racism, as the edi­tor said he did, they would look at golf and coun­try clubs exclud­ing Jews and black folks.… Look at their restric­tive poli­cies and explain why the only black folks you see at most clubs are work­ing in the kitchen … just like it was 100 years ago.“Seanor would have done well to dis­patch his staff to con­duct research into the his­tor­i­cal sym­bol­ism of the image — a dis­turb­ing amount of which is very recent. His staff would have had to look no fur­ther than CNN which reported on Novem­ber 1, 2007, just a lit­tle over two months ago, an alarm­ing increase in the num­ber of inci­dents involv­ing nooses.

Since Sep­tem­ber 2007, inci­dents of nooses placed in a vari­ety of loca­tions include:

• One left in the bag of a black Coast Guard cadet aboard a cut­ter and another left on the office floor of the white offi­cer who con­ducted race-relations train­ing in response to the incident;
• A police sta­tion locker room in a New York suburb;
• A high school in North Car­olina high school;
• A Home Depot store in New Jersey;
• In a tree near a build­ing that housed sev­eral black groups on the cam­pus of the Uni­ver­sity of Maryland;
• Directed via U.S. mail to high school prin­ci­pal in Brook­lyn, New York, accom­pa­nied by a let­ter stat­ing “White Power Forever;”
• Out­side a post office at Ground Zero;
• On the tool­box of an employee of the Goodyear plant in Fayet­teville, Georgia;
• On the office door of a Pro­fes­sor Madonna Con­stan­tine at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, an act she said reeked “of cow­ardice and fear on many, many lev­els;” and
• The head of a black man­nequin was found hang­ing from a noose out­side a home in Val­ley Stream, New York, with a piece of paper bear­ing the “n word” attached.

The prob­lem is so bad that House Bill 80, the “No Nooses Act,” is cur­rently pend­ing in the Mary­land Leg­is­la­ture. In 2000, the Depart­ment of Jus­tice reported an increase in the num­ber of inci­dents of nooses found in pro­fes­sional envi­ron­ments and the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­nity Com­mis­sion (EEOC) has pros­e­cuted at least 20 law­suits involv­ing nooses in the work­place since 2001.

The most fre­quently cited basis for com­plaints of dis­crim­i­na­tion filed with California’s civil rights enforce­ment agency con­tin­ues to be race. That agency, like the EEOC, has han­dled cases involv­ing nooses and images of nooses placed in work­places around the state.

So you have to ask what Seanor and his staff were think­ing when they made their unfor­tu­nate and short-sighted edi­to­r­ial decisions.

In response to that very ques­tion, Seanor offered this expla­na­tion: “It’s an easy ques­tion for some­one to ask who has never sat in an editor’s chair or worked in jour­nal­ism. We were think­ing, as unbe­liev­able as that might seem to peo­ple. Per­haps we over­thought it in a way. We weren’t try­ing to be sen­sa­tional. It’s inter­est­ing that a lot of the objec­tion, ‘Oh, they’re just try­ing to sell mag­a­zines.’ We’re 99 per­cent sub­scrip­tions. We’re not even on the newsstand.”

Of note is the fact that there are no African-Americans on staff at Golfweek, so the “very, very vig­or­ous” in which the edi­tors allegedly engaged before decid­ing to go with the cover inar­guably took place in a vac­uum, with­out input from mem­bers of a diverse workforce.

The noose sym­bol­izes one thing, “death by hang­ing,” says the Direc­tor of the South­ern Poverty Law Cen­ter. Since the end of the Civil War, more than 4,700 per­sons have been lynched in Amer­ica, more than two-thirds of them African-American. It remains, along with the image of a burn­ing cross, the most endur­ing sym­bol of racial intol­er­ance and hatred in Amer­i­can history.

So Seanor and his staff were plainly not think­ing clearly, ratio­nally or with even a mod­icum of sen­si­tiv­ity to the his­tor­i­cal and soci­o­log­i­cal impli­ca­tions of their irre­spon­si­ble behav­ior. Seanor’s con­tention that they “over­thought” the issue is ridicu­lous. I agree with Jim Thorpe, a leg­endary African Amer­i­can golf cham­pion: “It was a bad choice of words. But the guy from Golfweek … Let him get bar­be­cued. That was a major mis­take on his part.… [Putting the noose on the cover] was absolutely stu­pid. That was throw­ing fuel on the fire. Why would you do that? He knew better.”

The only “sil­ver lin­ing” is this: Like the recent inci­dents involv­ing Mel Gib­son, Michael Richards and Don Imus, the Golf Chan­nel and Golfweek deba­cles have focused our atten­tion upon how much we have accom­plished in the nearly 40 years since Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. was assas­si­nated — and illus­trated just how much work remains to be done in order to achieve equal­ity and tol­er­ance for all per­sons, and allow us to live peace­fully in a soci­ety free from racial dis­crim­i­na­tion and harassment.

Seanor has said that he hopes to con­tinue his career in jour­nal­ism. What­ever he does in the future, my wish for him is that he will learn from his recent mis­takes and never repeat them, and take respon­si­bil­ity for his actions in a man­ner not hereto­fore evi­dent in the inter­views he has granted. As Dr. King stated, “The ulti­mate mea­sure of a man is not where he stands in moments of com­fort and con­ve­nience, but where he stands at times of chal­lenge and con­tro­versy.”

Tech­no­rati Tags: Civil Rights, Com­mu­nity, Jr. Day, Mar­tin Luther King

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