As a journalist, sometimes you make an error. And I’ve always believed that when you publish something that’s wrong, you need to be up front about it, acknowledge it, and correct it as soon as possible, with exposure appropriate to the situation.
I gave you some bad information Friday. I relied too heavily on early reports that a young man inviting Kansas State University students to say the N-word was a white person made up to look Black.
I’ve since discovered that’s not true, so I’m writing this column to correct the error and to apologize to my readers for making it.
I also wish to thank K-State spokeswoman Michelle Geering, who brought the error to my attention and confirmed through Campus Police that the individual who set himself up on the university’s Pat Bosco Plaza with a sign reading “Say N—– Win Candy” was not in blackface.
I think it’s also important to tell you what I’m not retracting from the column:
1) I still firmly believe this sort of race-baiting behavior has no place on a college campus, no matter who’s doing it. It disrupts the educational mission of the university, breeds racial animus and distrust, and reflects poorly on us all.
2) The Kansas Legislature erred when it passed the KIRK Act, which hamstrings administrators’ authority to regulate activism on campuses and gives extremists nearly unfettered access to what is essentially a captive population of young people, who have to be there to attend classes and get their degrees.
I also want to address some of the ugly responses to the column on social media.
More than a few accused me or my news organization of being paid off by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Those comments echo charges brought by the Trump administration’s Justice Department last week, accusing the SPLC of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” What the SPLC actually did was pay informants within the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi organizations, to provide inside information that was made public and/or passed on to law enforcement.
Let me take this opportunity to assure you I’ve never received a cent from SPLC, and nobody else I know has either. We’re not Klansmen and we’re not Nazis, so we’d have no insider information to share.
Another common thread among the column’s critics was that time-honored “gotcha” question: If Black people can say the N-word among themselves or use it in rap lyrics, why can’t white people say it?
I’ll answer in the form of a question: Why do you want to say it? Answer that and I think you’ll probably get pretty close to why you shouldn’t.
