Wednesday, September 13, 2006
A minefield of carefully chosen words
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- For those who have too little
- Time to gather mountain views
- Our blind spot on roads
- Following the money trail
From the RoundTable blog
After more than two decades of newspapering, I've been on the giving and receiving end of editing enough to accept it with equanimity, as just part of the job. Except sometimes, I don't.
Sometimes, something important is in danger of being lost.
Such was the case, I thought, with Sunday's editorial, the lead-off piece in a weeklong series of staff-written editorials about the impact of 9/11. Part of my assignment was to recall that day and the painful days that immediately followed.
I wrote: "For a few weeks, neighbors were not white, African, Latino or Asian Americans, but Americans ...." I did not include "Arab" in that list of Americans from fill-in-the-blank parts of the world. Yet there it was on the page proof, "African, Arab, Latino ...."
So I dashed off a diplomatically couched e-mail to my editor noting "it has been added" -- either by him or the publisher, I knew, but I left that unsaid. Crafty, eh?
I had not included "Arab" intentionally, my e-mail continued: "I thought about it, and decided it really would be just too [expletive deleted] to say Arab Americans were part of this feeling of solidarity when others actually started looking at them with new suspicion."
Dan Radmacher, the interim editorial page editor, dropped in soon after for a chat.
He had added "Arab," he acknowledged, reasoning that its absence would be painfully obvious in the context. I agreed. Further, I said, Arab American readers might be insulted, might read a snub into the omission. Might fear, wrongly, that the newspaper intended to strain them out of America's ethnic stew.
I had struggled with all that. To exclude Arab Americans was politically incorrect. But, as I remembered that day five years ago, Arab Americans were not on the unwritten list of "us" in solidarity against "them," the Mideast Muslims who had commandeered jetliners to commit mass murder.
In a choice between what is nice and what is true, I argued, our credibility demands that we tell the truth as best we can.
I shared with Dan a story: Once the country began to understand what was happening on Sept. 11, 2001, my day was a blur of work, trying to comment on events I barely could believe were happening. The next day, though, I went to church, where a small group gathers five days a week to read aloud a Morning Prayer service.
My voice broke in grief halfway into the prayers, and I couldn't get through them. Afterward, I stumbled out to my car to head to work, and one of the regulars approached me. She is a more spiritually centered person than I am, I think, an assessment bolstered by her concern that day for a stranger, a woman she had seen on her way to church.
This woman was a tiny person driving along, her head barely visible over the steering wheel but covered, my friend could see, with a hijab, the head scarf symbolic of her Muslim faith. My friend was worried for her safety. I managed a weak smile, made a few sympathetic noises and fled.
I certainly wished no harm to the Muslim woman. In fact, looking back at the editorials we ran on Sept. 12 that year, I see the newspaper urged that Americans "not, in our grief, punish entire peoples for the crimes of extremists." I wrote those words the day of the attack, and similar ones the day after. In the moment, though, I had room in my heart only to grieve for the lost.
That was the tenor of the time, I argued. We cannot pretend otherwise.
Dan shared a story with me. Some months after 9/11 -- perhaps that year, perhaps the year after -- he went to a professional seminar. One of the participants was a Muslim woman, an American. She told the group what it was like to witness the terrorist attacks through her eyes.
She suffered fully the grief other Americans felt for the victims and their families, and a special grief, too. She grieved for her religion. Her faith was hijacked by a relative handful of people whose radical views she despised.
I took his point: American Muslims also were joined in national mourning, even if others failed to recognize it. We cannot pretend they were not.
I proposed a compromise: to note that Arab Americans hoped they were included in the coming together of diverse Americans into a people united by shared tragedy. That, essentially, is what ran.
That, I think, was as far as the editorial could go to support ideals of inclusiveness and keep it real. I wish it were not so.
Elizabeth Strother is on the editorial board of The Roanoke Times.
