As mentioned in the post of a few days ago, there is indeed a story in today’s Wall Street Journal by Dorothy Rabinowitz about Keith John Sampson‘s situation at IUPUI. The reportorial aspects of the story are fine, but oh, do I have a problem with the tone! And the graphic. While I certainly never expected WSJ to come across with a story sounding like The Nation, I guess I did expect it to come across with, well, simply a journalistic report. Silly me.

Take out mention of the Harvard controversy, take out the graphic, and take out or re-write most of the last four paragraphs, and what’s left would be an excellent piece of reporting.

You can read it here.

Sampson’s experience, along with the racialized aspects of the presidential campaign, presents an opportunity for the kind of difficult and honest dialogue that people undertook, oh so cautiously, during the Civil Rights Movement, but which has largely fallen by the wayside in more recent years. May we do so again. And again, I’ll hope we keep in mind what Bobby Kennedy said the night that Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated:

To make gentle the life of this world, let us dedicate ourselves to that.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen