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A blog apology
By adamg on Wed, 04/22/2009 - 11:08am
Last month, Candelaria Silva decried what she called the Black-on-Black crime of the eradication of Black cultural businesses and institutions in Boston. She ended by fretting about the fate of the Bay State Banner, whose owner has a white wife.
Last night, Silva posted an apology:
... The words I wrote have been running through my mind again and again. If I was the Black wife of a White business owner and someone wrote about what a shame it would be if the business were to fall in my hands because it would no longer be White-owned, there would be a hew and cry. The difference would be that in this case some people might assume that as a Black wife I wasn’t qualified to run whatever White business. In the case of the Bay State Banner, the competency of the White wife would never be a question, or at least not in my mind. ...
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Comments
Good to see...
...bloggers admitting when they think they've made a mistake.
I think that humility is an essential component of both wisdom and decency.
It is surely a good impulse
for any writer, and when done well, as in this case, the process of revisiting the initial thoughts on the issue further advances the discussion. This can only be good.
Now, in an aside which does not advance the discussion of the issue, and may not help anyone but other writers, I must point out that it's "hue and cry", and not "hew".
:-)
too hard on herself
Maybe her original post was over the top, but there were nuggets of raw honesty, emotion, and insight that I thought were well worth sharing.
I haven't been around this town long enough to have experienced the very worst of its 20th century legacy on race and exclusion, but I've seen sufficient, lingering vestiges to understand that it's very, very hard for many to talk about race here without running the risk of being overly cautious or overly caustic. It's either bottled up, or exploding.
Speaking personally, even as an Asian American who grew up in less-than-wonderful Northwest Indiana during the 60s and 70s, I did not understand what systemic, enduring racism and exclusion were about until I came to Boston in the mid-90s. So I do get part of where Silva was coming from in her original post.
All said, I'd say that Silva's apology, while certainly a sign of a good and reflective soul, should not obscure some of the valuable messages behind her original comments.