The Consequences of a Flawed Article

I read "Being White in Philadelphia" in evaluation mode. Its premise (whether I agreed or not) struck me as interesting and plausible: maybe a frank airing of white views on race would be informative and valuable -- let's see where this goes. I finished the article wishing someone had better executed that premise. Why is the recent immigrant from Moscow treated as if her dearth of context or experience in the city makes her a more credible source? How would relatively shallow interviews with sources in a narrow swath of the city get us reliably to what being white in Philly is like? Why write that all the race stories are utterly unique when some of them verge on banal stereotypes? Wouldn't we get more complex portraits if the interviewer had pressed his subjects more? Finally, if the premise was that frankly airing white views is helpful, shouldn't the conclusion explain how airing the views of these interview subjects might help?

Some interviewees were interesting. Did reading about them make white Philadelphians more open to addressing important issues that they've allegedly ignored, as was implied by the theory of the piece?

I cannot see how.

There were good parts of the article too. With a good edit, it could've been a much stronger piece. By all accounts, the author has done excellent work in the past, including on the subject of race.

That's actually what worries me.

A talented journalist with experience writing about race began from a defensible premise, earnestly tried to tackle a fraught subject in a way that he thought would improve public discourse, and failed. That he ought to be criticized for the flaws in his work goes without saying. But the mayor of his city demanding an investigation? It underscores something that every journalist knows. We're all vulnerable to publishing dud pieces -- to trying hard, getting it right most of the time, but failing once in a while -- and while it's never pleasant to be excoriated in a blog post that is dead on in its critique, the consequences of publishing a dud are magnified wildly if you're writing on certain subjects -- the perilous ones that could plausibly result in a viral outcry or an advertiser boycott or calls for your actually being fired from your publication.

Race is one of those subjects.

That isn't entirely unreasonable. It is fraught like few other subjects in America; the taboo against racism serves us well in most ways; and it ought to be called out in a healthy public discourse.

But if honest interracial dialogue is essential to moving forward as a country, as many Americans believe it to be, it is counterproductive to heap furious scorn on well-meaning people, whatever their race or profession, who try to participate but do so with suboptimal skill or sophistication in a given instance. Honest interracial dialogue cannot exist without speech that is wrongheaded, speech that is prejudicial, even speech that is unwittingly racist. If it were otherwise, there would be no need for the dialogue. The race problem would already have been solved.