The walls around us are crumbling

A young African American girl stares with exaggeratedly wide eyes into the face of a thug who stands, gun still smoking, over a prone bullet-pocked body.

"I didn't seen nuttin!" she says fearfully.

"Now that's a good little ho!" sneers the gunman.

Both wear T-shirts that read, "Don't Snitch!" A billboard in the background depicts other black people and the lyrics, "Rap your life away."

This was an editorial cartoon published recently in the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, Fla., under a caption reading, "The New Rule of Law." The cartoonist said it was meant to be a call to action about black crime.

I found it a disservice to a profession that on its best days has been a vigilant voice on matters from the civil-rights movement to Vietnam to immigration. The best editorial cartoons are edgy provocative pokes in the gut. The worst, like the one I described, traffic in stereotypes and racial pathologies.

Bug-eyed characters using poor grammar is offensive. The gratuitous use of "ho" a transparent bid at an edgy coolness.

Would the cartoonist have inked this cartoon if he were not white and 64 years old? Would the cartoon have been published if someone of color had vetted it first? Good questions, and ones I and other opinion writers around the country considered nonstop for two days. Journalism has been and remains a largely undiverse profession.

But a better question arises from the reaction to the cartoon's critics.

The cartoonist depicted the black community as one with little education, jobs and overburdened by racism and the amoral influence of rap music.

"Someone has to say something is wrong. I did. I knew it would be offensive to black leaders who are only now (after years) beginning to stand up ... but if my cartoon can help two or three lost souls to straighten up or at least think about how bad this is for a society, then it was worth all [the] trouble."

It will not help even one lost soul. It has been roundly dismissed by those who see in the cartoonist's defense that someone had to care about issues plaguing many African Americans, an almost godlike arrogance. Others will reject the cartoon because they prefer their opinion sans insults. Even those who might have suffered the insults for the message within will find all meaning clouded in the storm of outrage.

Critics were also derided as challengers of our free-speech rights. It is a familiar argument. Journalism is singled out in the U.S. Constitution and this protection has the danger of leading to arrogance. One opinion writer said the cartoon's critics deliberately misunderstood it to frighten us away from the subject.

Such defensiveness comes at our peril. The walls are tumbling down; not those that separate opinion writers from news journalists. Firm delineations remain between those paid to express opinion and those entrusted to keep opinion out of balanced news. I refer to the eroding distance between opinion writers and our audience.

We can seem far removed from those we write about. The growth of corporate media ownership means some of us can thumb our noses at a community without ever having to consider the impact. It is easy to treat crime by whites as individual acts and yet examine black crime as indicative of a cultural pathology if you don't have to face the people you're writing about.

I don't get to do that. The Seattle Times is one of the few remaining family-owned media outlets. We get the impetus to treat our audience with respect and acknowledgement because we live and work among them.

We shouldn't be afraid that being responsive to communities is somehow giving quarter to those who would manipulate our coverage.

Doug Floyd, editorial page editor at The Spokesman-Review, offered the best take on the yin-and-yang balance.

"Willful misunderstanding is not misunderstanding at all ... it is sinister manipulation. Good editors recognize the difference and react appropriately. It takes courage to stand up against an angry community when your editorial writer or cartoonist have made a valid point effectively."

And when they haven't made the point effectively?

"It also takes courage to stand up to your peers when they are more interested in demonstrating their independence than in getting the message across effectively," Floyd added. "When a comment, verbal or graphic, is so offensive as to scramble the message, a strong editor says let's find a better way to do this."

By all means let's train the spotlight on black-on-black crime. Let's also point out that fear of snitching is a tragic phenomenon wherever there is crime. Let's do this without hurtful stereotypes and insults or let's expect smart readers to take their subscriptions and advertising dollars elsewhere.

We can't feign ignorance to such realities. The walls shielding us are crumbling.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is seattletimes.com">lvarner@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com