the blueshift journal

Interview with Kenneth J. Cooper, Conducted by Chris Li

 

Interviewer: Can you give me a short background of your work life? For instance, how did you get into journalism?

 

Cooper: I started college as a computer science major and quickly discovered that wasn’t for me. As I made up my mind...I remembered I had written for the school newspaper at every school I’d attended. And I had always dreamed about writing. Then I found a bit more about that. I come from a family who’s not capable of supporting a starving artist. So I said, “What’s a writer who gets paid regularly?” And that’s a journalist. So that was one motivation.

 

And the other was that as I was coming of age in college, Watergate happened, and the Civil Rights Movement had just happened. I saw how the media were able to amplify the social change. With Watergate, I could see how aggressive, skeptical journalists could have an impact as great as making the President resign. That was what we usually say is part of the Watergate era of journalists. There were a lot of college students who would otherwise have become lawyers or something else, [but did not] because Woodward and Bernstein went into journalism. So I did an internship in college--full-time, for one semester. It was at a weekly newspaper in St. Louis called The St. Louis American. I worked there when I graduated... and kept moving up.

 

Interviewer: I noticed you’ve written multiple articles for the Black Agenda Report, for the Columbia Journalism Review, and for The Boston Globe in relation to race, specifically, so I was wondering--what exactly motivates you to do so?

 

Cooper: I’m an African-American, and I was an African-American before I was a journalist. I don’t see any tension between those two things. And I’m an honest African-American journalist, and through my African-American eyes, I call them the way I see them. As far as I’m concerned, race is the preeminent socio-economic divide in this country. A person’s race will tell you more about their socio-economic status than any other fact, on average. So I write a lot about it, but not only that. And I will just say that the Black Agenda Report articles were picked up from some place else--I didn’t write directly for them.

 

Interviewer: For me, as an “amateur journalist,” I was really attracted to that “truth” aspect of journalism that you described, in that journalism is supposed to be a medium for truth to be given to the public. Especially in today’s world, media and journalism, in my eyes, have taken a turn for the worst, becoming more about pleasing an audience than conveying the truth. For instance, take how Ferguson was portrayed in the media with, according to CNN, “weed and fire in the air.” They weren’t really focusing on its major aspects. How do you think that impacts the public’s view of such complex, racially-charged events?

 

Cooper: By and large I would say that--and there are many exceptions to this, because the media are a broad thing--journalists aren’t nearly skeptical enough about official accounts of what happened. In the case of Ferguson, the one I followed most closely, I haven’t seen journalists really scrutinize Officer Darren Wilson’s statements and look at them with a skeptical eye. I didn’t read his Grand Jury testimony, but I did watch his interview on ABC TV, and one of the big things he said in the interview was that Michael Brown punched him and punched him so hard that he didn’t think he could take another punch like that. That he would die if he got hit like that again. And my thought was, “Okay, Michael Brown hit you so hard you thought another punch like that would kill you. So, was your jaw broken? Were your teeth knocked out? Were you knocked unconscious?” It’s not a credible statement. It’s all driven toward justifying his actions--as in, “My life is under threat; therefore, I used my weapon.” Things like that haven’t been questioned.

 

And the other one that is strictly undisputed fact that I’ve never seen questioned anywhere is that Michael Brown was shot along his right arm and then in the top of his head. But, if Darren Wilson’s life was under threat, he would certainly know from police academy that if a police officer’s life is threatened, you go for a kill shot, which is aimed around the left side of the body, around the heart. But he shot Michael Brown on the right side of his body. I’ve never seen a journalist try to challenge that statement with those facts, and try to get some reconciliation for both things to be true. I think in general, the media have not be nearly skeptical or aggressive enough with official accounts of what happened. In general, journalists have not done their job well.

 

Interviewer: Why do you think journalists have been doing so?

 

Cooper: I think journalists are typically overly reliant on official sources. Maybe even too influenced by public opinion, and they lack courage to challenge it. In the case of Ferguson, there’s a certain body of public opinion that says [Mike Brown] was a bad guy. He had done a strong-arm robbery, he struck a police officer--all of which may be true. But in our system of governance, a police officer is not allowed to be... an executioner and it actually matters not whether Michael Brown was a good or bad man. A police officer--we don’t give him the authority to kill people just because he has a gun and the other guy doesn’t, which is what happened in my mind.

 

Interviewer: So would you say that, since the Watergate journalism of your past, reporting has deteriorated and lost its investigative drive?

 

Cooper: Investigating starts with questioning, and I’m not seeing much questioning going on. Even the strong-arm robbery business--the first reports said he didn’t know about that. Then comes to the Grand Jury and he says he knew about it. Furthermore, he said Michael Brown was a suspect in a robbery--how could he know that for sure? He never saw his identification before he shot him, and there was no physical description that might rule out others of similar build, race, and stature. I didn’t see nearly enough questioning of police accounts. It was somewhat better with Eric Garner in New York City because people had video there. But journalists can’t afford to be skeptical only when there’s video--they must be skeptical all the time.

 

Interviewer: What do you think are contributing factors to the discord in race relations as of late?

 

Cooper: Well, I don’t think that this is new. And again, this is a generalization, but African-Americans or Latinos--particularly Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans--have a different experience with police officers than White Americans do. It colors the perception of each group. African-Americans and Latinos don’t trust police because so many of them have had bad experiences. Whereas with White Americans, they haven’t had any experiences with police, or if they have had experiences, they were more in the classic police mission, “To serve and to protect.” I think that accounts a lot for the differences in perception.

 

It’s kind of hard for most White Americans to understand the experience of African-Americans and Latinos when it comes to dealing with police officers. And I would add, as an African-American who is pushing sixty, you don’t have to be a young Black man to run into harassment from police. In my fifties, I’ve experienced that more than once. As I often tell [the police] when they detain me... I’ve never been arrested for anything ever in life. There are not that many African-Americans who could honestly say that.

 

Interviewer: Do you think it’s this lack of understanding that causes this confrontation in race relations?

 

Cooper: That’s one cause. And the other cause is the structural nature of racism in this society. There’s been research done that show that police forces devote an inordinate amount of their resources targeting African-Americans and Latinos. People don’t get arrested for things in White, suburban areas because the police aren’t out there looking for that. The best example people always cite is drug use. All the research shows that African-Americans’ use of illegal drugs is no greater and perhaps less than that of White Americans. But when you look at who gets arrested for drug possession, who gets prosecuted and incarcerated, there’s a great disparity against African-Americans and Latinos. And that’s a function of the way we devote our policing resources. So there’s a structural element to it.

 

And, even beneath that, is an assumption--a prejudice, if you will--of too many police officers that young Black and Latino men are up to no good, are criminally-inclined, and need to be controlled, which is a very different mindset than “We’re here to serve and protect everybody.”

 

Interviewer: I know this is a very hard question to answer, but how do you think we should go about dissolving those misconceptions? Do you think there even is a solution?

 

Cooper: There’s no easy solution. These assumptions of Black and Latino criminality are almost in the ether in this country... Facts don’t seem to persuade people. I am somewhat hopeful that this recent spate will establish a pattern that is hard to ignore or help a lot of Americans see the light of what we’re doing wrong as a society.

 

Interviewer: One solution that’s been presented is just engaging conversation. Especially at my school, we’ve had a lot of forums and op-eds in the paper. How do you feel individuals should go about approaching this topic in conversation?

 

Cooper: I guess I should add one caveat--I am more hopeful about young people in this country who, by and large, have grown up having relationships across ethnic lines with peers and people who have authority over them. I think this racial-ethnic bias is less present in that population, which is a good thing. People have honest conversations in environments where they are safe to speak their minds. But I still think things need to be done to the structure of the criminal justice system, which I often say is the most racially unfair system in America today by far, in every step of the process. Who gets detained, who gets arrested, who gets charged with what, who gets the plea bargain way, who gets convicted, who gets sentences to how many years, who gets parole...

 

Interviewer: Can you be a little more specific about that?

 

Cooper: Well, I think the most thorough job of exposing the disparities [of the justice system] and their unfairness is a book by Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, where she compiles a lot of scholarship that shows what I just said. A lot of it goes back to the War on Drugs. There are laws in our country that are racial: the crack cocaine versus powder cocaine sensing disparities... feels something like fourteen to one. Even the law in many states that says that convicted felons are unable to vote has its origins in the post-Reconstruction era when some states adopted it specifically to disfranchise African-Americans: to arrest them for posing nominal or nonexistent felonies and therefore take the franchise away from them.  There’s a law that the Supreme Court has upheld that says only a jury can sentence a convicted murderer to death, and those laws were again first adopted by southern states to give White juries the latitude to sentence Black murderers to death. It’s embedded in the system. And the reason it hasn’t changed much is because there hasn’t been nearly enough scrutiny, legal or otherwise, of the criminal justice system as there has been of, say,  the education or health system, to name a couple that have been scrutinized, had pay changes, and tried to do better. But so many people think the criminal justice system is just fine.

 

Interviewer: Here’s a quote from theroot.com about the recent use of hashtag activism, how on Twitter, people use hashtags to promote things like #BlackLivesMatter. “Although critics have often derided ‘hashtag activism’ as inauthentic and ineffective, this year black women on social media proved them wrong. Hashtags have led to tangible change in communities, and the implications of what that means for the future of activism are far-reaching.” My generation has really reverted to this kind of activism, be it through Tumblr or Twitter, but there’s a huge question of whether it has a positive effect, or even a negative effect. One of the biggest concerns of hashtag activism is that when you put anything on the internet in just words, you can’t get the nuance that you get from actual conversation. I was wondering about your opinions on this type of activism.

 

Cooper: This is an area where I’m not an expert because I don’t tweet. I don’t have a Twitter. But part of the reason I don’t do that is that I don’t think one hundred forty characters is enough to express the nuance that I want to express, the thoughtfulness in the things that I write. That said, some of this kind of activism does have a positive impact, particularly with Black rights. It helps in creating a mantra or type of slogan--like a bumper sticker slogan on a car--which is probably shorter than one hundred forty characters, in most cases. That can help change perceptions, and I think #BlackLivesMatter, in particular, is a positively stated hashtag. It asserts the value of life. I do think, though, that it’s a means of communication that, in order to change things, you need lives present--people present--collectively together, and hashtag activism can bring them together. You can get video of people assembled, hopefully peacefully, petitioning people to redress wrongs, which is part of our system. It’s a fundamental part of our system.

 

Interviewer: One criticism of this kind of activism is that is does give anyone a voice--and not necessary voices that aren’t exactly contributing to the conversations regarding these topics. After #BlackLivesMatter started, there was a movement for #YellowLivesMatter, and there was criticism about that because it seemed the Asian Power movement was trying to derail Black social justice movements. Do you have any comments about that?

 

Cooper: So the comeback was #YellowLivesMatter or #AllLivesMatter?

 

Interviewer: Well, there was both.

 

Cooper: The first thing I would say is that I’m not sure Asian-Americans suffer from the same disproportionate treatment from the criminal justice system as Blacks and Latinos.

 

Interviewer: That’s the argument. It stemmed from this misunderstanding, but it gained such popularity that people started to believe that as truth.

 

Cooper: There may be some places where that is true, but I think as a general proposition, it is not true, from what I know. And the broader point about how everyone can say something in today’s media--it’s a free country, and everyone is entitled to their own opinion... and I think people need to choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore, what they credit and what they discredit. I think you can’t shut voices off, and the response to disagreeable or offensive speech is more speech. It seems there was a conversation in the #YellowLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter campaigns... people communicate different views about that. I’m not really into the relativistic thinking of deprivation and discrimination.

 

But certainly Asian-Americans face discrimination in this society--I just don’t think the criminal justice system is a big force of that. Asian-Americans face stereotypes. We’ve moved on from a terrible history, but I’ve heard stories from a few decades ago that particular academic departments in colleges wouldn’t hire Asian-Americans. And when race was questioned, the department would say, “Think about what they did to us in World War II,” as if all Asians were Japanese, as if all Japanese in that era were soldiers. I just don’t think there’s an equivalence when it comes to the criminal justice system. I have actually looked at some data about health disparities, and I was astonished to see that when it comes to most basic procedures, the disparities in Asians’ states were miniscule compared to White Americans, about the same incidence... you maybe think about why that is. I’ve been thinking about certain characteristics of Asian diets--perhaps a lot of grain, not as much meat, vegetables sort of mixed into everything. Careful preparation of vegetables, as opposed to pouring them out of a can.

 

Interviewer: So my final question is--in my generation right now, we have conversations about social justice put on our shoulders. What do you think should be our focus, going into the future?

 

Cooper: Good question. I don’t want to be in the position of telling an entire generation what to focus on, but I think I’m more comfortable talking about how to go about things, which is to identify people with similar values and interests and together effect a change that you think should be made. The means could vary between social media, protests, lobbying legislatures, media campaigns, public education campaigns... I’m pretty hopeful about this. This generation and the one before it--there’s so much different than when I was coming of age. That’s astonished me. One of the things is the universal, multiethnic appeal of rap music, where a couple of generations have a similar groove. The same entertainment appeals to them. When I was growing up, there was White music, and there was Black music, and there wasn’t much overlap.

 

And like I said before, your generation and the generation before yours have had key relationships with others who were not of the same race or ethnicity. One way to dispel stereotypes is to interact with individuals. Basically what stereotypes and prejudice do is lump a whole group into one mold. Really, what the Civil Rights Movement was about was righting specifically for Black individuality, like with the King line about wanting his children to be judged by the contents of their character... In my mind, group prejudice is a lazy instrument that has people stumbling through the world without seeing individual people as they are. It’s tragic for people who hold such views. It’s not something that’s changed overnight, and the nature of our country and our system is that change is incremental. I hope I live long enough to see more change effected by your generation or the one that came before yours.