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Jewish World Review March 18, 2005 / 7 Adar II, 5765
Issac J. Bailey
Expanding beyond racial expectations
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Sometimes I'm afraid of being black, afraid of what it means.
I've been in this skin for more than 32 years and still can't quite figure out how it defines me, can't quite figure out how others view me.
Sometimes it's limiting. I write about race and instantly there are those who believe I do it because I have dark skin. It can't possibly be because it's an important issue in which we all have a stake.
It's why early in my career I tried to steer clear of the topic. I thought I'd be taken more seriously that way.
I could have been paranoid or hypersensitive. Maybe I shouldn't have read Nathan McCall's "Makes Me Wanna Holla" shortly before joining my first daily newspaper.
In it, I found fascinating the backbiting he described in the newsrooms in which he worked. McCall made it clear race was a factor in his treatment.
That's what I expected, just as I once warned my future wife in the wake of the Rodney King beating that she shouldn't be surprised the day that happened to me. I'm a black man living in America, I told her. But all I've received during traffic stops since then is a break on a speeding ticket from a white state trooper and a warning from another when points from my license could have been docked.
Here's what I also didn't expect:
I didn't expect hard work to pay off and didn't believe I would be afforded the same respect from white colleagues as from fellow black journalists. But for the most part, I've received it.
I didn't expect upon being named business editor after a recommendation from a white colleague that the white CEOs and other executives I'd come to know while covering real estate would be among the first to congratulate me.
I didn't expect black readers to accept my opposition to race-based affirmative action without revoking my Negro card. But they've accepted it.
I didn't expect to anxiously await the latest job creation report the first Friday of every month or to want to follow the effect the expiration of tariffs would have on our textile industry or want to explore whether or not multicounty business parks are effective economic tools in resort areas. But I do.
I plan to explore these subjects more deeply because those interests are an important part of who I am.
For too long, I've expected to only be allowed to be black. Or what my own limiting mind considered to be black.
03/15/05: Rethinking the personal data problem: At what cost?
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