The Sacramento Bee got this story wrong for more than 100 years. This is our plan to change that

https://www.sacbee.com/news/equity-lab/representation/article248934769.html

The Sacramento Bee…I can remember in the day when the Sacramento Union was a very robust companion and politically opposite of the Sacramento Bee.

They did however share one ingredient, they were both racist.

Why did we know that, because I was working in Del Paso Heights, coaching and teaching. The complaint was multi-faceted, mostly revolving around the civil rights demonstrations that was going on plus complaints that the Bee was not publishing. enough news on sports in the ghetto areas of Sacramento.

As time wore on Mira Loma High was replaced by Grant High as an athletic powerhouse. But high graduation rates and success in college were still very much mostly attainable only in white high schools.

Students of color for example are still suspended at rates many times of those of white students.

Today, Sac State and the other community colleges in the area have diverse but not yet inclusive student bodies, while the high schools. are overall still segregated due to racist housing patterns.

That’s right the “ghetto” areas. In 1972 it was very clear what was what territory and there could be no compromise with white privilege in housing; that saw blatant red lining that kept “them” in their place.

So today, in 2021 we are more segregated than we were in 1921! The redlining is illegal but customary….

Right up there with the African Americans was the Bee’s. implicit and explicit racist treatment of other communities of color, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Native Americans and other sub groups were implicitly attacked regularly in crime stories, sports stories; etc.

The Sacramento Union was even more biased, carrying a right wing conservative view on everything, worshiping Ronald Reagan. The Union simply would not back down on one racist story after another, “law n order” was a huge thing then. Still is!

Today some of my conservative friends. are rooting for the Bee to go out of business; it might.

The internet has become the sole information source for many Sacramento citizens, digests that even the Bee uses, with lots of videos leaving the public under informed.

A digest news source is not enough in a democracy. Reading essays and other articles is more accurate but is failing because many people are walling out any news outlet that does not compare favorably with “my beliefs”. And those beliefs are rooted in the myth of a hierarchy of color.

So many simply live in a bubble, the same bubble that walls out points of view that the Sacramento Bee and Union used to wall out ; leaving a racist and prejudice view on everything. Tribalism is what we call it today, Jim Crowe is what we used to call it.

It is the same thing.

In our class I showed news articles carried in the late 19th century that openly was racist and genocidal news referencing Native Americans. It doesn’t take much researching to read story after story of outright murder of people of color. And ALL sub groups suffered from it.

Sacramento is a great city with a very diverse base; unfortunately the referenced article tells truth to power that should have been created 100 years ago.

That’s right 100 years ago. People are always the same concerning base behaviors. And racism is a base behavior. Newspapers are still alive barely, and finally discovered America’s original sin, after over 150 years of actually supporting racism and prejudice.

This leaves us thankful for the Bee finally waking up, but it probably is too late because the public has moved on. The forced, yes forced, integration of our schools of higher education is helping some, but has a long way to go as well.

One of the founders of Sacramento State was also a leader in the racist eugenics movement! Eugenics in America was copied by Hitler in his “master race” screams.

Unfortunately this move by the Bee is doomed to failure in that straight up fascist sources of news are now prevalent in much of the digital “news” outlets that have for example, sold the lie that the last election was stolen. The Bee is quickly becoming irrelevant to a increasingly fractured and divided citizenry.

White supremacy is alive and well in Sacramento, the Bee’s appointment of a reporter to specialize in America’s original sin is probably too late and is quite frankly pathetic.

We keep on making the same mistake over and over again with racism and prejudice winning out every time. The Bee’s hiring of basically a truth teller is pathetic in many ways, because it admits that the Bee has been lying for over a century about fellow citizens who are still “Stamped at the Beginning”.

We have not only got a long way to go, we haven’t even started!

And it is catching up with us…January 6, 2021 proved that.