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The blur of color, a lack of facts hide truth
© St. Petersburg Times, I shall tell the story of what happened last week when the Progressive National Baptist Convention came to Tampa in the simplest fashion. Mere humans will be featured. Not black ones. Nor white ones. Wednesday evening, one delegate said he saw a waiter spit into a bowl of punch about to be served at the downtown Tampa Marriott Waterside, in a gesture that -- if true -- was the banquet room equivalent of flipping the bird on the interstate. The charge could not be immediately proven or disproven. Nevertheless, the convention president stormed out of the meeting, angry and offended, and a thousand people followed. Wednesday became Thursday. The hours passed. The dust settled. Other versions of the story emerged. In one, the hotel food served had been tainted, not just the punch. But the waiter's own account was this: A ladle slipped into the punch bowl and he reached in to pull it out. Another hotel worker backed him up. The leader of the Baptists, at the same time, said by Friday he didn't know exactly what had happened, and the convention delegate who had made the original charge had left town without talking to police. If this story could be told without color counting, we would have a dramatic illustration of the destructive power of a rumor, especially when inflamed by somebody who confuses shouting with leadership. The conventioneers were black, the waiters were white. But color doesn't change the point. Rumors destroy. Leaders are supposed to act responsibly. The analogy isn't precise. Only close. But this awful incident brings to mind every outrageous episode black friends and colleagues have reported, about when they were falsely accused of shoplifting or stopped by the police for no reason. They were accused of a crime merely because they were black. Murky possibilities got them into trouble. Not facts. If that's wrong, then what happened when the Rev. C. Mackey Daniels, the president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, led his members out of the hotel was just as wrong. A black man attending the meeting thought he saw something. He was used to white people acting this way. Therefore, he must have seen clearly. The Progressive Baptists should go pick themselves a police department, any police department, and swap stories about who is more proficient at racial profiling. Somebody must have warned Daniels ahead of time that he could expect bad treatment in Tampa because the city seems incapable of going more than a few years without some racial gaffe, if not crime, that sets the whole country to rolling its eyes. Here we go again was my own first thought. Then those icky things called facts were reported. City officials used to turn their backs on these episodes, but Dick Greco was working overtime on this one. Tampa's reputation on racial matters is so poor, Greco interpreted the incident not just as bad news for the hotel but for the city's already battered reputation. In keeping with our overly sensitive age, Greco apologized. He shouldn't have. But we live in an age of confused sensitivities. People who shouldn't apologize do. And people who should apologize don't.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
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Times columns today Mary Jo Melone Ernest Hooper Gary Shelton Darrell Fry Hubert Mizell Robert Trigaux Helen Huntley Robyn E. Blumner From the Times Metro desk |
