Singling Out Young Black Men… Againsponsoringyoungpeople.org /singling-out-young-black-men-again/

As a youth advocate, I was especially struck by theopening paragraphs of a story published onNYTimes.com last Wednesday, November 19,“Toning Down the Tweets Just in Case CollegesPry.”

In the story, which aims to shown a spotlight on theimpact among high school seniors of increased socialmedia patrolling by college and university admissionsofficials, New York Times reporter Natasha Singersingled out Atlanta’s Morehouse College as oneinstitution where the prying eyes of admissions officershave resulted in greater vigilance across social mediaplatforms among applicants.

Morehouse admissions officials were “shocked,” Ms. Singer reports, to find applications with e-mailaddresses containing “provocative language.”

Some of the e-mails, the reporter goes on to add, “made sexual innuendos while others invoked gangsterrap songs or drug use.”

But if Morehouse’s experience “mirrors” that of hundreds of other colleges and universities, as Ms. Singergoes on to point out, then Morehouse seems to me an especially peculiar choice as a frame of reference.

If the intent of the story was to highlight a trend that’s common among America’s young people, it occurs tome that Ms. Singer could have selected an institution that was far more representative of American youthas a whole than “an all-male historically black college.”

Indeed, of the more than 400 college and university admissions officers polled by the Kaplan Test Prepstudy she cites, the author no doubt had a plethora of more apt institutions to choose from. Institutions thatwould not have necessitated pointing a finger in the direction of any one specific demographic.

As unintentional as I suspect that the decision was, by spotlighting Morehouse, Ms. Singer tacitly singlesout young, black men, a group already well-accustomed to the side effects of harmful stereotypes.

Even at Morehouse, arguably the finest finishing school for young black men in the country, the studentsdepicted in Ms. Singer’s story hardly fit the profile of someone any parent would want their daughterbringing home with her for Thanksgiving dinner—college student or not.

I have never met Ms. Singer, and I am in no way shape or form suggesting she was either racist or raciallyinsensitive to select Morehouse. But at a time when the flames of racial tension are being fanned amid theshooting death of an unarmed young black teen by a white male police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, andwhen young black men seem all too easily pigeonholed as “thugs,” the choice of Morehouse strikes meas journalistically irresponsible on Ms. Singer and the Times’s part at best.

I can’t help but wonder whether or not far greater newsroom diversity—or at least the presence of moredisparate, counterintuitive points of view—might have led to the editors at the Times second-guessing the

choice of an all-male HBCU as an exemplar of unseemly conduct.

The selection of Morehouse, if only subconsciously, leads the average reader dangerously close toassuming that such activity is uniquely prevalent among young black men, a conclusion which is whollyunsubstantiated by the rest of the story.

At a time when black male humanity continues to be assailed across a seemingly wider and wider swathof American society, I would expect for the New York Times, of all places, to think outside the box.