Perception and intent: The Tartan’s lesson

Editor’s note: This column contains themes and terms that may not be suitable for all readers…. Editor’s note: This column contains themes and terms that may not be suitable for all readers.

So I got a hold of one of The Tartan April Fool’s issues, and let me tell you …

No.

I’m not going to do any of that stuff that everyone else has done and jump on a newspaper already awash in shame, which has already uttered so many apologies that they’ve begun to lose meaning. I don’t know why The Tartan made the decisions they made, and I’m not going to speculate on something that’s already happened.

Instead, I’m going to write on one of the truly few subjects on which I have any authority at all: how hard it is to put out a paper that actually says what you want it to say.

The Tartan paper’s satire edition is crude, in my opinion, and it says and does things that I would never allow in The Pitt News, regardless of date or tone. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong; it means that it crosses lines I wouldn’t. But I’m crazy, and lots of great papers cross lines I wouldn’t: Souf Oaklin fo’ Life, a terrific satire publication, and The New York Times are two you might know.

There are words that I don’t let in the paper, words I find offensive or think that readers might find offensive. And, every time, that decision is fought by some member of my staff who thinks we should let the word in question into the paper. I mumble about credibility, I get berated for being a tight-ass, etc.

We make tough decisions all the time. Sometimes the deciding factor is one of comfort; other times one of exhaustion and letting our guard down, as The Tartan says occurred. Other times, we make decisions out of ignorance.

The flag on our April Fool’s edition, which normally reads “One of America’s Great Student Newspapers — since 1906” read instead, “Jack Daniel’s biggest fans — after all, he all we got.” That was a reference to three things.

1. We drink too much whiskey.

2. The basketball team’s slogan, “We All We Got,” was not a good one, as we said in a previous editorial.

3. Our vice provost and dean of students, also named Jack Daniel, is the one person to whom we — just like any other student group — report, no matter how much we print about his office’s latest controversies.

To me and every other editor present for production of that issue, our intentions were obvious. We’d been hitting the slogan pretty hard, and a drinking reference is always appreciated, as is any allusion to the coincidence in names between the Tennessee sour mash beverage and a Pitt vice provost who’d been in our paper of late.

So imagine my shock when I’m told that I’ve run a racist flag, connecting Daniel (the administrator) with an Ebonics joke. And then it occurs to me that, for all the other things Jack Daniel represents in my mental Rolodex, he’s black, also.

The rest you can work out for yourself, I’m sure. Daniel, who, incidentally, has written extensively on the topic of black American vernacular, saw none of the things that were “obvious” to all of us. Oops. Sorry, Dr. Daniel and everyone else.

Now, the differences between our alcohol/athletics-inspired flag and the issue put out on the other side of Junction Hollow — an issue filled with slurs, profanity, vulgarity and blatant insensitivity — are myriad and important.

And I’m not suggesting that we write off a completely offensive comic or an article about the Jewish fraternity on campus “finally” getting sent to the Moon as being the same as an unintended perception. But the point is that we almost never appear to others as we think we do, and the best anyone can hope for when things go wrong is that every possible step is taken to make it better.

In a special Tartan apology issue, Editor-In-Chief Alexander Meseguer writes that, “After all of this, I don’t want to resign.” I don’t know Meseguer, and I don’t know that I agree with his decision. After all, he did approve things that were not borderline — they were quite offensive and had no redeeming qualities that I can find. His “apology” was out of a Pete Rose book or a White House briefing, filled with reasons why it’s not his fault.

“I feel obligated to take responsibility,” he writes, as if taking responsibility weren’t his job, but some good deed he’s doing. “No matter how hard you try, failure is inevitable if you don’t have what you need to do your job. In this case, it was time.”

I oversee the operations of a daily paper — The Tartan is weekly — and I’ve suffered from lack of time more than once. And lack of time does not make someone put in ads with “Muppets eating cock,” or a comic in which characters use the n-word, or an illustrated poem about raping and murdering a girl with an ice skate. Lack of judgment does those things.

Perhaps the accountable thing to for Meseguer to do is admit he screwed up and step down. But, whether or not people agree with Meseguer’s decision, I have to admire it. It’s brave, if nothing else, and his ideas, which have served the paper well all year, may actually make the paper better in the long run. Looking at your own guts spilled out all over the ground is not an easy thing to do, especially when you’re heading the cleanup effort.

I have often documented the fact that, in addition to anything else I might be, I’m a fairly well-off, suburban, white male. Ask me to see things through the eyes of black woman, and I won’t. Try to get me to take the perspective of a Filipino immigrant, and it won’t work. I’m bound by my life, my experiences, my sense of humor.

Just like everyone else.

Some think Meseguer made an amateur mistake, something we should forgive and forget and move on from. That’s not it. Let’s not forget what The Tartan’s misguided exercise in satire did to a community any more than we forget the times we’ve hurt people without meaning to.

But let’s also remember what a hard, cold lesson it is to realize that we’re not perceived the way we want to be, and that it takes courage, more than anything, to stand up and try to make it better.

So no, we can’t forget the transgressions of the Natrat. But maybe we can start by realizing that we’ve all hurt someone without meaning to. If we start there, maybe we can get a little bit closer to forgiving people who do it to us.