David Brudnoy hit by hate-filled attack

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Dear Derrick Z. Jackson:

Your column in Wednesday's Globe was impassioned and well-written. You know how to squeeze the most emotion from every word. You're good at what you do. But you don't do much good.

You hate too much. Your words divide. They make the chasm between whites and blacks grow just a little wider. They deviate and they deceive.

A white person reading your attack on David Brudnoy shakes his head and says to himself, "Wow. Did he ever nail that guy." And so he retreats, vowing not to get himself in such a mess. Or he gets angry and bitter and hates just a little more.

A black person - and of course I'm projecting, I can't know how a black person feels - would have his most negative feelings confirmed. "This guy's like all white guys. He'd be happy if we all were slaves." The slander your words reinforce is that white men want to put black men back in chains. And so the black man reading this gets angry and bitter, and he, too, hates just a little more.

Our job as writers is to illuminate, not to deepen the darkness that surrounds us. Do you truly believe that David Brudnoy thinks "genocide, bondage, and cultural annihilation" are funny? Do you know David Brudnoy? Have you ever listened to him or talked to him? Have you even met him?

A month ago, at a luncheon discussing violence in black neighborhoods with a black host, Brudnoy said, "Remember the days when people used to talk about `the Saturday night specials in niggertown?"' Do you actually believe he said this to intimidate his host or to make her feel uncomfortable? Or do you think maybe, just maybe, he was making a simple, accurate, historical reference.

Because that's what people used to say. That's what the area was called. Remember when people called black penny candy shaped like a person "nigger babies?" This was offensive. This was racist. This was wrong. But this is the way things were, and to sanitize the words now is to distort history.

You used this incident as a jumping board to attack Brudnoy for a comment he made three years ago. In an on-air radio discussion he said a very dumb thing. That he said it facetiously, with his tongue deep in his cheek, you ignored. "I don't think they're {the Supreme Court} going to go back to slavery, but if they do, I wonder if I and my broker can buy me a couple."

Brudnoy shouldn't have said this. It was insensitive and stupid. But it was not mean. And it was not meant.

I'm Irish and Catholic, which not too many years ago meant being low man on the totem pole. My grandmother was a waitress in a barroom. Her mother cleaned rich people's houses.

My friend Anne's grandfather was one of the rich people. She tells me stories about deluxe dinners and parties in his sprawling summer home at Royalston. She talks with wistfulness of meals prepared and served by Irish servants. She tells me that in her family when people said the word "Catholic," they would whisper it.

Am I to deduce from her words that she wishes things would return to the way they were? Do I believe that she sees me as subservient, as someone who should be a servant?

Of course not. But I'm not looking for something that isn't there.

"Brudnoy laughed," you wrote. "In American slavery, millions of Africans died in hellhole ships, sleeping in their own feces. Rebels were murdered and dismembered. To impose docility, white masters cut off slaves' penises, ears and feet. Masters raped black women, branded them with hot tongs and made them birth babies, who were sold downstream."

These images, which you put on Brudnoy, don't hurt just him. They hurt us all. You chose your words carefully. Murdered. Dismembered. Masters cutting off slaves' penises. Masters raping black women.

Why? For what purpose? Do you hate David Brudnoy so much?

There is too much hate in this world already, Mr. Jackson. You try to camouflage yours. You say malignant things with passionate words. But your words are poison and they injure us all.