Context isn’t everything, but it matters.
Consider a line in a Sunday magazine profile of Taye Diggs that will publish in print on Sunday.
Writing about the actor who moved into the title role in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” on Broadway this week, the writer James Hannaham described him:
Diggs, until now, has been the kind of sex symbol you could marry. He plays stable, intelligent, sane guys, like the good doctor Sam Bennett on ‘‘Grey’s Anatomy’’ and its spinoff, ‘‘Private Practice,’’ and the hapless novelist Harper Stewart in the highly popular and profitable black upscale comedy ‘‘The Best Man’’ (1999) and its sequels. Diggs’s roles aren’t irritatingly wholesome dweebs, or overly ambitious jerks, or capricious bad boys, but brothers who could wear Tommy Hilfiger while playing croquet and still look as if they were keeping it halfway real. If you start to salivate when you hear the phrase ‘‘black men with jobs,’’ then Diggs is your guy.
It’s that last sentence, particularly, that is drawing fire from some of the readers who have seen the article already online.
In the comments on the story itself, and in mail to my office, some readers found it (and in some cases, other parts of the piece) offensive and inappropriate.
C.M. Lewis asked me to look at the comments: “Readers are rightfully outraged, and your editors have a lot to answer for (not to mention the author of this piece).” One commenter, for example, wrote: “This is just so offensive on so many levels. The fact that this article was approved for featured publication is disturbing — that means that a large group of people at the Times seem to think that if you gush in a manic way about the spectacle of a straight sexy black actor acting, then anything you say is acceptable.”
Anthony Glover of the Bronx wrote a particularly thoughtful email to me. The article, he said, could have been written without “this bad attempt at humor.”
To a black man such as myself, it came off as flippant, unworthy of being published in the Times, and, well, offensive. I am also gay, and a member of a multiracial gay male group called Men of All Colors Together/New York. Founded in 1980 on the premise that interracial relationships needed to be celebrated, one of the things we consistently examined and challenged were the intersection of stereotypes and desire.
The flippant comment here about employed black men being desirable sexually brought back to me conversations we had in our group about what fuels desire, what happens when that intersects with fetishes, especially ones based on a stereotype.
It was not an easy discussion to have given that most of the group comprised black and white men in relationships. What we discovered was it created a dissonance for the man being desired that a relationship, grounded ultimately on love in many cases, had a component that involved desire based on a stereotype, even one that seemingly was positive.
Desiring a man because he had a job was different from a white man desiring a black man because he was a black man who had a job. One becomes less a person and more of a thing, no less a thing that is based partly on someone basing desire on a circumstance of employment often based on race and little else.
Though editors must give their writers leeway, the Times editors should challenge writers to be wary of engaging stereotypes, especially for a laugh. Here the cheap offending joke ironically diminished what ostensibly was to be a positive article about Taye Diggs being cast in a role that challenges stereotypes.
I asked the magazine editor, Jake Silverstein, whether editors had considered taking this sentence out. He said it had been discussed internally and with the author:
James felt strongly that he wanted to keep it, and I think it was right to do so. Indeed it is a stereotype, but that was the whole point. James is a black man writing very tongue in cheek about expectations for black men and the roles black actors too often are limited to and how they’re portrayed in pop culture. This has been a theme in his fiction (as Entertainment Weekly said about his excellent recent novel, “Delicious Foods,” “Hannaham satirizes racial stereotypes with dark humor”) and in his previous theater criticism, mostly for The Village Voice. In that context, I think this line is provocative but entirely acceptable, part of the intelligent, sophisticated, and funny riffing that James has been doing for years on the way that both African-Americans and gay people are represented in popular culture.
On a number of occasions, Times readers have strenuously objected to characterizations and story framing that strike them as tinged with racial or gender stereotypes. And while stories shouldn’t be edited to avoid ever offending anyone — or pabulum will ensue — editors do have to consider how readers might react.
The very real issues of economic inequality and racial strife in our society aren’t funny. But it’s also true that the most sensitive topics are the ones that comics often play on (with mixed success). Trevor Noah, among others, comes to mind.
The fact that the writer is a black man who often takes up these issues, both in fiction and criticism, carries weight here. And the story isn’t tone-deaf. In fact, it seems fully aware of what it’s wading into.
Stories in the Magazine often have more voice and point of view than in other parts of the paper. If Andrew Ross Sorkin had written this sentence in a DealBook column, or if it had cropped up in fashion coverage by Vanessa Friedman (highly unlikely, of course, in both cases), all hell would break loose, and rightly so.
Given the legitimate sensitivities around this issue, and the very real chance that its intention would be misunderstood by many readers, the wiser play might have been to take it out. But so far, it is causing only a dustup and not a hurricane-level storm. And context is a big part of that.
Correction, Friday, July 24, 2015:
An earlier version of this post misstated when Mr. Diggs took on the title role. He did so this week.