To the editor:

As a regular reader of the Emory Wheel, I was disturbed and disappointed to pick up the Nov. 7 issue, the first issue to appear after the historic presidential election of Barack Obama, only to find no substantial coverage devoted to him on the front page. In response to an earlier letter that I penned questioning this matter, the Wheel printed an editorial in its Nov. 11 issue. The editors clearly believe they have done their due diligence by offering justifications for their coverage, and fail to understand that such justifications, however much they may believe in them, does not inherently legitimize the choices made. The central issues are two-fold: Why was it deemed beyond the scope of the Wheel’s self-proclaimed “hyper-local” prerogatives to include a significant mention of the nation’s newly elected leader on the front page, as they had done in past issues, and is the Wheel staff willing to grapple with the negative, if unintended, implications of their choices?

The coupling of three pages of laudable editorial coverage on Obama’s victory with only a marginal mention on the front page is a troubling incongruency. As any journalist and any student of civil rights history knows, location matters. Thus this deliberate decision to place coverage of Obama solely in the editorials section bears questioning, especially given its inconsistency with college news coverage around the country and with the Wheel’s own prior coverage of such elections. What does it mean, for instance, to include coverage of an unprecedented African American achievement near the back of the paper, while the front of the paper betrays almost no hint of such an achievement? What does it mean to suggest that the “hyper-local” necessarily supersedes the national in an institution in the Deep South? What does it mean to make these choices in the birthplace of Dr. King? The Wheel may not have asked these questions, but future historians certainly will.

The evacuation of Obama from the Wheel front page, though perhaps unintended, nevertheless constitutes an erasure. And the Wheel’s explanation of this erasure bespeaks larger impediments to community and diversity that continue to re-assert themselves on our campus despite the institutionalization of diversity initiatives like the Transforming Community Project and the Race and Difference Initiative. The argument offered in the Nov. 11 editorial that more prominent coverage of Obama would have amounted to a mere “regurgitation of the facts and insights reported by the major media” is particularly uncompelling, given the Wheel’s choice to cover, for instance, the national paper shortage and its effects on our campus. How ironic to cover the paper shortage three days later, but not the reason for the paper shortage.

Some members of the Emory community have also suggested that it would have been outdated to include front-page coverage of Obama’s victory three days after the election. For those folks, I have two questions: if coverage of Obama himself was outdated after three days, how was coverage of voter turnout and student reaction still relevant three days later? Second, how is it that the election of the first African-American president ceases to become first-page news in just three days for a campus who supposedly supported Obama in numbers above 75 percent?

The Wheel’s decision that Obama was unworthy of any “front page real-estate” seems a bit foreboding, during this honeymoon period, in which some less thoughtful members of our population are proclaiming that America is post-race. It seems that these types of choices that the Wheel made are the very types of errors that are permitted by premature post-racial thinking. Such thinking also makes those who call attention to these obvious oversights seem unduly hypersensitive and stuck in the racial past. But Obama himself reminded us in his infamous race speech, quoting William Faulkner, “that the past isn’t past.” The magnitude of this historic moment thus demands that we be not hyper-local, not hyper-sensitive, but hyper-vigilant about making the most of opportunities to foster a notion of community inclusiveness.

Brittney Cooper
PhD Candidate