12 March 2003

Joel Giambra's mealy-mouthed hypocrisy

by Bruce Jackson

I wasn't going to weigh in on Joel Giambra's racist gaffe. I've never had a conversation with him but he seems a cut above many of the other rogues, scoundrels and incompetents in government or pulling the strings that control people in government around here. I've never heard of him being in anybody's pocket or dancing to anybody's tune, and if you compare that to the second floor of Buffalo's city hall that is saying quite a bit. His talk about consolidation seems airy, at least from the city's point of view, but he's talking more to the Republicans out in the county than the Democrats in Buffalo, to towns many of which are comfortable rather than to a city that is having a hard time getting off the ropes, and people in Buffalo know that.

Then he issued Tuesday night's god-awful press release.

The current row started last Saturday at a conference on school choice when he said, according to Dale Anderson in the Buffalo News, "that he transferred his children from Buffalo's Waterfront Elementary School to Christian Central Academy in Amherst because 'our children began to be fearful of black kids.'"

That, on its face, is a dilly of a dumb thing to say. Not just because he was talking about a highly-regarded magnet school with one of the lowest number of disciplinary reports in the city, or because the audience was an ethnically mixed group of parents and teachers and school administrators in St. John Baptist Church who were sure to go nuts at such an utterance. I assume they did go nuts because everything I've read about the event says that Joel Giambra wishes he'd been able to explain what he meant by that line but he couldn't quite manage it.

There are other reasons it was a dilly of dumb thing to say. If he indeed said what Dale Anderson said he said, then he was admitting to some pretty awful parenting skills. You don't deal with a kid's fear of other ethnic groups by moving the kids to a place where they won't have to be around those ethnic groups, or where the members of those groups will be so rigidly controlled or few in number that it comes to the same thing. (Only 14% of the students at Christian Central Academy are not white and American.) You do it by helping the kid deal with the basic issues, and perhaps by confronting them yourself. That is, if the kids were really having such problems in the first place and you weren't really moving them for some other reason you haven't even mentioned yet.

Sam Hoyt told Dale Anderson, "I do not believe Joel Giambra is a racist.... I think his comments were indeed unfortunate, and I think he owes the community as a whole a better explanation than he's given." That may indeed be true, but what else could Sam have said? If he said he did believe Giambra was a racist he's got an enemy he doesn't need now that he's tooling up for a run for mayor, and if he refused to say anything Anderson might have written that he refused to say anything, which is halfway to the same thing.

The News followed that with "Giambra amplifies remarks," an astonishingly slanted piece of front page writing by Robert J. McCarthy on Tuesday.

Giambra, McCarthy said, had dug in his heels and refused to apologize for the remark or the transfer. But he did say, "I've said I regret not being able to finish my statement.... I've made myself pretty clear. Everybody knows where I stand."

Well, no, everybody does not know where Giambra stands, and that's what the flap is about. If McCarthy had pushed him on where he stands on what he said and what he did there might have been some clarity. Instead, McCarthy moved to non sequitur:

"Why does there need to be a separation of church and state?" [Giambra]  asked. "I don't understand the reason for that. I don't have a problem with kids praying."

And while he acknowledged the constitutional basis for the concept, he labeled that view "politically correct." He was trying to convey that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that such vouchers are constitutional, he said, and do not violate separation of church and state.

This is where, for me, the whole sorry episode started turning rancid. Joel Giambra doesn't see any reason for the separation of church and state? The United States Constitution is the reason for separation for church and state. That's not "politically correct"; that's the law. He doesn't understand that there are Constitutional imperatives modulating how we behave? How can he run his office with that kind of hole in his imagination?

What does any of this have to do with the Giambra children's ostensible fear of black children and Giambra's dealing with that fear by pulling them out of a very good city school, anyway? That's another subject entirely. Did he move his kids to Christian Central because he wanted them to pray in school? If so, why hadn't he said that on Saturday? If that wasn't an issue, why was he saying it now? If it wasn't an issue now, why wasn't McCarthy pushing him back to the issue at hand?

Instead of pursuing that curious line of thought, McCarthy immediately changes mode and starts doing P.R. work for Giambra. His next sentence is,

Giambra, who throughout his tenure as county executive has reached out to blacks and invited them into his Republican fold, found himself on the defensive following a summit on school choice he convened Saturday.

It's not a reporter's place in a news story to characterize behavior central to the misbehavior that is the subject of the story without even token substantiation. Had McCarthy gotten Sam Hoyt to utter that line, say, or a Republican official who presumably would know about Giambra's attempts to enfold blacks, or a black who had been enfolded by Joel Giambra, it would have been fine. It would have been a fact. Quotations are facts, even if they're wrong because even if what the person is saying is wrong we learn something from the person quoted that he said that wrong thing.

Assertions by reporters may look like facts but they're not; they're just assertions. Editorials and opinion columns are full of unsubstantiated assertions and that's fine with us because we recognize those columns for what they are: if an editorial says "Buffalo will be better if the Common Council is changed" or if Donn Esmonde says somebody is a swell guy, we read those statements in terms of what we think of the opinions offered by the editorial writers or by Donn Esmonde.

But a news article is a place where the newspaper promises to give us facts, not hype. That's the contract: opinions in the editorials and opinion columns, facts in the news articles.

There's a further problem with McCarthy's defense of Giambra: it's irrelevant. What does the assertion that Giambra has tried to enlist blacks as Republican voters have to do with what he said last Saturday and what his pulling his kids out of the Waterfront School may imply? The assertion that he tried to get more blacks to vote Republican has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he told people he moved his kids to a school because they didn't like being around black kids.

Bringing in irrelevant information and masking opinion as fact isn't the only way a newspaper writer distorts the meaning of a story. Another is by the use of carefully placed loaded adjectives. Most readers hardly notice them, but they can influence the reading of whatever follows. For example, in this story about Joel Giambra's gaffe Buffalo News political reporter Robert J. McCarthy wrote:

"I think it's extremely damaging. I hope he retracts that and makes an apology," Masten Council Member Antoine M. Thompson said. "I think at the end of the day he'll probably wind up apologizing."

He said the Common Council had previously passed a resolution condemning racially sensitive remarks issued last year by Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and intends to do the same with Giambra remarks he called "divisive."

"He really made a blunder," Thompson said. "I don't know how he's going to get out of this one."

University Council Member Betty Jean Grant was not as strident but said Giambra's remarks had proven offensive to some and an apology would be in order.

What, exactly, is  "strident" about Antoine Thompson's remarks? On the page, they seem well-balanced and reasonable. Was he shrieking and yelling and carrying on like a fool? If not, why characterize them as strident? If he was, then why didn't McCarthy say so? As it stands, here is nothing "strident" about Thompson's remark except McCarthy's use of the word. If Betty Jean Grant "was not as strident" as Thompson, just how strident was she? The only quotation McCarthy provides from her is:

"He needs to apologize to the community," she said, adding that had he clarified his remarks the problem would not have arisen.

Which doesn't seem strident at all. Are we getting stridency by the people McCarthy is interviewing or, as a friend said when she read his article, "racist stereotyping-to-go"?

McCarthy then presents Giambra's Alice-in-Wonderland explanation:

But as Giambra attempted to clarify, he also avoided apologizing, even after meeting with the four African-American Council members. He explained that he and his wife, Michelle, decided to enroll their three children in Amherst's Christian Central Academy because of a lack of discipline and other problems they encountered at Waterfront School.

They transferred the children, he said, because he did not want them to be racially prejudiced as a result of problems they experienced with black students at Waterfront.

"Michelle and I had the ability to react to it and the ability to choose another situation while others don't," he said. "Many parents in the Buffalo school system don't have that choice."

Yes, Joel Giambra had the ability to move his kids to a private school and many parents in Buffalo do not. But the logic that he moved them out of Waterfront school in order to keep them from being prejudiced seems, on its face, absurd. Yes, I think it is absurd. It's not on the order of "We had to burn the village in order to save it," but it's the same theory of meaning.

Giambra, McCarthy writes,

acknowledged he could have issued a standard political apology if he had offended anyone but chose to focus attention on the issue.

"I know that would have made this go away," he said. "I'm just convinced someone has got to force the issue of the serious and major problems in the Buffalo Public Schools. It's the root cause of Buffalo's problems."

Aides to Giambra say he is not done making his point, adding they expect him to document his position with statistics about failing schools in coming days.

But Philip Rumore, president of the Buffalo Teachers Federation, said the county executive is only deflecting criticism. He said he finds it "sad" that Giambra was unable to explain to his children that not just black students have discipline problems.

"If it had been white students who presented problems would he have pulled his children out of school and sent them to an all-black school?" he asked.

Has anyone told Giambra or has it occurred to him that focusing on the issue of problems in Buffalo's schools and apologizing for having said something stupid and perhaps having done something worse are not incompatible? Giambra could have stood up to this mess of his own creation and said, "I'm sorry. I fucked up. I'm still learning. We all are. Let's learn something and go on from here."

But he couldn't do that. What he did was try to shift the attention elsewhere. And then he issued that god-awful press release.

A little while after 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday night, March 11, Giambra's office faxed Giambra's statement on the sorry affair to selected media organizations. Buffalo Report was not, I'm sorry to note, among the Select, but there is a happy brotherhood of sharing among political journalists that comes into play when something so god-awful comes along that there's room for us all at the table.

This is Giambra's press release in its entirety:

    I have found that the biggest challenge of leadership is learning to listen.

    This afternoon, I sought the advice of several senior faith leaders in our community. I sought their counsel, as I so often do, and once again I was privileged to receive it.

    These faith leaders asked me to listen to the voices of parents and children who were hurt by my words. They pointed out that in my passionate advocacy of School Choice I left the impression that I blamed African-American children and not incompetent bureaucrats for the failure of a public school.

    My clumsiness in communicating has gotten more attention than the School Choice movement that is the best hope–perhaps the only hope–for thousands of children in failing City schools. For that, I'm sorry. I want to help children, not add to their burden.

    As a parent, I do not apologize for taking action when incompetent school administrators failed to protect my children. I do not apologize for challenging a broken public school system that serves many children well, but leaves far too many others behind. And I have no patience for partisan political rhetoric that masquerades as racial sensitivity.

    I will work hard to help every parent in this region choose the best public school, the best charter school or the best private school available–and only by working together, and by putting any hint or suggestion of racial animosity behind us, will we be able to do right by our children.

He really sent that out, by fax, to reporters all over Buffalo.

I'm not one for calling people names and I'm not saying Joel Giambra is a mealy-mouthed hypocrite. I don't know the man so I wouldn't say a thing like that about him. But that letter or press release or whatever it is is a very good example of mealy-mouthed hypocrisy.

Those two sanctimonious paragraphs about Joel seeking advice from faith healers or faith leaders: he had to go to them to find out something was wrong? What place does someone have in the Erie County Executive's office if he has to spend two paragraphs with faith healers learning that the education system is a mess around here?

Then he goes on to tell us he's not going to apologize for things nobody asked him to apologize for, things nobody knows he even did. He never said anything Saturday about taking action because "incompetent school administrators failed to protect [his] children." He just said he pulled them out of Waterfront School because they were afraid of the black kids.

What, exactly, were Joel Giambra's kids really afraid of? He doesn't say. Was it two kids who stole their lunch money? All black kids? Everybody in sight? How, exactly, did those "incompetent school administrators" fail to protect his children—did something actually happen to them or did they just not like being around so many black kids who don't get to school in cars? He doesn't say. Were the kids really all that freaked about Buffalo's Waterfront School or was it Joel Giambra and his wife who were freaked about Buffalo's Waterfront School? He doesn't say.

The main thing he doesn't say is that he is sorry for having said what he said. It's all a matter of other people misunderstanding, misbehaving, misperforming. None of it has anything to do with any attitude he has, or any attitude he may be and probably is communicating to his children.

Is Joel Giambra a racist? I have no idea. He got some heat a few years ago when he was quoted as responding to a query about the absence of blacks in his kitchen cabinet by saying that he could find out about crime by talking with black preachers. But that passed over. So far as I know no blacks got added to his kitchen cabinet, but he didn't make any more remarks like that that got out.

Until Saturday, when he told a group of parents and teachers that he'd pulled his kids out of Waterfront School in Buffalo and moved them to a Christian school in Amherst because they were afraid of black kids. He said he did it to keep them from becoming racist. People told him what he said and did were both offensive.

He could have fixed the whole thing at any point between then and now by saying, "I fucked up. It was a dumb thing to say and maybe I dealt with a complex problem without thinking what I was teaching my kids by handling it that way. I was so busy serving the public I dealt with the symptom rather than the problem. It's a lesson for me, it's a lesson for all of us. Let's learn and move on."

Who could be nasty after a manly statement like that? I was wrong, I'm gonna learn something, let's all learn something, let's do better. That would be a good lesson for kids who read newspapers.

But no. He gets on the ground with his faith healers and attacks unnamed school administrators and, so far as he's let anyone know, he has engaged in not a moment of serious reflection on the real meaning of any of this. That is just awful. It may not be racist, but it is just awful.

 

 

The Buffalo News responded to Joel Giambra's late-night press release in three places in its March 12 morning edition: a page 1 article deceptively headlined "Giambra issues apology" (in his statement Giambra twice said he wouldn't apologize), an editorial whitewashing Giambra of responsibility for anything of substance, and a Donn Esmonde column that seems at its start to be about Giambra's unfortunate remark, his troublesome actions and his non-apology, but then wanders into a complaint about the school system and by the end, has entirely forgotten the beginning in favor of something about green people.

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