IN 1998, as I was nearing the end of eight months working under Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice, he handed me a task that changed my life. I no longer have the yellow legal pad where I tracked my work, or a copy of the dot-matrix notes I printed out from the green-screen computer and left piled on his chair. But I can see it anyway: a handwritten check-box and the phrase “Call Sheila Williams.”
Barrett told me to call Ms. Williams because of a tragedy: her 20-year-old daughter, Sonya, had died in a 1991 stampede at City College. Police had failed to control the crowd at a basketball tournament featuring celebrity rappers, and nine young people, all black, had died. They had lain underfoot as a police captain instructed 66 officers, including eight already inside the gym, not to act—even as college officials and 911 callers begged for help. A police radio communication from the incident included an officer’s assessment of the students inside: “They’re not humans. They’re animals.”
The families of the dead students filed wrongful-death lawsuits against New York City, the state, a private security company, and the event’s promoters: Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and Dwight “Heavy D” Myers. Shortly before Barrett must have asked me to call Ms. Williams, a judge had approved a $3.2 million settlement.
When Barrett handed me that task, he would have told me that the Giuliani administration refused to pay anything until the judge ordered the city to take responsibility. In response, New York offered 2.5 percent of the total, so little that the other defendants threatened to settle separately. In the end, the city paid 5 percent: $166,000.
And then, Barrett would have told me why he was writing about this case: Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had recently held a press conference to announce a different, much higher profile wrongful death settlement. This was the city’s response to 80 plaintiffs1 charging police negligence and violations of civil rights in the 1991 Crown Heights riots. The city paid those plaintiffs $1.35 million,2 with the mayor directly apologizing to the family of Yankel Rosenbaum, the riots’ single fatality, for the city’s “clearly inadequate response.”3
It wasn’t Barrett’s style to tell me to ask Ms. Williams personal questions: how it felt to lose her daughter, what the loss had meant, what her truth was. Instead, he told me to ask what she thought about the divide he saw, and named. For her family, she said, “Giuliani did nothing.… I don’t know what reason there could be other than discrimination.”4
What Barrett probably didn’t tell me, but ended up writing, was that the problem wasn’t just racist city bureaucrats—it was racist media attention, too. “Saturation press coverage helped create a moral imperative to compensate the Crown Heights victims,” wrote Barrett. “But the media never even covered the CCNY lawsuits, walking away from the story immediately.”5
Barrett wrote that story for politicians and citizens in New York, and maybe it changed things in some small way there. For me, helping report it created a shift, slow moving but tectonic in scale, in how I understood racism, and its centrality to honest journalism.
I’d grown up, like most white Americans of my era, knowing that racism was wrong. But this was an opposition to overt, articulated hatred. In college, I was learning about racism’s complexities and its flip side, white privilege. On that settlement story, I learned something far more powerful: racism can be measured in dollars and cents, as much as lives lost. I’ve been learning to calculate its cost ever since.
Tracie McMillan is author of the New York Times best seller The American Way of Eating. She is working on her second book, The White Bonus, about the cash value of whiteness in America, for Henry Holt. She interned for Wayne Barrett in 1998.
1 Reported in the New York Times on April 3, 1998.
2 Note that other accounts put the settlement at $1.1 million, such as this Times piece: www.nytimes.com/1998/04/03/nyregion/mayor-apologizes-for-city-response-to-crown-heights.html.
3 Ibid.
4 Wayne Barrett, with research by Tracie McMillan and Jarrett Murphy, “Cheap Lives: How Rudy Stonewalled the Families of Nine Dead Black Students,” Village Voice, April 21, 1998.
5 Ibid.