How I Learned To Love "Alternative" White Men.
or, David Carr was the embodiment of White Privilege
by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
* whereby Coates acknowledges the journalistic lights of the late David Carr, and Erik Wemple of the Erik Wemple blog, in helping to create his prize-winning genius.
I had just turned 20 years old. And -- geez, I was so close to school -- I mean high school, that’s the crazy thing about it. I was still very much a child in many ways. In some ways I was more mature than other people, in other ways I was very, very immature. One way that I was mature is that I really cared about writing, I cared a lot about it. And I would have written David Carr a letter expressing my interest, and I think I sent him this little chapbook of poetry and three or four articles that I had written for the school newspaper.--------------------------
...
There were no black people in the office. Like none. This is immediately the whitest place I had ever been in my life. Right away. So I get in and culturally, you know, it’s like a different world. I’m looking at these folks, and they’re not even professional, or corporate, like what you see in the movies or on TV. You know, these are like alternative white people, and I had no exposure to alternative white people, like none. I didn’t know what that was. They were all dressed down; I think it was March and they had on shorts. I was like, God, everybody’s in shorts. What’s going on here?
They were so, so relaxed.
And then I was brought in to talk to David Carr. And David was loud and boisterous, and he was in shorts, and he was charming, even if he was loud and boisterous and aggressive. He’s very likable instantly — kind of crude. He’d yell at you, but he yelled at everybody. I think the only other place you might get that experience is like in athletics. Maybe in the armed services.
He said, “Yeah, I got your stuff, and, you know, this poetry thing, we don’t do this, but, you know, I like this. I like that you did this.” And I think looking back on it, what he liked was that I had made it** -- I think he liked the fact that I had put it together into a book; it’s a little chapbook. That showed initiative. I wasn’t just sort of scribbling things in my room and sending them out.
And he said, “Yeah, man, you’re the shit, man. You’re the shit. Why don’t you come do this?”
* Don't say "who?" Everybody who is anybody in Washington knows those three, it seems...
Public intellectuals, power journalists, late critics and all. Will be interesting to see if they are still remembered by the people, in the post-Obama years... Does their work live beyond the daily pages? Will their ideas hold? Is "the shit" any good?
** I think too, David Carr liked the idea of adding racial and economic diversity to his staff. Call it a hunch...and an understanding of the hiring freezes in the journalism industry of the early 1990s for candidates not of color, without connections. I wonder if Coates is curious enough to ask questions about that... lol.
(Like, did Coates reveal his father Paul's status as a former Panther? Carr likely would have eaten that shit up in the badass whiteboy role he was creating for himself...)
ADDED: "Night of the Gun" was Carr's autobiography.
For many, including Carr, the task of telling his story has always included sorting out the contradictions. While he acknowledged that sometimes he "didn't do a good job" of keeping his professional and private lives separate, he defended his ability to work as a reporter while high.Tom Arnold, Roseanne's ex-husband, was a close friend of Carr's in the early days:
"Why don't you go back and read the clip?" he said. "I think I won a [journalism] award" for the story that the Perpich interview yielded. "I did things differently," he added.
Carr did do things differently, and has his regrets. In the book, he describes leaving his two infant daughters alone in a car, in the cold, as he went to buy drugs. "How long had it been, really?" he wrote. "It had not been ten minutes tops. Ten minutes times ten, probably, if not more. Hours not minutes."
His biggest champions in Minnesota, and there are many, prefer to dwell on the good times, and there were many of those, too.
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{Former} Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak said he did not live the details of Carr's darkest periods. Rybak said Carr coaxed him to become the publisher of the Twin Cities Reader, the now-defunct alternative weekly, when Carr was its editor in the mid-1990s.
"I saw him as a real hero who had overcome his demons," Rybak said. "It was a great time and, for a while, better than I thought we could ever get to."
Rybak had less to say about an incident in the book when Carr publicly referred to a female Reader staffer as having a "nice rack." Carr acknowledged he was "pulled into the publisher's office and told that I made some of the women in the office uncomfortable." Rybak declined to talk of the episode, other than to say "I applaud David's honesty."
{Former} Minnesota congressman Jim Ramstad, a recovering alcoholic who met Carr at a recovery meeting, also is a fan. "I deeply admire his courage," he said of the book.
Not everyone is as kind. "I couldn't understand why I was the only one who felt relieved when he was gone," said Cherie Parker, who worked briefly at the Reader and said "there was a ton" of hero worship of Carr at the paper. Parker said she cried when Carr harshly criticized her first story, and she will never forget her job interview: "He shouted at me, 'When I was your age, I was selling coke.' I'm, like, 'O-kaaay.' "
Rose Farley, another Reader reporter whom Carr hired, said he was a good editor and mentor, and someone who "knew how power worked in Minneapolis." He was also a mesmerizing storyteller who was not bashful about his past.
Farley recalled Carr taking his staff to dinner and holding forth about the time he left his girls in the car.
"It's such a horrible thing -- you can't believe he's sitting there telling us," she said. "He was entertaining you with it."
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Bob Olander, a Hennepin County social services official who helped Carr get state-funded treatment, said his problems were frighteningly real. "I never sensed for a moment that the game was about a hustle," said Olander. He said Carr had been through a "pretty heavy coke thing and a booze deal" and was having a "moral struggle" over how to raise his daughters while still traversing his own personal mine field.
Some friends wonder: How much of that is in Carr's rear-view mirror, even as he reaches new professional heights? In an interview late last month, he talked of "coming up on three years sober" -- he started drinking again in 2002, then quit after a DWI arrest -- and being less of a jerk these days, though "probably not much less."
Twin Cities businessman Dave Cowley, who has known Carr since the 1970s, said he heard him talk recently about meeting megastars Mick Jagger, Gwyneth Paltrow and Paul McCartney in his role as New York Times columnist. It is a fast crowd for someone trying to conquer his own demons, Cowley said.
"I worry about him," he said. Carr's story is "a gripping story but, you know, it never has an end."
Arnold: We had this running fight about who owed who drugs, which, if you read his book, we got into a fistfight about, and, you know he lost, sadly, because he was bringing it up in front of this girl who I liked from Minneapolis. The local newspaper, the Star Tribune, had just written about how I was sober. I wasn't sober, but she thought I was sober. She liked sober people, so I said I was sober, because I wanted her to like me.Tom Arnold, and Ta-Nehisi Coates... Carr was a kingmaker, truly.
He came up when I was talking to her and said, "You owe me a gram of coke." And I was like, "Shut the fuck up. Get away from me." And he was fucked up. And I could tell he was gonna not shut up. He keeps coming up, and I'm like, "Dude, I'm going to fucking knock you out. I can tell you right now buddy, if you come up one more time, because you're fucking this up for me, I'm going to fucking hit you in the face."
He does it again, and I just had a feeling he wanted to get knocked out, you know, like he's in that mood. And I turn around and I blast him and I end up with a thumb in his eyeball. And the woman saw it and she was disgusted and horrified, so it fucked up that too. But he forgave me. He knew that he started it.
You know, he considered himself a bit of a badass. He was bigger then. We were both fat and we snorted cocaine, which makes no sense. But we both hoped for something better for ourselves. We both thought: If I get my shit together ever, I can make something out of this. I can be a writer, I can be a comic, I can be an actor.
T
Arnold: In 1987, Roseanne had become a big comedy star by then, and she was doing her first HBO special, and asked me to come to L.A. and be her husband on it, ironically. It was my big break. I mean that was big.
It's Saturday night and I'm doing a show in Rochester, Minnesota, and after the show we go to McDonald's. I get into a fight — a fistfight — with the cops, after getting kicked out of McDonald's. I end up in jail. It was my seventh time in jail so I was on a 30-day hold. A psych hold. You know, I'm in a padded cell. I have one call. I have to be in L.A. on Monday morning. I have to get on, at the very worst, a red eye on Sunday night. I have one call and I call Carr.
I was feeling so depressed. And this feeling I've had in my life, like, "Okay, I've gone too far this time. It is over." And [Carr] calls a lawyer in Minneapolis. He's like, "I got the guy." This fucking guy calls the judge on the golf course. The judge has them let me out of the psych hold. I get back to Minneapolis, get on the plane, and my life is completely different because of that.
If I had not showed up for that, and [Roseanne] would have found out I was in jail again, she would have just never spoken to me again. I wouldn't have been a writer on her show.
Reading those links can help you better understand Coates' literary disgust with white people, and his call for reparations from those who face no consequences for their actions because they are white and connected. David Carr was the embodiment of White Privilege.
Although his job has been left open at the Times since his death last February, today the Times named his replacement. He has a Wikipedia page up.
Jim Rutenberg is a political correspondent for The New York Times, for whom he has written 1600 articles.Oh, and he's married to an actress...
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