The AFU and Urban Legend Archive
Language
 back in the african american 




                      Peter van der Linden
                          April 9, 1994

The story was just too ripe to ignore: a cow-town paper, in a guache attempt to emulate the sophisticated big city press, falls flat on its face. Sure enough the big city press was quick to lampoon their rural rival. Herb Caen was the first to jump on the bandwagon, reporting in The San Francisco Chronicle on July 26 1990: 

      Being politically correct has its occasional problems.  For instance,
      this correction in the July 21 Fresno Bee: "An item in Thursday's
      Nation Digest about the Massachusetts budget crisis made reference to
      new taxes that will help put Massachusetts 'back into the African
      American.' That item should have said 'back in the black.'"

Very droll, and the story was later picked up by the Columbia Journalism Review in its "Lower Case" humor column. The origin is clearly implied from the news reports. In a mindless effort to keep up with the latest politically-correct terminology, as well as the latest technology, the story seems to say, the Fresno Bee became a victim of its own pretensions.

Acceptable usage has changed considerably since World War Two: "negro" became "colored" became "black" became "person of color" became "African-American". For most thoughtful people, the current term has nothing to do with political correctness, but is rather a laudible evolution of phrase; instead of emphasizing how we differ by focusing on superficialities like skin color, it instead concentrates on shared heritage ("American") and is compatible with the way other ethnic groups describe themselves, e.g. Irish-American, Polish-American, etc.

The Chronicle story allowed readers to conclude that a word processor had surely been used to automatically change all occurrences of oldspeak into newspeak. Inadvertent word transformation is not rare in printed media. Some examples are amusing, when a government "payout" becomes "peyote", or a "ruthless Mafia enforcer" is described in print as a "ruthless Mafia informer". A spelling checker for the Apple Macintosh refused to recognize "Laserwriter" (Apple's printer) and instead suggested "Laserjet" (HPs printer).

But none of this was what actually happened at the Fresno Bee! The real story, in an object lesson for journalists everywhere, has never been previously uncovered. And the real story had nothing to do with political correctness, contrary to Herb Caen's snide remark. The first step in investigating anything is to get the facts. Expert journalists call this the 6 "W's": Who, What, Where, When, Why, and hoW.

Many local libraries have big city papers on microfilm, so the Chronicle column was quickly confirmed. The next step was to ascertain whether it had ever appeared in the Bee. The Chronicle quoted the Bee correction as appearing on July 21, and referring to an article from Thursday. Small town papers like the Fresno Bee aren't widely circulated outside their area, but a call to Information followed by a call to the Fresno Bee library confirmed that on Thursday July 19, 1990, the Fresno Bee did indeed print, in its round-up of national news, the phrase "Back in the African American," correcting it two days later.

A copy of the article and the correction from the Fresno Bee library was obtained, just to make sure. That established that the phrase had truly appeared in print. The next step was to find out why. I called the Fresno Bee newsroom, and asked to speak to the editor of the column. Eventually I reached a journalist who was knowledgable about the incident. He would only talk about it without attribution, for reasons that soon became clear. What occurred was not a faux-pas, but a practical joke.

The Fresno Bee does not have any list of excluded terminology. And they use no program that automatically converts old phrases into new ones. The substitution of "African-American" in place of "black" was a deliberate premeditated manual replacement. After the column ran in 1990, the editorial management (knowing this) was furious, and tried to track down the journalist responsible. No one would own up. The staff assigned to the column adamantly denied any involvement.

Management then brought in a computer specialist to audit the access records. He pointed the finger at, but could not conclusively implicate, a quite different individual, who was a known practical joker! The joker was confronted by management and denied everything. In the absence of proof, the matter ended there without disciplinary action.

Since the Fresno Bee does not maintain a list of popular words to exclude from print, the substitution was definitely not a standard proofreader's change caused by the desire to pander to political fashion (as Caen and others had implied). The incident was therefore either the result of maliciousness, or a deliberate prank. It's still funny, but the joke is on those who think the joke is on the Fresno Bee.

These kinds of tricks are quite common in popular media. Cartoon animators have slipped in salacious frames since the days of Betty Boop; recent examples include the undersea tower that looked like a golden phallus in "The Little Mermaid" poster (since recalled by Disney and changed). There was also the AP press release in March 1994 that reported:

NEW YORK (AP) -- Disney animators with mischief on their minds inserted X-rated scenes into laserdisc versions of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" The most revealing scene comes when Jessica is riding through Toon Town with actor Bob Hoskins. Their taxi crashes and they tumble out. As Jessica tumbles, her skintight red dress rides up. At normal speed she appears to be wearing underwear. But slowed down, three frames show her wearing nothing.

In winter 1993, the San Jose Mercury News illustrated a story about children's toys with a photograph of a stack of children's building blocks. A few days later a red-faced editor apologised for the fact that the letters on the sides of the blocks spelled out the slogan "Be a Lesbian" a subliminal message courtesy of the staff photographer. Newspaper hoaxes are an honorable tradition dating back to at least Mark Twain. They serve the public interest by reminding readers not to believe a message simply because it is widely distributed, and carries the meretricious authority of the published word.

So the Fresno Bee incident was not at all about a credulous newspaper, as was, say, the 1948 election results given in the Chicago Tribune, erroneously reporting a victory for Dewey who actually lost by a landslide to Truman. The Bee incident was much more like the 1979 Boston Globe picture of President Carter making a speech. An anonymous but fun-loving journalist removed the staid headline and replaced it with "More Mush from the Wimp."

The lessons of this piece of urban folklore bear repeating:

Hint, hint.


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