Parody Blows Up for Columnist
(1/31/2008) A column in The Independent purportedly written by “YoMama Bin Barack” has outraged readers, prompting accusations of racism and calls for the real author’s ouster, talk of boycotts, widespread protest, even the rumor of a visit to East Hampton by the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Called “Why I Should Be Our Next President,” the piece, which appeared on Jan. 23, was written by Rick Murphy, the newspaper’s editor in chief, in his weekly “Low Tidings” slot. Pretending to write in the voice of Barack Obama, the so-called parody makes ample use of racist and sexist stereotypes, asserting, for example, that most black men are in jail or that white women like to be slapped.
The column was the subject of a news report on ABC Channel 7 television last Thursday night and has been widely distributed on the Internet, fomenting a furor over it as well as a previous column on Jan. 16 that Mr. Murphy wrote as if it were by Hillary Clinton. It was called “My Scrapbook.”
Jerry Della Femina, an owner and publisher of The Independent who writes his own weekly column, “Jerry’s Ink,” has apologized for Mr. Murphy’s columns. In yesterday’s issue of The Independent, Mr. Della Femina called them “frankly vile,” and said, “There’s no excuse.” Until this week, Mr. Murphy was also listed, with Mr. Della Femina and James Mackin, as one of the newspaper’s publishers.
“It’s absolutely inexcusable,” said Lucius Ware, the president of the Eastern Long Island Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “The piece is just very ugly,” said his son, Lester Ware of Sag Harbor. “This is no accident. This is not a momentary lapse of judgment. Even when you look at little things, this is a pattern at that newspaper. This is the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
The older Mr. Ware suggested that “concrete” action, beyond an apology, was needed. The issue is still “under discussion” by the N.A.A.C.P., he said.
Mr. Della Femina, who runs a New York City ad agency and owns Della Femina restaurant in East Hampton, has had a hands-off approach to the paper, but has promised to review all of Mr. Murphy’s future columns before publication. “He’s not a writer who should ever be allowed to edit his own work again,” he wrote in his column this week. “I will be making sure that we never have anything like that again,” he said on the phone on Tuesday.
The “YoMama Bin Barack” column was removed from the Independent’s Web site at the end of last week. In its place was a brief apology for a “lapse of judgment.”
“I feel terrible; I feel awful,” Mr. Murphy said on Tuesday. “I’m readily admitting it was a mistake. It offended people. That’s why it was a mistake. I’m trying to make people laugh.” He said the two columns were to have been part of a series focusing on each of the presidential candidates. “The concept, which was faulty,” he said, “was to focus on some of the stereotypical things the candidates are saying about each other. My effort went awry.”
“I’m not a racist,” he said. “The intent was not to hurt anyone; it was to poke fun at ourselves.” Mr. Murphy suggested, however, that some of his local critics were not “genuinely offended” but rather “politicians we didn’t endorse.”
In his column in yesterday’s paper, Mr. Della Femina also stated that “Rick is not racist. If I thought he was,” he wrote, “he would be out on his ass in a heartbeat.”
Jim Henry of Sag Harbor, an attorney who was a candidate for Southampton Town supervisor last year and is a vice president of the Suffolk branch of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said he was preparing a complaint to be filed with the Southampton Town Anti-Bias Task Force.
“There’s definitely a feeling in the community that this has happened before,” Mr. Henry said. “This time it has gone too far. People are not satisfied with the notion of an apology and back to business as usual.”
In an e-mail sent to The Independent’s publishers and editors, Mr. Henry referred not only to Mr. Murphy’s columns, but to the Jan. 23 “Is It Just Me?” cartoon, a weekly feature by Karen Fredericks, who is married to Mr. Murphy. The cartoon, which Mr. Henry called “vile,” criticized Oprah Winfrey for her support of Barack Obama in what some said was obscene language. It remained on the Independent Web site.
Lisa Votino-Tarrant was among a group who met on Tuesday night to organize another response to the Independent column. She said volunteers would contact advertisers about withdrawing their ads, circulate a petition, and plan rallies, perhaps outside Mr. Della Femina’s restaurant in East Hampton.
A member of the Southampton Town Anti-Bias Task Force, Ms. Votino-Tarrant is the wife and granddaughter of members of the Shinnecock Indian Nation. She said Shinnecocks had been offended by a previous “Low Tidings” column and had protested outside the newspaper office on one occasion.
“They certainly can probably hurt us,” Mr. Della Femina said Tuesday. He acknowledged that the Obama column, as well as the one on Hillary Clinton, “were an embarrassment to the paper,” but he said he did not believe in firing someone for making a mistake.
Ken Allan, the co-chairman of the East End Gay Organization, said on Friday that the Clinton column was not only sexist but loaded with homophobic slurs. Even before he saw the Jan. 23 column, Mr. Allan said, he had contacted Mr. Murphy. “We, as a human rights organization, support freedom of the press, but it comes with responsibility,” Mr. Allan said.
EEGO has canceled a lunch it booked for next month at Della Femina, Mr. Allan said. In addition, the group decided at a board meeting Tuesday night, to ask Mr. Della Femina to run an apology to “the gay and lesbian community of the East End” as well as giving the organization two pages of free advertising. Some members, Mr. Allan said, are so angry that they proposed picketing the restaurant.
It was noted that “My Gay View” by Jack Michels, a longstanding column in The Independent, was initiated after concerns were raised about a headline that offended some members of the gay community. Mr. Della Femina has pointed to his longtime support of Body Positive, an advocacy group for H.I.V./ AIDS patients.
“The fact is that what we are is irreverent,” Mr. Della Femina said of his tabloid on Tuesday. “You still can be irreverent without going over the line, and this went over the line. But I don’t want people to see The Independent as changing.”