Up until Sunday, Wendi Thomas was a columnist for the Commercial Appeal. She was not universally loved. In fact, if you ever read the comments on her column or saw what people wrote to her on Twitter, you could get the idea that a whole lot of people believe that, if black people just never talks about what it's like to be a black person in Memphis, there would be no racial animosity in Shelby County or, for that matter, the country.
Late Tuesday night, Thomas was reassigned.
After 10 years as The Commercial Appeal’s Metro columnist, Wendi C. Thomas is taking a new assignment. As part of The CA’s ongoing reorganization focused on its digital platforms, Thomas has been named to lead expanded coverage of crime and justice in the Memphis area.
This is, the Commercial Appeal claims, what readers want. They're shifting her to one of the "topics of importance to readers." I surely believe that the opinions of a black woman aren't a topic of importance to readers, but it's a damn shame. White people opine about things all over the media, men more so than women, but everyone knows what white people think about things. There are so few black female columnists at the major papers that Thomas's reassignment is a devastating loss.
I think that, in a state (hell, in a country) with as fraught a history of race relations as we have, it's immoral for the Commercial Appeal to remove Thomas from the opinion page, especially without a commitment to replacing her with more African American writers. Especially when the Commercial Appeal knows that many in the community will understand her change in jobs as her being shut up by the paper.
And they know this because, as the Memphis Flyer points out, that's what people thought was the case the last time.
A year ago, when Thomas was temporarily reassigned to an editor's desk without any official notice from the paper to its readers, many commenters assumed that the CA's first female African-American columnist was being punished somehow for her often contentious positions on events of the day, especially those relating to race.
The Commercial Appeal should not even give the appearance that, if white people belly-ache long enough and loud enough, it will silence the "offending" black woman. If a newspaper's job is still to afflict the comfortable, then the belly-aching just proves Thomas was doing her job. And yet, here we are, the Commercial Appeal failing its community under the guise of making moves to please its community.
Still, a decade is a good run. And Thomas, unlike so many journalists, at least still has a job. But we've lost something important here.
