Mainstream Media's White Gaze On Black Neighborhoods Is An Irritating Eyesore

It was a warm spring day, and I sat at a fold-up table at the construction site of the Go-Go Museum & Café, my latest project, located in the heart of Washington’s historic Anacostia neighborhood in a retail strip The New York Times hailedas the new epicenter of Black-owned businesses.

The door popped open. The stranger walked in wearing work slacks and a light button-down shirt and a swooping curly haircut. By the furtive, stuttering way he moved and surveyed the building from the other side of a glass wall, I took him for a real estate vulture. I was wrong. I raised a curt eyebrow and cocked my head in a way that said: State your business, MF.

He never did. He mumbled something about wanting to buy a bumper sticker and left.

Later, I learned the real identity of the surprise visitor. It was a former GOP candidate for Congress in his 20s, Matthew Foldi. Despite being listed as a political reporter, Foldi described himself as an “investigative reporter” for The Spectator, a magazine established in the United Kingdom in 1828. Motto: “firm but unfair.”

Foldi scurried out the door, his “investigation” complete: He suspected we were operating a front using $4 million in city money to sabotage local political enemies. With a few weaselly caveats, Foldi tied the payments to an unrelated activism campaign to stop the Washington basketball and hockey teams from leaving the district. The piece landed in The Spectator a few days later. A whole story based on an unproved, logistically impossible and unreported theory.

I think they call this sort of thing “fake news.”

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In mass media, “stereotypes are shortcuts to character development,” as my former Howard University professor Clinton Wilson II has explained . The fastest