TechCrunch‘s Sarah Perez penned a blog post about the Sony Hack issue that was a rejoinder to Aaron Sorkin’s missive in the New York Times, and reminded me of a lesson I learned 14 years ago.
During the time I worked to bring the 2005 Super Bowl to Oakland,between 1999 and 2001, and as a consultant to The City Of Oakland, then Oakland Mayor, now California Governor Jerry Brown didn’t make life easy for me, repeatedly stonewalling me from meeting with him. That, as my Super Bowl Bid counterparts enjoyed regular access to the leaders of their cities, especially the mayors.
When I learned that Brown and a small group of Oakland elected officials were holding meetings on plans I developed behind my back, without asking me, I hit the ceiling and issued an email I thought at the time to be private, and to the board of the Oakland-Alameda County Sports Commission, accusing Brown of being racist in that I believed he didn’t want to deal with an aggressively intelligent young African American man, and was more comfortable when we approached him in the role of kissing his tail. I wrote words to that effect.
A few days later the idea expressed in that email wound up in a local newspaper columnist’s space and the cat was out of the bag. As I was giving Mayor Brown his copy of a specially-made Palm Pilot that contained information about our Super Bowl Bid, Jerry suddenly asked me if I was going to “apologize for that email?”
I said “No.”
That was when I learned an email is anything but private. A friend of mine told me something I never forgot 14 years later to this date: “There are some emails you write and don’t send.” It never once occurred to me that the local columnist was wrong to publish my email’s contents; I was singularly pissed off that I was stabbed in the back by some of my board members. The message was clear: don’t email what you really think unless you’re prepared to make it public, because someone will.
Obviously Aaron Sorkin, Amy Pascal, Scott Rubin, and others at Sony didn’t get that memo – especially Sorkin, the famed writer of The Social Network and The West Wing. In a New York Times Op-Ed, Mr. Sorkin writes “I understand that news outlets routinely use stolen information. That’s how we got the Pentagon Papers, to use an oft-used argument. But there is nothing in these documents remotely rising to the level of public interest of the information found in the Pentagon Papers.”
Well, that’s where Mr. Sorkin is wrong. One activity that never ceases to amaze me in the media business is how the value of a news item can change, often for unpredictable reasons, and one of them being the changing audience that consumes it. For example, Mr. Perez is a female tech journalist, and so in considering Mr. Sorkin’s rant, she revealed her own values explaining “It’s worth informing the public that the studio’s upper management is 94 percent male, and 88 percent white (as Fusion reports) – making them less diverse than the much-lambasted tech companies whose recent barrage of diversity reports have revealed their tendencies toward monoculture, for instance.”
As I’m black, male, and an early supporter of Barack Obama’s run for President going back to 2006, and part of an online group called “Obama Rapid Response” that, among other things, changed the search results for “Obama Is Muslim” to read “Obama Is Not Muslim,” the email that Ms. Pascal, supposedly a Democratic Party supporter (I checked, and she’s donated $98,370 to Dems and most notably President Obama since 2006), was of particular interest to me. Aside from the fact that it just plain looked racist for Amy to crawl to Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson (thus sending the public message that she thinks President Obama represents only black people) as part of her apology, what Amy wrote was a valuable window into the kind of duality some whites express with respect to blacks, particularly those of us in prominent roles.
For me, that was a very important something to know, that Amy can give so much to President Obama, yet make a racist joke based on his assumed taste in movies. And judging from the public reaction to Amy’s email, I’m not the only one who feels that way. So, while Mr. Perez may think that it’s news that Hollywood has fewer women in executive roles than the Silicon Valley Tech Community, to me, that Amy Pascal, one of Hollywood’s few power women, can take on the same racist view that any one of those white males may have is equally newsworthy – and very disturbing.
What the Sony emails show is that now matter how much we think we’ve advanced in civil rights and race relations, we’ve really just crawled along. One generation learns its lessons, gets older, and then watches as the next generation picks up some, but not all, of those teachings learned – and so repeats many mistakes over again.
No, Mr. Sorkin is wrong. We needed to see those Sony emails and to know what was in them, because now, with the leak coming in the middle of the Ferguson, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice protests, and the Million Person March, America can see with clear eyes how Hollywood image makers help contribute to the slowness of improvements in race relations – and see that social media is well on its way to causing an acceleration in improvements in race relations.
Indeed, that can be seen in the makeup of the protestors around the country: completely interracial and male and female, not all black and malel. The question is, now that the racist and sexist cat’s out of the bag, will Hollywood finally start reflecting the real America, or not?
Mr. Sorkin, ball’s in your court.
Zennie Abraham | Zennie Abraham or “Zennie62” is the founder of Zennie62Media which consists of zennie62blog.com and a multimedia blog news aggregator and video network, and 78-blog network, with social media and content development services and consulting. Zennie is a pioneer video blogger, YouTube Partner, social media practitioner, game developer, and pundit. Note: news aggregator content does not reflect the personal views of Mr. Abraham.