Former Pennsylvania news anchor Wendy Bell, who was fired from WTAE-TV in March after making controversial comments about black people in a Facebook post, is now suing her former employer for race discrimination. The lawsuit, filed on Monday, alleges the station fired Bell, who is white, based on the color of her skin, in violation of her protected civil rights. If Bell were black, her attorney says, the outcome would have been completely different.
“The comment was not intrinsically racially pejorative. It was interpreted to be that way,” said Sam Cordes in a statement. Denouncing the station’s double standards, the lawsuit claims WTAE “consistently downplays misconduct by similarly situated reporters and anchors because of their race or gender.”
Two weeks following the shooting of six black people in the low-income borough of Wilkinsburg, Bell wrote on her professional Facebook page about what she perceived to be a rampant and preventable black-on-black crime epidemic in her city:
Her post, which has since been deleted, read:
You needn’t be a criminal profiler to draw a mental sketch of the killers who broke so many hearts two weeks ago Wednesday […] They are young black men, likely teens or in their early 20s. They have multiple siblings from multiple fathers and their mothers work multiple jobs. These boys have been in the system before. They’ve grown up there. They know the police. They’ve been arrested. They’ve made the circuit and nothing has scared them enough. Now they are lost.
Bell said she was “tired of hurting” at the thought of young children finding “their father’s twisted body leaking blood into the dirt from all the bullet holes,” but found hope in a young African-American busboy she saw diligently wiping tables at a restaurant her and her family went to that week. “He’s going to make it,” she concluded.
The comments — which immediately drew a flurry of responses, some more scornful than others — were heartfelt, she later told The Associated Press in a phone interview. The post was never meant to be about her, but about “African-Americans being killed by other African-Americans.”
“It makes me sick,” she said. “What matters is what’s going on in America, and it is the death of black people in this country. … I live next to three war-torn communities in the city of Pittsburgh, that I love dearly.”
I have removed a post that I initially placed here on Monday. I sincerely apologize for that post about the… https://t.co/SPdfljNykO
— Wendy Bell (@WendyBellPgh) March 23, 2016
Taken out of context, there are plenty of things to frown at in this story.
The timing, for one, was unfortunate. At the time Bell took to Facebook — on March 30, two weeks after the incident — the County District Attorney had said there were suspects, but no descriptions had been issued and the police had yet to make any arrests. Authorities investigating the shooting were equally silent on the motive.
(To make things worse, WTAE reported on Tuesday that the two presumed suspects — who are indeed black — were still unlawfully detained in solitary confinement for unrelated charges.)
Also, by generalizing about the circumstances of black men who commit crime and that of promising young men with such assuredness, you could even say she was being quite condescending.
But. And there’s a big But. Wendy Bell…. is actually right.
A quick look at the FBI’s 2015 Crime in the United States confirms that in 2013, 90% of black people were murdered by black people. For white murder victims, 83% of the killers are white.
According to Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox — who modified the FBI’s data to include murders with multiples victims, unreported cases, and unsolved homicides and found similar results — the vast majority of folks are actually murdered by someone from the same race.
According to 2007 US Bureau of Justice statistics, African-Americans are roughly six times as likely as white Americans to die at the hands of a murderer, seven times as likely to kill someone, and their victims are black 82% of the time.
This is due, mainly, to the extreme racial homogeneity of most American neighborhoods. “People tend to be murdered by those who know them,” Fox recently told Politifact.
Beyond the questionable tone of her comments, Bell’s case illustrates how quick the public is to crucify white public figures who dare venturing into the field of race and black identity — even when they are well-meaning.
When Larry Elder dismisses the Black Lives Matter movement as “people whining and bitching and moaning about nonsense,” adding that if they “really want to talk about Black Lives Matter,” they would focus more on “black people murdered by other black people,” no one winces. When Deroy Murdock or John McWorther argue that all forms of violence against black people — including black-on-black crimes — should be addressed, we don’t hear the sirens of outrage wailing.
Alas, the digital world we live in — where online backlash dictates who gets to live and die in the politico-media world — is just as myopic as Bell’s comments.
Follow me on Twitter @nahema_marchal
