A Gift Ghetto?

I have a soft spot in my heart for holiday gift guides. The NEWSWEEK Gift Guide was the start of my career in 2004 and, to be frank, I'm obsessed with Christmas. What's not to love—an entire month of parties, good cheer, baked goods. Even the crankiest person is usually in a really good mood, and it's OK to drink eggnog. But, in keeping with my usual self-absorption, the real reason I love Christmas is that I'm good at it. So good, really that I usually take it too far, adding traditions, throwing spur-of-the-moment cocktail parties and buying people too many presents. I am trying to calm down a bit this year, if only to give my bank balance a break, but I will not stop buying presents. I don't need lots of big boxes under the tree with my name on them, but I require my family's eyes to pop out of their heads when they unwrap a gift from me. That's a good Christmas to me. I tell you all of this not so you'll envy my prodigious shopping skills, but to prove how exquisitely qualified I am to weigh in on the controversy surrounding The New York Times Holiday Gift Guide for people of color.

One of about 50 the Times did this year, this particular guide has attracted some pretty hot commentary from around the blogosphere. Gawker mocked it saying: "For racist grannies who maybe feel funny about their adopted Chinese grandkids, The New York Times offers a very special 'Of Color' gift guide." While Mediaite goes on to say, "Meanwhile, if they are going to include sections devoted to particular segments of the population why only highlight one based on race? ... Why not have a section for the gay people in your life? Or Jewish? The answer, of course, is because it is insulting and offensive and so utterly at odds with how the NYT conducts itself in all other areas of the paper." It's not often that two of my obsessions (in this case, race in America and Christmas) come together so neatly. So I took a look and: I liked it. I didn't find it offensive at all. Not all the gifts were things I'd suggest, but that's just a professional quibble.

At first, I wasn't sure why I wasn't offended, and feared that perhaps I'd become an apologist for what Ed Driscoll at Pajamas Media called "Separate But Equal at The New York Times". But no, that's not it. I feel that the guide's detractors have critically misunderstood the purpose of the guide—instead of seeing it as an expansion of options for Times readers, they've chosen to see it as a ghetto for those readers who are of color. But let's face facts, race does tell us something about what a person may or may not like—as do gender and age. Nobody argues with 25 Gifts for Tweens or 15 Ties Your Husband Will Love, and neither do they think that by looking at these guides, we're reducing people to the sum total of their age or gender. Instead, we understand that classifying gifts by the recipient is the most efficient way to find what you're looking for. Imagine the confusion if the Times just threw up the contents of their guides online with no organizing principle—it'd be useless or at the least, a pain in the ass. Of course, if the guide had featured fried chicken and gangsta rap, then it would be guilty of reductive thinking. But as it is, I wouldn't mind getting some of the things on that list (Hint: love that Carol's Daughter Magical Beauty collection). Not to mention that these critical bloggers appear to be reading the guide as if it were written by Strom Thurmond instead of Simone S. Oliver, an African-American reporter at the Times. NYTPicker, a blog dedicated to the inner workings of the newspaper, bemoans the fact that "this gift guide takes a holiday season celebrated by both Caucasians and people of color, and sets apart a page for gifts meant 'by and for' a group of people defined only by the color of their skin."

Context matters with these kind of things since the NYT is not a whites-only publication. If Gawker and NYTPicker read it as "What White People Should Buy Their Colored Friends," instead of what it purports to be (and is), then what does that say about them? In fact, when Yahoo News asked the NYT about this guide, spokeswoman Diana McNulty said, "The "Of Color' guide ... is in keeping ... with the efforts of a diverse Times staff to directly address minority readers with our content." What's the matter with that? I want the NYT to want me. They should try all different kinds of stories to attract a more diverse readership—that makes the paper more interesting, the readers better informed, and the media a little closer to looking like the world it covers.

The main problem with this kind of criticism is that it creates an environment where media outlets are damned for being too white and old-fashioned if they ignore race as a category altogether—and damned for being racist if they dare use it to distinguish varied tastes among their audience. Such an atmosphere does not advance my own personal cause—the amelioration of race relations in this country—because it requires that we remain silent and scared instead of challenging ourselves to think critically about the role skin color plays in our society. The Times should be applauded for creating guides that, as McNulty said, "are intended to offer holiday gift ideas for a wide variety of audiences and interests, with Times writers and editors making smart, informed choices that might appeal to those different audiences." And since I've looked at this guide about 345 times, let me add one more thing: its pretext, subtext, and racial subtext all say pretty much the same thing ... get people something they want, not something you want them to want. That's my No. 1 trick for buying presents for people. Trust me, I'm an expert.