Careless Lumping

The U.S. Communist press operates on the racist proposition that a Negro can do no wrong, an assumption that is as offensive to most U.S. Negroes as its racist opposite. But last week Entertainment Columnist David Platt of Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker discovered that no party-liner dares wander from that particular line, even for an instant. In printing a list of "lavatory literature," i.e., pocket-size picture magazines published by the "capitalist press," Critic Platt made the mistake of including Jet, the breezy Negro weekly (TIME, Sept. 22, 1952) that can lift a skirt with the best of them (e.g., People Today, Bold, Tempo). Platt was promptly brought to task by a letter from a couple of Worker readers accusing him of a "sectarian, white-chauvanist error."

In the Worker last week, Platt shamefacedly confessed his sin. Wrote he: "I very carelessly lumped the tabloid weekly Jet with the others. Deplorable as it sounds, I never even looked through Jet until today. What happened was this: I was lunching at a newsstand and saw this title displayed together with others, and I jumped to the conclusion that they were all alike . . . Now that I have had a chance to look through Jet, I can see that it is quite different from the others." Then Platt confessed the worst sin of all:

"Frankly speaking, I did not know at the time I wrote my piece that Jet was a Negro magazine."

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