Heard about this through the Carl Brandon mailing list:
While the facts surrounding the kidnapping and rescue of the Maersk Alabama Captain Richard Phillips have been widely reported, less well-known is that ship which saved him was commanded by a black woman, Rear Admiral Michelle Howard.
Howard received the assignment of leading the U.S. Navy’s counter-piracy task force just three days before the Maersk Alabama was attacked by Somalia pirates.
“It’s probably one of the most exciting missions the Navy has been on in for a long while,” Howard told the Navy Times.
Did you know the Maersk captain was rescued by a black woman? I didn’t either.
On the one hand, I’m almost glad this wasn’t publicized; I could almost believe this means Howard wasn’t regarded as special or unusual by the media covering the Maersk incident. That’s what we want, after all — not to be depicted as a race of thugs and hoochiemamas that occasionally spawns a Morgan Freeman-like Messiah figure that will save all us from tsunamis terrorists the recession. We are ordinary people, with the same range of characters and behaviors as anybody else — good and bad. But I highly doubt Howard was overlooked by the mainstream media because she was “too ordinary”. I think Captain Phillips fit the image in the producers’/reporters’/editors’ heads of what heroism should look like: white, male, one brave man surrounded by black savages. And I think Admiral Howard defied that image, being black and female and in charge of a diverse team of competent people, so they discarded her. I think we still exist as nothing more than a collection of stereotypes and inaccurate assumptions in the eyes of most Americans — unfortunately including ourselves. We’re not ordinary enough to have ordinary heroes, not yet. Not according to them.
But fortunately, there is the blogosphere.
So. Admiral Howard’s a hero. Pass it on.
Which reminded me to donate to Carl Brandon! Sent in $30. Can’t get the ‘join the mailing list’ link to work, though.
I may have missed some of the coverage of this, but did any of the individuals involved in Philips’ rescue receive much personal publicity? It seems as though the lack of such was common to everyone involved, probably because a complicated operation involving lots of professional people doesn’t really fit the simple “individual hero” picture that makes for a good story.
That said, it’s not clear that it’s any more a snub to Howard than, say, Frank Castellano (the captain of the ship on which the snipers were based, whose name I wouldn’t have known without looking it up just now), or anyone else in the long chain of command from Obama downwards, and it would be rather unusual for the press to name them all.
By contrast the focus on Philips seems fairly easy to understand – he was a single person in a unique and the most dangerous situation, and it was fairly well-documented that he’d put himself there voluntarily to protect his crew, making for an obvious “hero” story.