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''If the black man wins,'' warned a New York Times editorial on the eve of the historic 1910 fight between Jack Johnson and ''Great White Hope'' Jim Jeffries, ''thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors'' (New York Times, 7/3/1910—as cited on PBS’s Unforgivable Blackness, 1/17/05). In an earlier editorial (11/1/1909), the editors worried over the fight while revealing what passed for discretion at the Times of nearly a hundred years ago: ''[We] will wait in open anxiety at the news that he has licked the—well, since it must be in print, let us say the Negro, even though it is not the first word that comes to the tongue’s tip.'' Of course, great strides have been made by American media and society since that editorial, and many others like it, were published. But progress seems to come in fits and starts. It doesn’t help that journalists often fail to recognize and challenge racism, even when—or perhaps especially when—it involves their own institutions. Racism, in fact, may be gaining a firmer foothold in American media institutions as its promoters adopt more stealthy and sophisticated ways of presenting it. Consider two recent episodes in which David Brooks and John Tierney, both conservative New York Times writers, touted the work of Steve Sailer, a well-known promoter of racist and anti-immigrant theories. [more]