In the March 16 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist and columnist David Horsey scolded the mainstream media--including his own paper--for failing to ask tough questions about race in the aftermath of the Pioneer Square Mardi Gras riots. "The city's mainline news media, as well as all the officials from the police precincts to City Hall, have seemed timid about raising disturbing questions for which there are no easy answers," Horsey wrote.

Last week, when the Seattle School District released a study showing that black students are three times more likely to be disciplined than other students, Horsey's P-I had an opportunity to redeem itself by asking some tough questions. The paper failed miserably. Under the headline, "Black students face more discipline," an April 6 article by Rebekah Denn reported the study's findings, but made the same mistake Horsey lamented two weeks earlier. Once again, Seattle's reliably liberal daily paper didn't ask a tough question about race: Why are black students being suspended more often than other students?

Instead of confronting the issue head on, Denn's convoluted article blamed "a persistent shortage of minority teachers and other school employees," strongly implying that white teachers are discriminating against black students. The article goes on to allow Medgar Wells, principal of the African American Academy, to condemn the Seattle School District as "criminal."

The P-I failed to ask the obvious if potentially disturbing question--"Why?"--because the answer might not fit into the paper's preferred white-people-racist/black-people-victims box. Yes, the numbers are unbalanced--black students accounted for 44 percent of disciplinary actions while only making up 23 percent of the student population. There are two possible explanations. One, white teachers and administrators are racists, singling out black students for discipline. To make this case, however, some evidence should be produced showing white teachers targeting black students or showing black students being suspended for infractions that white students are getting away with. Without this evidence, we cannot indict white teachers.

A newspaper willing to ask disturbing questions might spill some ink exploring this one: Why are black students three times more likely to be disciplined than other students? Suppose it turned out that black kids were actually misbehaving more than other kids. Fortunately for the P-I, there would still be a liberal argument to hang onto. Poverty breeds violence, and only after we address the needs of Seattle's poor (who are disproportionately black) will we solve this problem. Unfortunately for the P-I, there's another compelling explanation as well, one that might appeal more to conservatives: A culture that celebrates thuggery is to blame; and until we address the cultural messages targeted to young blacks, we don't stand a chance of solving the problem. (Here's another disturbing question: Could it be that, in this instance at least, liberals and conservatives are both right?)

So maybe black kids are misbehaving more. Or maybe not. We don't know, of course, because no one--not the Seattle School District nor the P-I--seems willing to ask the question.

And when you take into account the issue of poverty and its attendant ills--from substance abuse to broken families--and a popular culture that celebrates thugs, well, higher rates of misbehavior by black kids seem possible. Taking the recent Mardi Gras race riots into account, well, that brings us back to David Horsey's editorial. But never mind. An honest discussion of these issues might disturb some people, so the P-I opts not to address them. After all, why ask disturbing questions when it's so much easier to imply that Seattle's white public school teachers are a bunch of racists?

savage@thestranger.com