A writer for the East Hampton Star has been suspended indefinitely after a real estate story roiled residents as racially insensitive.
Debra Scott’s July 2 piece “Portrait of a Neighborhood” — about a part of Bridgehampton, the Huntington Crossway strip, that’s historically black — said the area was “not so long ago dubbed ‘Crack Alley’ by locals because of drug activity,” and it’s by “Scuttlehole Road, land of horse farms and grapevines,” but “has indeed been the location of many drug arrests.”
Scott writes in the piece, in which she’s given a tour by a luxury broker: “While neighborhoods surrounding it have gradually been gentrified, the Crossway has remained staunchly downscale.”
The paper published two angry letters.
One huffed, “I should start by congratulating you for publishing the most racist article I’ve ever read in a local newspaper without once using the word black.”
Editor-in-Chief David Rattray told us, “The article was really, really regrettable, and we are using it as a moment to review steps so that nothing like this can happen again.”