A new question is being asked in the week-long controversy over a column headlined “Why I Hate Blacks” in the Asian Week newspaper: Who decided to print the column?

It’s one thing for a 22-year-old writer to pen such a column, but what were the editors thinking when they decided to run it? That question was the focus of column by Jon Carroll of the Chronicle and it came up during a Town Meeting in Chinatown Friday that was called to deal with the controversy.

While Ted Fang, Asian Week’s editor at large, has been the newspaper’s spokesman during the controversy, the job of actually editing the weekly is that of Samson Wong, who has yet to explain publicly why he ran the column. In his column, Carroll tried to get into Wong’s head:

“He gets a new column from his feisty young columnist Kenneth Eng. The title of the column is ‘Why I Hate Blacks.’

“Maybe the first thing he thought was, ‘I sure hope this is a fashion column.’ It is true that this ‘black is the new black’ thing is way out of control, and it’s about time some feisty young columnist started to ridicule it. But no, it was not a fashion column — it was a column about why Kenneth Eng hates black people and, by extension, why you should hate black people too. Does it get more racist than that? …”

Above, AsianWeek’s editor-at-large Ted Fang, foreground right, listens as the Rev. Amos Brown, foreground left, speaks at a news conference in San Francisco on Wednesday (Feb. 28). Pictured at rear are Rev. Arnold Townsend, center, and Marie Franklin, vice president of the San Francisco NAACP. AP photo by Jeff Chiu.