“These problems are not new, and they are not unknown”
It’s suuuuure been interesting to watch the biggest names in the biz leap at the chance to cover the BLM protests and racial injustice in general (which in itself is a net good thing, to be clear) and then twist in the wind upon realizing that they aren’t staffed the way they should be in order to offer the expertise and Black perspectives needed — and now comes the third stage in what has become a v. interesting reckoning amongst media titles as they grapple with their own roles as employers and arbiters of white-driven narratives (see recent news re: NYT, the Philly Inquirer, Refinery29, Bon App, Paper mag, amongst others).
Shit is shaking up, but I don’t think any of us get to be too gleeful about it when every single outlet could do well to examine the entrenched issues in their own workplaces (i.e. just because your outlet once published a great feature about reparations doesn’t mean you don’t have a white staff member or two who will, at a meeting, blithely compare the experience of having an unpopular opinion to “being lynched,” just a lil FYI from past personal experience).
This Guardian piece, The Enduring Whiteness of the American Media by Howard French, does a really excellent job examining “the intersection between America’s age-old race problem and the crisis of race in journalism” and tying the media’s breathless coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement starting in 2014 to our inability to create truly representative newsrooms and cover race properly ever since. Why did we lose our focus? Hint: 2016.
Writes French:
Only months after the country had begun a tentative interrogation of its history of racism, that had all been forgotten. Early on, Trump was criticised for the unusual crudeness of his racial appeals, but by the time the candidate had eliminated the last of his Republican rivals, in early May, the media seemed inured to Trump’s rhetoric. But even as the US media has devoted vast time and resources to covering every twist and turn of the primary campaigns, almost none of this journalism has posed deeper questions about the social pathology of racism that makes nativist demagoguery so appealing to white voters. Instead, this fact is simply taken for granted...
French then goes on to detail his own experience as one of the NYT’s first Black correspondents and delivers a warning on tokenism that feel especially relevant now, as outlets frantically try to to find a quick fix for dismally non-diverse workforces:
“This process of assigning discrete bandwidth to a singular black figure for a limited, if indeterminate period of time (the whims of the majority will decide) is ultimately a mechanism for feeling good about oneself. That figure can always be pointed to, cited at cocktail parties, maybe even invited, as evidence that black opinion is being heard, even better, perhaps, if it is angry, because that demonstrates white forbearance.”
^^Link This To Your Employer 2020 Challenge. Go!!!