Recently in Race Category

According to National Public Radio's ombudsman, the National Association of Black Journalists wonders aloud about black senior staffers at NPR who have left recently:

"It is NABJ's belief that actions speak much louder than your words," said the NABJ letter on Tuesday. "It is not enough to provide internships for young people or hire them into entry-level positions. Diversity must also be reflected among the managers who decide what news gets covered and who gets to cover it."

To which NPR chief Vivianne Schiller said:

"Well, that's too bad, but let me explain something to our friends at NABJ. I'm trying to run a national news organization that's suffering through serious budget cuts, like every other news organization in this country. We will not discriminate in hiring or firing on the basis of race, but we do not have the luxury now, in this time of intense difficulty for journalism, to set aside jobs for journalists on the basis of race. We're all struggling to keep our heads above water these days, and professional competence, not demographic desirability, must be by far the most important factor in hiring and retaining personnel."

No, actually, this is what she said:

"I couldn't agree more that NPR must increase the diversity of its staff -- particularly in management and editorial," wrote Schiller in response to NABJ's letter. "I am on the record with the media and our employees, stations and board in acknowledging that NPR must take a leadership position in diversity, just as we do in high-quality journalism and digital innovation."

The NABJ's kind of complaint, and NPR's kind of response, is completely unexceptional in mainstream journalism. If top media executives spent a fraction of as much time worrying about viewpoint diversity as they do about ethnic diversity, we might have a truly more diverse media in terms of content. In any case, I wish folks like Vivian Schiller, instead of kowtowing to people like the NABJ, would instead challenge them to recruit more minorities for college journalism programs. I haven't looked at any numbers lately -- so if you have access to them, please correct me -- but in general, minority candidates for journalism jobs are relatively scarce. A friend of mine at a big newspaper told me a couple of years ago about trying to recruit a Hispanic for a plum position, and having a very difficult time finding qualified applicants. He said that there's so much demand for minorities now that the media outlets with the greatest resources tend to scoop up the better candidates as quickly as they come on the market.

It is unjust to come up with a racial quota for achieving "diversity" in a newsroom, without taking stock of what a newsroom's needs are, and what the pool of minority candidates consists of. Most newsrooms are suffering from dramatically shrinking budgets, and are letting people go, not hiring them. To expect newsrooms in which fewer people are having to do more work with less to commit itself to hiring people on the basis of their ethnic background -- which unavoidably means putting white journalists at a competitive disadvantage through no fault of their own -- is morally wrong. With so many journalists of all colors terrified of losing their jobs now, the idea of having minority set-asides for fewer and fewer newsroom positions is hard to justify, or so it seems to me.

In fact, with all the layoffs in newsrooms, a higher percentage of minorities are working in journalism today. But according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors (of which NPR is not a part, I'm pretty sure), there's no way newsrooms can keep parity in diversity hiring with the growth of non-whites in the population. But you know, so what? Personally, I don't care whether the people who write and edit my newspaper (or produce my favorite news radio shows) are white, brown, black, or spumoni-colored. I don't care if they're gay or straight. I just want them to give me news and information that's well-written, accurate and relevant. If every story is written and edited by an African-American (or an Asian, or a Hispanic, etc.), that's perfectly fine with me. Journalism is not a product that can be created like widgets, with people like interchangeable parts.

To be clear, I'm certainly not against trying to diversify one's newsroom staff; in, for example, a newsroom like the one I work in, if you don't have people who can speak Spanish (even if they're not Hispanic), you're going to be at a disadvantage in covering much of Dallas. On the other hand, given our readership demographics, and given how fast and how far our circulation has fallen, it's a serious question as to whether or not it's a wiser use of resources to hire a reporter based on his or her ethnicity (this, on the theory that you can reach out to ethnic communities), or to hire another reporter, whatever his or her ethnic background, who is better prepared to cover the news, period, or who is more capable of covering news likely to be more interesting to the largely white suburban communities who make up the bulk of our newspaper's readership. These are the kinds of decisions journalism executives are having to make all the time now. I'm not saying one decision is right, and the other is wrong. You have to know the circumstances. I am saying, though, that for the NABJ or any other activist group to tell a news organization struggling to stay alive that it "must" meet a certain quota in minority hiring is unrealistic in this economic environment. It's like telling telling the British commanders being pushed toward Dunkirk that they had better make sure that a sufficient number of Welshmen are placed in senior officer positions, or else.

This continued agonizing among journalism executives with "diversity" (which I put inside ironic quotes because they have a very specific take on diversity that excludes diversity by other measures, i.e. religion, politics, and so forth) takes place on a planet different from the one we're actually living on. Here we are watching an entire industry sink like the Titanic, and these well-meaning folks want to make sure that enough chairs on the deck are reserved for people of color.

The other day, in a really interesting post about race, which quoted a really interesting Ta-Nehisi Coates post about race, Megan McArdle prefaced her remarks by saying, "White people writing about race are always walking a minefield... ."

Freddie responds by saying:

Our racial dialogue is a hair-triggered and anxious phenomenon, and to no one's benefit. Many white people feel that speaking about race is simply too dangerous, that the stakes are too high, that they stand little to gain and everything to lose from participating. There are few things more dangerous to our democracy than that which we don't talk about, and nothing good can come from not having a frank national discussion on race.

There's another sense in which that statement is a problem. For too many white people, fear of the consequences of being accused of racism has come to seem a larger problem than racism itself.

And later:

No, what we must privilege is behavior, and this is why I think we have to return social correction to our racial dialogue. We all have racial prejudice, and sometimes, we say and do things that are insensitive or biased. These behaviors have to be corrected the same way any are, through gentle- and if warranted, not so gentle- reminders about what is and isn't socially acceptable behavior.

For this to happen, however, cries of racism cannot amount to "you are a bad person; you must be excommunicated. Prepare for your shunning." People must hear "What you said or did was racist", not "You are a racist." Accusations of racism should become more prevalent, but have less at stake. Racism must become another socially corrected behavior, like mild sexual harassment, excessive profanity or boorishness. Familiarity must build moderation.

This is important because we must have corrigibility; we must have correctability. No one is an end. Everyone is a process. Even the most noxious racist must have the ability for repentance, though we are under no obligation to invite them back into respectability. I am not suggesting that we should never have harsh censure for those who are persistently, maliciously racist. But we must keep the question open, and we must give everyone the ability to make a good-faith effort at ending their own racially unjust behavior.

I would like, in short, for Megan McArdle to no longer feel she is walking a minefield.

In principle, I agree with Freddie. But that's not the way the world works. I am reminded of this comment by a liberal Crunchy Con blog reader in the sexual harrassment thread below:

Several years ago, I had an official complaint put into my personnel file while working at ABC Television in NYC. My offense? Complimenting a co-worker on the dress she was wearing.

Here's the context: It was a Friday evening, around 6:30pm. Most of the deptartment had gone home, the only ones left in the office (I thought) were my and my boss (a female). While going to the break room to grab another cup of coffee, I see a co-worker, an attractive late-20's female, coming out of the bathroom, dressed to the nines. Turns out she was going to a black-tie affair immediately after work, so she was dressed up in the long black dress, slit to the thigh, low cut, with high heels. My comment? "You look great. That's a beautiful dress."

Monday morning I get called into my boss's office, and a woman from HR is there, along with our Union Rep, because I'm being charged with sexual harrassment.

Fortunately, I left the company 2 months later.

The end result of this experience has been to create a bias for me against hiring women. Unfair? Absolutely. Pragmatic, realistic and better for my fiscal health? Absolutely.

Sad, but true.

At one job I had, in the course of commenting about a news story involving a terror attack, I called the terrorists "animals" or something like that. The terrorists were not black, but a black co-worker complained that I'd been racially hostile with that characterization, and suddenly I was facing the prospect of having to explain myself to Human Resources. I got out of that pinch, and decided that as long as I worked there, I wouldn't comment about racial issues at all, even though that made me less effective in that particular journalism job. I knew there was no way I would prevail in a dispute like that with HR, no matter what. And I knew that my job would likely be on the line if this went to HR. Furthermore, I'd be known as the guy who got fired because he was a racist. I was genuinely afraid to talk to the (likable) guy who'd made the ridiculous accusation about his beef, and ended up keeping him very much at arm's length, for fear that some innocuous thing I might say would strike him the wrong way, and cost me my job.

Contra Freddie, I would never claim that fearing being tagged as a racist is worse than being the actual victim of racism. But I will say that he perhaps underestimates the stakes for white people in making a single slip -- or what is interpreted as a racially hostile slip -- within certain professional environments. See, this is one reason why Robert Putnam's famous study finding that "diversity" tends to reduce social solidarity and social capital: it makes people terrified to trust people of different races and demographic groups, because the price to be paid for a single mistake can be devastating. Better not to walk across the minefield at all than to risk blowing up your career. Excerpt:

But even after statistically taking them all into account, the connection remained strong: Higher diversity meant lower social capital. In his findings, Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to "distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television."

"People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down' -- that is, to pull in like a turtle," Putnam writes.

In documenting that hunkering down, Putnam challenged the two dominant schools of thought on ethnic and racial diversity, the "contact" theory and the "conflict" theory. Under the contact theory, more time spent with those of other backgrounds leads to greater understanding and harmony between groups. Under the conflict theory, that proximity produces tension and discord.

Putnam's findings reject both theories. In more diverse communities, he says, there were neither great bonds formed across group lines nor heightened ethnic tensions, but a general civic malaise. And in perhaps the most surprising result of all, levels of trust were not only lower between groups in more diverse settings, but even among members of the same group.

"Diversity, at least in the short run," he writes, "seems to bring out the turtle in all of us."

There's been a lot of discussion about Andrew Sullivan's angry, fascinating reaction to a Pat Buchanan piece, especially this passage of Sully's:

It struck me almost at once, if only in the music I heard all around me - and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans do not realize how black they are. Even their whiteness is partly scavenged from the fear of - and attraction to - its opposite. Even something as stereotypically white as American Catholicism, I discovered to my amazement, was also black from the very start.

When I read this entry, two thoughts instantly came to mind. The first was after I'd spent several weeks traveling around Europe the summer before my junior year in college, and came to understand after being around all those fellow white people that deep down, we Americans have been deeply shaped by the black experience. I grew up in a Deep South town that was half black. It's bizarre to think about it now, but whites and blacks in my town were so very intimate, but utterly strange to each other. Whether you're white or black, if you've lived it, you understand it, even if you can't explain it, and if you haven't, you really shouldn't talk about it, because you don't get it. It's a Southern thing. But for a white Southern boy like me to spend six weeks in the Heart of Whiteness was to feel my own Americanness to the marrow for the first time ... and to surprise myself by recognizing that the main reason I was so different from these people who looked just like me was because I had been raised in a culture profoundly shaped by black Americans.

A second thought, less strange. Living for five years in New York City made me understand deep down how Southern I am, and that means to an unmeasurable but undeniable extent, black. Every now and then, I'd meet a black person from down South, and ... I'm not quite sure how to put this, but let's just say there was an ease of discourse between us that I didn't have when talking to white (or, obviously, black) Northerners I just met. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was a food thing. I've told the story here before about a black co-worker a couple of years ago coming upon me microwaving a bowl of turnip greens and roots for my lunch in the break room. She was genuinely shocked, and stammered that she thought only black people ate that stuff. I couldn't believe that, but it turns out she's from Indiana, and never knew white people who like what used to be called "soul food." I told her how most white folks where I grew up ate greens, cornbread, grits and the same stuff black folks ate. It's the legacy of rural Southern poverty culture. I can still see her kind face now, struggling to comprehend that she was talking to an actual white person who ate greens. But then again, she wasn't a Southerner, and I don't think I have ever met a white person in Dallas who eats greens cooked the traditional Southern way (in fatback), though surely there must be quite a few who grew up as I did.

Anyway, it is impossible to imagine what the South would have been without black people. It is impossible to imagine what America would have been without black people. That's not a sentimental, politically intended statement meant to airbrush, in an SWPL way, the problems within black America, and with race relations. It's just the way it is, and to not see that is to be deceived, and, in a substantial way, culturally impoverished. It also means that whether we like it or not -- and each of us has times when we hate it -- all of us, white, black and everybody else, are in this together, and always will be. Because we are Americans, and we are family, and God help us, you can't choose your relatives.

Aaron M. Renn at the indispensable New Geography site has a fascinating analysis of a curious aspect shared by progressive urban havens like Austin, Portland and suchlike: they have relatively few black people in them. Excerpt:

This raises troubling questions about these cities. Why is it that progressivism in smaller metros is so often associated with low numbers of African Americans? Can you have a progressive city properly so-called with only a disproportionate handful of African Americans in it? In addition, why has no one called these cities on it?

As the college educated flock to these progressive El Dorados, many factors are cited as reasons: transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes. But another way to look at it is simply as White Flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip? Many of the policies of Portland are not that dissimilar from those of upscale suburbs in their effects. Urban growth boundaries and other mechanisms raise land prices and render housing less affordable exactly the same as large lot zoning and building codes that mandate brick and other expensive materials do. They both contribute to reducing housing affordability for historically disadvantaged communities. Just like the most exclusive suburbs.

More:

Imagine a large corporation with a workforce whose African American percentage far lagged its industry peers, sans any apparent concern, and without a credible action plan to remediate it. Would such a corporation be viewed as a progressive firm and employer? The answer is obvious. Yet the same situation in major cities yields a different answer. Curious.

In fact, lack of ethnic diversity may have much to do with what allows these places to be "progressive". It's easy to have Scandinavian policies if you have Scandinavian demographics.

Discuss.

UPDATE: Just to add my two cents, as I'm going to be busy today and unable to blog much till later, I don't care about white flight, or black flight, or brown flight. It doesn't surprise me that people want to live around people like them, whether in terms of race, class, educational level, whatever. I object only to any legal impediment to people being free to move and to live where they want to. I simply find it risible that progressives would criticize others for allegedly having bad racial motives for what they call "white flight" (though middle class people of all ethnicities do the same thing) when they themselves are doing the same thing.

An astonishing piece of truth-telling by a middle-class black woman, reflecting on the gang beating of the Chicago student last week. Excerpt:

That's because the Derrion Albert video told the world something that we already knew, but rarely spoke aloud: Too many black Americans aren't safe in their own neighborhoods.

When I think about Derrion Albert, the 16-year-old who was beaten to death outside his Chicago high school on Sept. 24, I think about the very things my dad was working to protect us from when my siblings and I were growing up in the early '90s. Our home was in Beechview, at the time a quiet, mostly white, working-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh. It made us the butt of jokes from a lot of our black friends, who lived on the east side of town. "No one can find your house!" they'd say. "Y'all live waaaaaaaay over there! Y'all live with the white folks!"

But living with the black folks--in Homewood, Wilkinsburg, East Liberty or on the Hill--was not an option in my parents' eyes. Yeah, our people lived there--but so did the local news.

More:

Dad didn't mind being the occasional butt of jokes for living among the "others"--because at least in our home, we didn't have to try to sleep amid sirens and gunshots. And he didn't have to worry about whether his children would make it home. In his eyes, the best way to stay alive was to stay out.

We loved our people, but we couldn't live with them.

Because she is black, Veronica-Marche Miller, the author of this piece, can say something obvious in public that non-blacks cannot: middle-class people of all races want to move far away from poor black people because they're afraid of violence, which is itself a result of familial, moral and cultural decay endemic in the black community in this country. A similar dynamic is playing out among poor and working-class Hispanics. Everybody knows this, but few people talk about it openly.

I live on a street with black and Hispanic and white people, all of us middle class to lower middle class. It's a good place to live. But we all live close enough to the 'hood to hear gunshots in the near distance from time to time, and to see gang graffiti on occasion. If I thought that blight was moving closer, you'd better believe I'd take my family and go. And so would my middle-class black neighbor. When it comes to safety and one's children, political and racial orthodoxies go by the wayside. If my choice was to live in a neighborhood of poor white people who were violent and otherwise dysfunctional, or a middle-class all-black neighborhood, I wouldn't be able to get to the black neighborhood fast enough, even if my black neighbors were unwelcoming. Nothing is more important to me than my family's safety. And if it was, i wouldn't be the husband and father I'm supposed to be. Neither would Veronica-Marche Miller's father. One of the evils of segregation was that it forced minorities who had solid bourgeois values to remain in place instead of getting out to places of safety.

On the other hand, is it possible to make a plausible case that by forcing the respectable black middle class to remain geographically tied to place, that middle class provided a countervailing force to the forces of decay and despair? I remember once riding in a taxi through a down-at-the-heels part of Washington, DC. The older black man driving me complained bitterly about how all of this used to be a thriving neighborhood back when he was a young man, in spite of segregation. In fact, though I don't recall the specifics of what he said -- this was the early 1990s -- my impression was that he was acutely aware of the ironic likelihood that the neighborhood held together as it did because of segregation. As soon as it became possible for black folks to move, those with means did.

Anyway, when poor or working-class white people pick up and move to a better neighborhood, they aren't made to carry with them the burden of racial or class betrayal. It's my impression that upwardly mobile black people don't have that liberty -- that, like Miller's father, they have to withstand taunts from other blacks that they are sellouts. Am I wrong?