The untold stories behind the storytellers

SAN DIEGO — It shouldn’t come as a shock that a bunch of storytellers have spent years collecting stories. What might be a surprise, however, is that this particular batch of stories was never supposed to be told.

Journalists get paid to stick their noses into someone else’s business and share interesting and important things that happen to other people. We’re taught to think that all the stories are outside the newsroom, and whatever happens to us — or in front of us — is neither interesting nor important.

But when the storytellers in question are journalists of color, you can bet many of their personal stories will be interesting and important. Some may be juicy. A few will even be ugly.

And now, partially as a result of protests against police violence and silly concerns at some newspapers and broadcast networks that African American and

Latino journalists can’t be “objective” in covering these events, some of these personal stories are leaking out.

We’ll leave for another column the discussion about how the assumption that white journalists are “objective” is, in most cases, a truckload of manure.

One story belongs to Soledad O’Brien. A few weeks ago, when it was reported that an ABC News executive allegedly made insulting remarks about African American contributors, the television journalist chimed in. Recalling how a former boss at CNN viewed a prominent black commentator, O’Brien tweeted: “Reminds me of the CNN exec who told me: ‘Roland Martin isn’t the ‘right kind of’ Black person.’ She didn’t want me to book him on my show.”

My own stories include a boss who — during a heated argument about whether the newspaper editorial page should go to bat for undocumented immigrants preyed upon by police and prosecutors — told me I was “full of p - - - and vinegar and Tabasco sauce.”

And the time that the campaign manager for a gubernatorial candidate accused me of favoring his rival, who was Mexican American. He threatened to “drive up to see your boss” and get me fired. I offered to pay for the gas.

And when a program director at a radio station in Los Angeles wanted to hire me to co-host a radio show with an African American partner and joked about paying me “in tacos.”

And the time I raised a ruckus at a staff meeting over a front-page photograph in the newspaper that showed Latino juvenile offenders in stripes at a correction facility in Arizona even though there were plenty of similarly outfitted white kids who didn’t have their pictures taken.

Guess what? When you’re a journalist of color, you see a lot of supposedly progressive people act in ways that are awfully regressive.

Media companies — which tend to be run by white liberals who think they’re smarter, better, and more enlightened than the rest of us — put on a show in the last three decades of supporting affirmative action and seeing the value of diversity. They wanted numbers. But what they got were human beings with life experiences who saw the world through their lens — just like everyone else.

Even today, 50 years after people of color began showing up in newsrooms, many of those who get hired are still under a microscope.

Usually, the concern isn’t that we’re not qualified for the job. We have the smarts. Many of the journalists of color I know went to Ivy League schools, while our bosses are often white men who went to state colleges.

Rather, the concern has always been that we would “go native” and identify too closely with the subject we’re writing about. It’s not just coverage of race and police violence that sets off red flags.

For instance, in 30 years of writing about immigration — first as a reporter at one newspaper, then as an editorial writer and columnist at two others, and now as a nationally syndicated columnist — I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been accused by readers, colleagues, and bosses of being too sympathetic to illegal immigrants because of my surname. Most immigrants to the United States come from Mexico, and my grandfather came from Mexico legally a hundred years ago. You get the drift.

A newspaper editor in the Northeast, when pitched my syndicated column, asked one of my bosses a question that I can’t imagine would ever be asked about a white columnist. “What’s his position on illegal immigration?” the editor inquired. The response, as relayed to me, bordered on sarcasm: “Well, it’s illegal. His dad was a cop. I’m going to go with, he’s against it.”

Sometimes you want to holler. Other times, you just have to laugh.