When not telling the story says it all
Two talks organized by the Canadian Journalism Foundation recently threw light on the sore issue of sorely needed diversity in North American media — but only one did it intentionally.
Changing the Face of Media was a deliberate discussion on diversity and discrimination on Wednesday.
Politics and Democracy in America, held last week, focused on challenges to the role of media in the Trump era. The discussion, moderated by the CBC’s Neil Macdonald, included The New York Times’ Susanne Craig, the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold and the Star’s own Daniel Dale. All are consistently brilliant journalists who offered important insights. And yet. Absent was the role of racism and xenophobia that were the hallmarks of a divisive election campaign as well as the first weeks of an undignified U.S. presidency. It was an audience member who addressed racial tensions when she said, “Now we have a white supremacist essentially behind the throne.”
At this, Macdonald felt compelled to say, “I’m not sure it’s fair to call Steve Bannon a white supremacist.”
I found this need to defend Bannon astounding and dispiriting because it came from no less a voice of authority than Macdonald, a respected industry veteran, who had earlier called out Trump for his narcissism and for his “relentless stream of lies.”
For his part, Macdonald told me by email he was not defending Bannon, “I merely expressed a hesitation to use a facile label.
“I would say Bannon is a nativist, even a far-right nationalist. Certainly an isolationist. Most unappealing, at least to me. But white supremacist? I’d need proof.”
If a man who openly called his news organization a platform of the supremacist “alt-right” (which Dale pointed out, too), who thinks white America is at war with Islam (as opposed to Islamic extremists) and is upset by the browning of engineering schools isn’t a white supremacist, I don’t know who is.
White supremacy brings up images of lynchings, men in white cone hats, burning crosses. While it’s comforting to consign it to the dusty reels of history, in reality it is far more commonplace than that.
In the workplace, it overlooks structures that benefit whites and manifests in the assumption that everyone operates on a level-playing field from which whites just happen to come out first and that others simply don’t measure up.
The term white supremacist is rapidly becoming just as fraught as the word racist — you can spew racist bile but cannot be called one. You can impose supremacist ideologies, but not be called out for it.
The s-word is such a surefire dealbreaker in any meaningful conversation on race, that nobody at Wednesday’s talk on diversity even mentioned it. The bright logo from the Trump Tower nearby was a constant reminder that the media needs diverse voices now more than ever.
The discussion, moderated by Global News’ Angie Seth, had the feel of support group therapy for those who had got a foot in newsrooms but were feeling the effects of otherness.
Desmond Cole, activist and my fellow columnist, who sought to distinguish between diversity and anti-racism, talked about dismantling the Mad Men-esque boys’ club “and including voices that have not been included thus far.”
The Globe and Mail’s Hannah Sung, who was also part of a yearlong diversity committee at the paper, pointed out that “talking too much about race and identity can lead to a social penalty.”
This is true. Minorities who have not internalized existing racial hierarchies hesitate to talk about race from fear of self-alienation, of being pigeonholed, of reminding others of their differences, of being seen as threatening and of “playing the race card.” It took me years to mention race with any seriousness and it took a particularly tough stiffening of resolve to dive into writing a column on it.
Huffington Post’s Arti Patel pointed to her constant struggle between, “Do you write to educate an audience or for an audience?” If she writes about, say, South Asian wedding dresses, is she writing to explain it to a white audience or writing to people familiar with that culture?
Buzzfeed’s Scaachi Koul, who once faced a harsh backlash for seeking diverse writers, brought up tone-policing. “It’s not just what we say, now we have to be concerned about how we say it.”
I can see why such talk would be uncomfortable for majority journalists. It is unfamiliar and, given the shrinking market, it would feel like they are being asked to make room for others by moving out themselves.
More than that, though, it fundamentally threatens mid-level and senior editors who developed their nose for news with homogenous cultural yardsticks and a stated neutrality that went largely unchallenged.
Last week’s Trump discussion mirrored newsroom attitudes across North America. Race is viewed as a topic separate from the “mainstream,” as if policy discussions on education or crime or voting rights or immigration are divorced from racial issues.
This presents a distinct challenge: If white journalists think their beats don’t involve race unless it involves a racist incident, what role are minority journalists expected to play?
For this discussion to have been effective on Wednesday, it needed to have been more than an in-group exchange of ideas. It needed, if not their buy-in, at least the presence of big-media bigwigs.