WHY I LOOK FOR THE STORIES I DO
Another reporter called me over, excited to check out the new staff photos. She scrolled the side-by-side images as I looked over her shoulder, when she paused on two male reporters who were each looking into the camera with neutral expressions. One of the men was in his 20s and wearing a necktie, button-up shirt and a suit jacket; the other was in his 40s and wearing a button-up shirt with a couple of the buttons open, and a sport coat. She pointed to the photo of the younger reporter and said, “Why didn’t he smile? He looks like such a thug.”
Ah, there’s that familiar flash of adrenaline — a stinging mix of annoyance, anger and a hyperawareness that comes from having to be very careful about how I react because of how I may be perceived. Once again, I was tasked with having to figure out how to respond to another in a long and continuous line of anti-Black experiences in the newsroom. Neither of the men in the photographs were smiling, but only the young, Black reporter (in an entire suit and tie, no less) had been labeled “a thug.”
In the short documentary film, “Black in the Newsroom,” being screened at 6:30 p.m. tonight at San Diego State University, the filmmaker Collette Watson focuses on the experiences of Elizabeth Montgomery, a former reporter for The Arizona Republic, and the abysmal underpayment and systemic racism she experienced, ultimately pushing her out of the industry altogether. I fully understand.
I’ve often wondered whether my non-Black co-workers understood that Black folks don’t enter the world automatically understanding the concepts of institutional and interpersonal racism. Do they not get that, in addition to repeatedly being on the receiving end of racism, we’ve had to do our own work to read, listen and interrogate our understandings? If we are actually interested in learning about and understanding people who are in groups that we are not members of, the answer isn’t to burden those group members with the labor of spoon-feeding us out of our ignorance.
The consequence of this burdening is the loss of so many of my Black journalist friends whose work I deeply respect and admire. They are exceptionally talented writers, photographers and editors who’ve been burned out from the experience of being Black in the newsroom. Losing them has meant losing seeing ourselves accurately reflected in the media, losing the candidness during an interview that comes from recognizing someone with shared experiences, and losing the trust in the ability of the press to get our stories right.
Since I’m still in the industry, I chose to keep looking for stories that would more fully reflect the places where I was living. The people around me in each newsroom where I’ve worked didn’t seem inclined to cultivate personal relationships with Black people outside of work, but maybe reading about Black people who were telling their own stories, in their voices, about their lives and the things that were important to them, would lead to less of the cringe-inducing commentary. This thinking has also been true for communities that I’m not a member of, so I seek out stories about all kinds of marginalized groups of people. My goal is always to ask questions that lend insight and understanding, avoid insensitivity, and essentially pass the mic to the experts of their own experiences. For me, the highlight is knowing that while I’m also learning through the process of reporting and writing about disability rights, racism, gender inequality or the LGBTQ community, readers are finding value in the perspectives of people closest to these issues. They send me emails outlining how much they appreciate the selection of the topics, the sources contributing to these conversations, and learning about both history and the present in ways that they weren’t aware of before.
The danger of that reporter seeing our colleague as an unsmiling thug — a colleague she’d interacted with on a regular basis — is that I then found it reasonable to think that perspective was finding its way into all of her coverage about underrepresented groups of people. Part of being Black in the newsroom doesn’t just mean being able to correct our colleagues without fear of tears or having our experiences dismissed as us being overly sensitive; it should also mean that the curiosity we expect from each other as journalists extends to taking the initiative to learn more about the people we write about, and work alongside, every day.
Many talented journalists have been burned out from the experience of being Black in the newsroom.