When The New York Times set out to produce a series on race last year, the paper sought to go deep and narrow, bringing home the challenges of race in America by documenting compelling personal relationships between races.
But when some Asian-American journalists read the 14-story series, which debuted in June and appeared intermittently over six weeks, they saw a series lacking the diverse perspectives suggested by its title: “How Race is Lived in America.” Some said the series focused too narrowly on relationships between black people and white people and failed to reflect the changing demographics of the country.
This issue of exclusion dominated a recent hour-long panel at the Asian American Journalists Association conference in New York City. More than 30 minority journalists — mostly Asian American — attended the discussion, which included Times Deputy Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, an editor of the series.
“When I think of race in America, I see it in the different demographics and in how the country is changing,” said panelist Jeanne Mariani-Belding, a member of AAJA and the San Jose Mercury News race and demographics editor. “I was hoping for at least one piece [in the series] that captured the complexities of these changing demographics.”
Of the 14 stories published in the series, five included Hispanic people, one pertained to Asian Americans, and one mentioned Native Americans. The remaining articles dealt with a black-white dynamic. In addition to the stories appearing in the regular paper, The New York Times Magazine also devoted an entire issue to race. Stories in the magazine reported on a wider range of racial issues and incorporated more Asian and Hispanic perspectives compared to the series.
Panelist Mary Sanchez said she was disappointed that The New York Times — an industry leader that smaller papers look to for direction — did not make a greater effort to incorporate more Hispanic and other perspectives into its series.
“As far as leading a conversation about race, the series did not,” said Sanchez, a Mexican American and the minority affairs reporter at The Kansas City Star. “If more of us in positions of power can’t push conversations past black-and-white dialogue and include others, then we can’t help the black-and-white dialogue go any further,” she added.
Several members of the audience expressed surprise that some sets of relationships providing more diverse racial perspectives could not be found. One such example was a story on a Korean and an African American that Boyd said he had wanted to do, but could not find the appropriate relationship to illustrate.
“It seems that The New York Times created an arbitrary set of criteria that limited the stories,” an audience member said.
Although Boyd said he understands the frustration of those who felt excluded from the series, he maintains that the series was conceptualized as a view of relationships. The reporters and editors were more concerned with capturing powerful and compelling relationships than they were with representing all of the different races, he said.
“In the end, we were guided by what relationships we could find,” Boyd said. Examples of the relationships explored in the series include one between black and white Cuban Americans and another involving three teenage girls: a white Irish-Catholic, an African-American Muslim, and one who is half Jewish and half Puerto Rican.
Asian Americans were not the only minority group that felt underrepresented in the Times’ coverage of race in this series. Of the dozen or so minority journalists interviewed for this article, most said they felt the series would have been more accurate had it been titled, “How Blacks and Whites Live in America.”
Marley Shebala, a reporter at the Navajo Times in Window Rock, Ariz., said the series provoked significant frustration among Native American journalists.
“When the series began publishing, we kept reading and reading and waiting and waiting, and we finally saw that they weren’t going to devote any stories to the Native community,” she said. “We were very disappointed.”
The Times had an opportunity with this series to show readers how the country’s demographics are changing, but instead fell back into traditional passé black-and-white issues, said Darryl Fears, a reporter at The Washington Post.
It is a telling sign that minorities are now the majority in California, and we all need to pay attention to that, Fears said.
The series was not meant to be an exhaustive look at race in America, Boyd said during the Aug. 26 session.
He added that each of the 14 stories has a universal resonance that he hopes people of all racial backgrounds can identify with.
“It’s a story of struggle, the struggle to understand each other,” Boyd said. “We wanted to detail that struggle. What we tried to do was say, ‘Race still matters.’
“I have been dealing with diversity all my life. And I may be naive, but I would hope that the kind of universal lessons that emerged from these stories are indeed universal.”
