No doubt you’ve heard it before — the complaint that reporters do a bad job covering race and ethnicity. It’s not always easy to hear, but sometimes it’s true.
So, when more than two dozen experts met at the University of Oregon in April to talk about racial formation in the 21st century, I took the occasion to ask what reporters often do wrong when covering race, and how they could do better.
Devon Carbado, professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles, laid out some traps that all too easily ensnare us by muddling our writing and introducing bias:
Thinking we all mean the same thing when we use the word “race.” In “Racial Formation in the United States,” the influential 1986 book that conferees had come to celebrate, authors Michael Omi and Howard Winant showed that race is not a fixed, stable or objective idea.
Race is a set of categories that the American people continuously police, challenge and change. That means journalists must always ask what people mean by “race.” We should probe and highlight the structures that shape the experience of race.
Confusing “colorblindness” with race neutrality. They’re not the same. “Colorblindness” is a political philosophy that race should not and does not matter. Critics argue that it actively overlooks unconscious bias, institutional inequities, and cultural differences. A “race-conscious” philosophy attempts to address social and historical inequities by remedying these factors. Critics argue that “race-conscious” ideology is discriminatory and undermines meritocracy.
Using “racial preference” as a synonym for “affirmative action.” Affirmative action came into being as a way to equalize opportunity and correct a systemic preference for whites. Instead of giving preference, it is a race-conscious remedy intended to undo preference.
The historians, anthropologists, sociologists, lawyers and political scientists at the meeting also offered some tips for more insightful coverage:
Learn to recognize race when it’s not obvious. In reporting on the torture at Abu Ghraib, for example, most journalists focus on questions about the legality or morality of the practice or decision-making at the top. But the story also should be about race, says Sherene Razack from the University of Toronto.
When supporters claim that “harsh interrogation” is a necessity because of Arabs’ unique ideological, religious and cultural differences, they are making a racial argument. Sometimes it takes courage to add racial depth to a story, even when it begs for it.
Address inequality on a regular basis, suggested Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a sociologist at Duke University. “Race still matters in every aspect of our lives,” he said. It’s not just a historical problem, but lived out routinely in schools, workplaces and newsrooms every day.
Recognize the difference between inequality and discrimination, Bonilla-Silva added. Notice when your own work, and the words and phrases you use, create a discriminatory “racial grammar,” as he puts it, that elevates white people’s concerns above others. When is the missing child “beautiful”? When are victims “innocent”? When is violence normal and when is it “shocking”?
The experts who met at the University of Oregon have put decades of their lives into trying to understand race. We should expect the subject to be elusive, they remind us. We should expect it to be troublesome. But if we ignore it, they warn, we paint over the realities of American experience and join in the process of “whitewashing” our collective story.
