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Coates: The Black Journalist and the Racial Mountain
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/black-journalist-and-the-racist-mountain/484808/As always, Coates is worth the read...
Howard French has an interesting piece in The Guardian tackling “the enduring whiteness of American media.” French’s claim is two-fold: 1.) Big media organizations have failed to produce a staff that looks like the larger country. 2.) Big media has failed black journalists, specifically, by siloing them in “stereotypical roles—sport, entertainment and especially what is euphemistically called urban affairs.” These twin effects, according to French, “strongly but silently [condition] how Americans understand their own country and the rest of the world.” This is an important piece—one worthy of the ongoing dialogue around newsroom diversity. But unfortunately it also shows how an attempt to analyze a problem, can actually reinforce it.
Howard French is a great journalist and a trailblazer—an African American who has reported from, among other locales, China, the Congo, Haiti, South Africa, and Japan. There are few journalists of any background who can match the depth and breadth of his experiences. But French is black, and garnering that experience has meant traveling outside of delineated boundaries and enduring a specific kind of skepticism lobbed at black journalists. That kind of skepticism has not disappeared. But to the extent that it has diminished, it is directly due to the efforts of black journalists like French.
Those efforts, and the fruits they bore, don’t appear in French’s essay. Instead he presents black journalists in two varieties—those chained by the boundaries of the press’s racism, and those specifically empowered to help maintain those boundaries. I am touted as an exemplar of that latter category. French sees me in a tradition of token black writers whom white people shower with plaudits so that they might better argue “that we don’t have a race problem any more.” To be sure, French sees this as “great work being celebrated.” But at its root it is still “the re-enactment of an old, insidious ritual of confinement”:
This permission serves to both keep black journalists and writers from competing in venues beyond the sphere “of race and racism,” and allow whites to celebrate “their own enlightenment and generosity.”
Howard French is a great journalist and a trailblazer—an African American who has reported from, among other locales, China, the Congo, Haiti, South Africa, and Japan. There are few journalists of any background who can match the depth and breadth of his experiences. But French is black, and garnering that experience has meant traveling outside of delineated boundaries and enduring a specific kind of skepticism lobbed at black journalists. That kind of skepticism has not disappeared. But to the extent that it has diminished, it is directly due to the efforts of black journalists like French.
Those efforts, and the fruits they bore, don’t appear in French’s essay. Instead he presents black journalists in two varieties—those chained by the boundaries of the press’s racism, and those specifically empowered to help maintain those boundaries. I am touted as an exemplar of that latter category. French sees me in a tradition of token black writers whom white people shower with plaudits so that they might better argue “that we don’t have a race problem any more.” To be sure, French sees this as “great work being celebrated.” But at its root it is still “the re-enactment of an old, insidious ritual of confinement”:
Coates was doing, after all, the one thing that black writers have long been permitted – if not always encouraged – to do: write about the experience of race and racism in the world and in their own lives.
This permission serves to both keep black journalists and writers from competing in venues beyond the sphere “of race and racism,” and allow whites to celebrate “their own enlightenment and generosity.”
