How Race Is Lived in the Media

When The New York Times launched its yearlong project, How Race Is Lived in America, there was great fanfare. There was so much hope and for some, dread. After all, how often does the country's "paper of record" take on the thorny, complex subject of race? Six weeks and more than a dozen front-page articles later, the series ended this month as a major disappointment. Abandoning investigative journalism for storytelling, the Times' race coverage was only skin deep. And as a result, it often trivialized racism as nothing more than personal relations.

Once The Times defined the terrain as personal and not political (as if we haven't learned anything from the women's movement), they missed an opportunity to become reporters on race and instead became ethnographers. By ignoring institutions, laws and systems that provide the context for race relations, they let these structures off the hook and relegated any evidence of racism to the subjective space between quotation marks.

To some, that was the most powerful aspect of the series: the way it afforded people of color to speak for themselves. An entire Sunday Magazine of personal memoirs. Editorial pages open to some of the "best and brightest" people of color in the nation. Black media mogul Robert L. Johnson got to wax poetic about being mistaken for a working class black man, one time as a stable hand on his own ranch and another time as a chauffeur at a Four Seasons Hotel. Beverly Daniel Tatum and Loretta Sanchez did, in a rare opportunity, bring out important points on institutional racism and its impact and, of course, corporate media's favorite race man, Ward Connerly, got to assert the right to claim his Irishness. (Of course, there are large numbers of African Americans who would gladly relinquish all claims to Mr. Connerly in favor of any that the Irish might stake, but I digress.)

Yet, the most powerful aspects of the series were those it didn't cover. The Times did not turn up much on white privilege, very little on hate crimes, and even less on historical factors that contribute to present day race relations. In fact, in 11 of 14 articles (not counting the memoir pieces in The New York Times Magazine), whites were portrayed as victims of racism. And by "portrayed" I mean the story took place outside the quotation marks. It was relayed as fact.

And whites weren't just portrayed as victims of personal bias but of rules, policies or practices implemented by people of color in bureaucratic roles. A story on advancement in the armed services (June 7, 2000), a Houston mayoral race (July 13, 2000), a white quarterback at a historically black university (July 2, 2000), and conflict over the legacy of a Louisiana plantation (June 22, 2000) were among the articles that portrayed whites having to overcome challenges due to unfair or insensitive practices on the part of African Americans in power.

Racism directed at people of color was, by contrast, cast as problems of personal attitudes and bias. In more than a dozen vignettes on race relations and their impact, little attention was paid to the larger factors that shaped the lives of people of color as they "lived race." The July 16th edition of The New York Times Sunday Magazine that ended the series was chock full of personal memoirs, touching stories and moving testimonies from friends who maintain their love "across the divide." In nearly every piece, racism was a mere obstacle, an inconvenience to be transcended by the colored strong and good. Those who paid attention to race were "racists," stuck in a dysfunctional past. Those who claimed to ignore race were cast as high minded, colorblind. It all fit neatly within The Times "race is personal" framework.

In this odd Times' parallel world, only African Americans hurt others because of their race; and a white man, Werner Sollors, is considered racially "outnumbered" as a professor at Harvard (he teaches in the Afro-American Studies Department). A gawking, wide-eyed q&a with former Urban League President Vernon Jordan found fourteen ways to ask 'how does it feel to be black and hang out with a bunch of rich white guys?' Perhaps this, the most telling piece of the series, speaks volumes about how race and class are conceptualized -- at least at The Times.