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Americans Live Parallel Lives
We can live next door to each other, but still be worlds apart
I’ve been a journalist for over 20 years now, and I’m ashamed to say I used to do journalism very wrong. See, I’m a white lady who’s always worked for white-owned publications. Naturally, we covered the people most interested in our publications: Other white people.
That’s not to say we never covered people who weren’t white. We did. But often, those people had to be engaged in “white people activities” in order for us to cover them.
But about the time of the killing of Trayvon Martin a decade ago, my very white, male editor of the regional group of magazines I freelance write for sat me down and said, “Look, we need to do better at covering stories about local people of color.” He emphasized we needed to be more diverse in all our stories, but that we also needed to start covering events and concerns specific to ethnic groups around our very white state. Perhaps most importantly, he told me that if I was doing a piece on, say, Indigenous archeology, I needed to interview more than just white academics about the subject.
It’s not that in the past I might only interview white academics because I meant to be racist. It was because it didn’t occur to me to look for other sources. It took someone else pointing out…
