Diversity; It’s a word I’ve been hearing a lot about since high school. Initially attending a high school space consisting of a 92% white student body, diversity was often stressed, not so much executed. Over the years spent at that school I noticed increased amounts of bigotry, sexism, and mostly, racism. Hosting the vast majority, white students began to feel comfortable making blatant racist remarks, joking about national black holidays, and even decent usage of the “n word”. Granted, this is a space of children, not workplace journalists, it goes to show that hatred is learned, not innate, and that comfort in numbers made it a scary thing to be a minority at my high school.
NPR released an article last May going into detail on the modern newsroom and its own racial endeavors. Statistics show that from a national standpoint, “Hispanic, black and Asian women make up less than 5 percent of newsroom personnel” (NPR, 2017) and they did not shy away from revealing their own stats, showing that 77% of their own workplace body is white.
The question arises, “Is there anything all that wrong about that?” Short answer, no. Long answer, very much so. We are a country that holds whiteness in the majority, of course they are going to influence the newsroom makeup, the problem is that its not keeping up with the time. We used to be a nation of >80% white decent, now, we are as low as 61.3% according to the national census (census.gov, 2018) and yet the recognition within workplaces is simply just not there yet. In fact, over the past 6 years, the numbers for Black, Latin, and Asian women in the newsroom has dropped for journalists.
The argument of the right person for the job only can hold so much merit in today’s society. Yes, the right credentials are imperative for hiring, but at some point, there needs to be an understanding of perspective. If 100 spots are available and 100 white men are the most suited on paper, they still should not all be hired, sounds a little crazy, but in this field, its necessary. Chances are those white men did not go through the life experience or gain the knowledge that some of our country’s minorities have. Not to say we as a nation should just be hiring anybody, but a more careful consideration of background is needed if we are to ever break this mold within the media. Those 100 white men are just going to produce the same view of the same story, there is not excitement, no outside reinforcer, to a degree it would simply be bad journalism.
Works Cited:
Abbady, T. (2017, May 01). The Modern Newsroom Is Stuck Behind The Gender And Color Line. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/05/01/492982066/the-modern-newsroom-is-stuck-behind-the-gender-and-color-line
U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: UNITED STATES. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045217