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So I recently started a new job as a politics reporter at Vox! (peep my recent clips!) Very excited about it, and I reckoned this is an opportune time to talk about the hurdles I faced getting here, and how racism stops so many super talented writers from getting jobs like mine!
Black people remain grossly underrepresented in journalism. There is no excuse—no pipeline problem. Black American culture exults literacy with near-religious zeal, and the black press stretches back to the age of abolition.
https://googletrends.github.io/asne/?filter=race&view=0
https://googletrends.github.io/asne/?filter=race&view=0
Journalism's racism grinds the spirit of the very best black writers. Both, MacArthur winners, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah Jones weighed quitting due to the industry's neglect and disdain. https://www.cjr.org/the_delacorte_lectures/nikole_hannah-jones_video_new_york_times_schools.php
I often wonder how many Cases for Reparations and 1619 Projects the journalism industry has snuffed out because of its reluctance to embrace black narratives.
Mychal Denzel Smith perfectly captured the dismal state of working as a black journalist explaining that "As a writer, I have spent more time asking white people to see me as human than I have thinking about the world I would like to live in." https://harpers.org/archive/2018/12/the-burden-of-the-black-public-intellectual/
Much of my own experience reflects this. I've heard journalism isn't for me, I should go work at a nonprofit, I don't have the talent, and so many other rebukes more times than I care to count. It's a full story for another day.
For now, newsrooms are reckoning with how racism impacts the country, but they also must wrestle with how racism impacts themselves. It's time they see black writers as essential, and black people as newsworthy. FIN
