If journalism is overwhelmingly white, then investigative journalism is blindingly white.

It wasn't until I joined the @latimes 3 mos ago that I reported to an investigative editor who isn't white. I've been working in jrn for nearly a decade.

I got into jrn specifically to hold institutions accountable. It was always a bizarre experience sitting in IRE luncheons amid a sea of white pple honoring reporting that revealed systemic abuses w/o any acknowledgment that the makeup of that very room itself was a systemic issue

How can you entrust an industry to point out imbalances of power when it refuses to acknowledge those very same imbalances within itself? How can we as journalists wag our fingers at institutions that obstruct the truth when we have yet to truly reckon with how newsrooms operate?

Investigative journalism has always been viewed as a 'plum' assignment, which makes the disparities especially glaring and problematic.

Who do we, as a industry, trust to hold our institutions accountable? Who do we cultivate to be society's watchdogs? To question authority?

As an East Asian woman, the racist stereotypes I typically encounter are that I'm meek, robotic & foreign, but also competent & analytical.

Yes, navigating jrn has been personally difficult, but I know there is NO comparison to what my Black and brown colleagues deal with