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As @LauraGarbes lays out here, the institutional whiteness of public radio stretches back to the advent of the medium, when Black ppl were ineligible (bc of facially race-neutral gov policy) from obtaining licenses for radio stations http://sociocast.org/podcast/race-at-npr/
the project of “making public radio sound like America” has been happening, in fits and starts, for decades. So why hasn’t it changed? To @victorerikray’s point: once an institution/org is conceived as a white space, it is v v v difficult to dislodge that whiteness.
And it doesn’t take decades for that institutional whiteness to set in: there are prominent media orgs that were founded in the last decade and staffed up with white ppl at their launch — Vox, The Marshall Project, The Ringer, etc. — that are already baked cakes, demographically
When we’re talking about institutional whiteness, it means practical things like trying to game out whether it makes sense, from an audience-building standpoint, for Code Switch reporters to appear on the network’s newsmagazines, whose audiences are nearly 90% white.
(This is notably less true for the shows helmed by Lulu and Michel.)
We’ve had to be more active on social and make sure we do hits on podcasts with brown audiences because signal-boosting from inside NPR channels just gets you NPR’s white, fiftysomething listeners.
And those ppl are proprietary over “the sound of NPR.” They bristle at AAVE, at Spanish that goes untranslated, at regional American accents — anything that makes them feel like they’re not centered. And why wouldn’t they? Public radio has centered them for half a century.
Anyway, i could talk about this shit all day but it’s my wedding anniversary so I’m hopping off this hellsite to hang out with my fave
Solidarity to the folks at WNYC and all the smaller member stations that you won’t read about in major national outlets
Solidarity to the folks at WNYC and all the smaller member stations that you won’t read about in major national outlets
