Now that I’ve had time to process this a little more, I wanted to come back to this article.

I keep landing at this conclusion - there are too many white voices in newsrooms. And, media outlets need to reconcile the damage they cause in their reporting. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/us/politics/virginia-democrats-governor.html

While newsrooms had a brief moment of reflection when 45 was elected in 2016, most failed at shifting their focus on understanding a broader voter electorate that wasn’t white. A lot of that has to do with who’s given the column space and air time to write about their worldview.

A story about Virginia’s gubernatorial race in the NYT carries weight. People will pay attention to it. What we see in this piece is the erasure of the Black electorate, specifically Black women, and again how white people and candidates are the center of the universe.

And I hate to say it, we’re going to see this over and over again in upcoming months.

HOWEVER...that does not mean we can’t work collectively to shift the narrative that’s coming out of Virginia.

More importantly, it means a lot of us will have to step into a greater role to shut down a lot of this nonsense. Meaning, we’ll have to be spokespersons for the Black women running for office because there are things they cannot say/do while campaigning.

But we can.

There is power in writing op-eds, letters to the editor, guest blog posts, etc. If you can create a Twitter thread, you can write at least 250 words for an LTE.

It sounds simple, but you have no idea how hard it is for me to beg people to write something for the paper.

We should identify issues that keep coming up for us every cycle and try to eliminate them.

Start think about ways to not only campaign for candidates, but to create a better environment for them to run.

Let’s figure out how to do a better job of this together.

For me, Imma keep having tough conversations with editors and reporters directly. I be fighting for us in a way many of y’all will never know.