Reporting Inequality

Tools and Methods for Covering Race and Ethnicity

Sally Lehrman, Venise Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317533009
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Under increasingly intense newsroom demands, reporters often find it difficult to cover the complexity of topics that deal with racial and social inequality. This path-breaking book lays out simple, effective reporting strategies that equip journalists to investigate disparity's root causes.

Chapters discuss how racially disparate outcomes in health, education, wealth/income, housing, and the criminal justice system are often the result of inequity in opportunity and also provide theoretical frameworks for understanding the roots of racial inequity. Examples of model reporting from ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, and the San Jose Mercury News showcase best practice in writing while emphasizing community-based reporting. Throughout the book, tools and practical techniques such as the Fault Lines framework, the Listening Post and the authors' Opportunity Index and Upstream-Downstream Framework all help journalists improve their awareness and coverage of structural inequity at a practical level.

For students and journalists alike, Reporting Inequality is an ideal resource for understanding how to cover structures of injustice with balance and precision.

PART I

A New Framework for Covering Race

1

The Individual in Context

Sally Lehrman and Venise Wagner

Every individual makes choices, but she does so in the context of environmental, social and institutional forces – also called the socio-cultural context. Using concepts from the work of social psychologist Hazel Markus, the authors encourage journalists to examine disparity from this framework rather than focus solely on the individual, which can lead audiences to blame the victim for her own circumstances.

Blinded by Sight

A six-year-old black girl, blind since birth, cries inconsolably, refusing to bathe with her friend, who is white. She is afraid her black skin color will rub off on the white girl.

A white teenager, also blind, brings home a picture of a boy she likes at school to show her parents. She feels their disapproval. They explain that she cannot date him because he is black.

A blind white man is certain he can discern a person of Mexican heritage by scent.

Sociologist and law professor Osagie Obasogie interviewed blind people who had never seen another human being.¹ Yet they had strong concepts of race and ethnicity, holding to clear boundaries associated with these. They expressed beliefs about social norms, human difference, and likely behavior based on race. When it came to categorizing others, Obasogie found, the notion of “colorblindness” was meaningless. People who had no sight at all since birth still experienced – and assigned meaning and emotion to – racial distinctions in much the same way as people with sight.

Whatever our attitudes or beliefs about race, we tend to think about racial differences as self-evident, delineated by physical features. We know race, sighted people might say, because we see it. Our sense of real, concrete, and visible distinctions among us is so powerful that even blind people recognize and live by it. As “Jeremy,”² one blind person who Obasogie interviewed put it, race is “ ‘what you learn and then you use your eyes to identify it.’ ”

When we view race as something so plainly embedded in our bodies, we naturally think of its effects the same way. We look to individual bodies, minds, and behavior to explain the social stratification associated with race, including disparities in health, wealth, educational achievement, and interactions with police. Our commitment to understanding racial boundaries as physical, Obasogie told us in an interview, prevents us from perceiving the ideology and associated practices that bring race into being. Our recognition of race by sound, smell, and sight makes us blind to the multiple social and political commitments built up through US history that shape what race is and how it affects everyday lives.

We’re “blinded by sight,” as Obasogie puts it – blinded by the idea of race as a natural set of human divisions marked by a set of physical characteristics that signify distinct behavioral tendencies and cultural attributes.

Journalists who want to report accurately on the world and events within it must take into account this visual conditioning. We must learn to look beyond the surfaces of race we have been taught to believe are so important and to uncover the underlying influences that lead to disparate outcomes. To do so, we must step back from our inclination to understand race as “real” because we can see it. Instead we must learn to see the ways in which an individual’s behavior and circumstances are shaped by communities and neighborhoods within the boundaries of race. We must examine institutions such as media, laws, finance, and education that constrain or propel lives, and the social systems that contour all of these. And we must help our audiences do the same. We must put the individual in context.

Such an approach is not a natural reflex for journalists because we tell stories. No matter our topic, news is about people who succeed, people who overcome obstacles, and people who are harmed. Nearly every piece of news has some central character or group of people that carries the story and helps others relate to the issue or event we are describing. The words and experiences of individuals help journalists know whether our instincts and assumptions are correct. Using real people’s stories to populate our journalism, we believe, supports accuracy and draws the public in.

On their own, tales of individual triumph and woe, however, may not draw the public closer at all. Further, writing about an individual that may seem emblematic of some social concern does not necessarily offer a window into the problem we seek to highlight. Instead, it can activate learned assumptions and biases about race, class, age, or other demographic groupings, according to Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard social scientist who studies implicit bias (see Chapter 4 for more on this topic). Just as importantly, it can lead our audience to interpret the problem as individual at root. It can imply that social problems would go away if we all just behaved better. Unless we place our individual in context, we lead our audiences to believe that the inequities across race journalists reveal generally result from personal failings.

How Race Works

Consider that race is not built into our individual bodies by nature. It is not a simple matter of the differing physical features we take in with our eyes and other senses. Race in America, in fact, is a social phenomenon that traces its history to the economic and political forces that formed this country. One powerful institution, slavery, originally victimized people of all shades, then grew to rely upon the brutal maintenance of sharp social divisions. Black skin color as a marker for supposed mental and moral inferiority became a justification for a violent system of ownership and trade of Africans.³ Similarly, as the colonies expanded, settlers began to look to theories of race to rationalize their attacks and displacement of Indian tribes.⁴ The supposed moral weakness and barbaric character of the “Chinese race” helped propel the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.⁵

Our nation’s earliest institutions and policies were designed to support unequal opportunity. We no longer hold such ideas and most of us have abandoned the racial ideology that conferred special status and benefits to a mythical “Anglo Saxon” elite.⁶ We have transformed many economic and social structures designed to keep white-skinned people in power. Yet the harmful legacy of these structures remains. It can be difficult to perceive these enduring inequities built into American systems because we are visually biased toward seeing race as an individual – and biological – phenomenon. What seem to be natural differences, so clearly obvious, actually are a racial system at work, a system that we learn to see in particular ways from birth and that is embedded throughout all aspects of our society.

Individual choices, belief systems, and courage do matter in a person’s life course, naturally. We often assert this with variations of the proud claim, “I am the master of my fate” or “I am the captain of my soul.” Those lines were written in 1875 by the British poet William Ernest Henley, who lost a leg to tuberculosis and was orphaned at 12.⁷ Henley’s defiant stance has become a trademark of the American spirit. We spit in the eye of misfortune; we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Protagonists in the Horatio Alger stories of the mid 19th century climb from poverty to middle-class respectability, overcoming obstacles by sheer will and self-determination. In the United States, we point out, anyone can become president.

Success stories are a popular journalism standard. With a quick online search, we can find magazines like Inc., Forbes, and Entrepreneur describe the passion and grit that fueled corporate leaders.⁸ Fox News features secrets of success shared by Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban.⁹ In both the Washington Post and a local television station in Louisiana, we learn how college students “beat the odds” to graduate.¹⁰ Yet if journalists more deeply probe our success stories, we will discover more than smart choices and a desire to succeed. We’ll find a supportive context. And, if we probe individual struggle, we will find structures that make success more difficult.

The Socio-Cultural System

To better understand how individual action and decision-making works within a social context, we sat down with Hazel Markus, a social psychologist at Stanford University. Markus explained that every individual is part of a larger social-cultural ecosystem that includes that person’s interactions with others, formal rules dictated by laws, informal rules promulgated by culture or custom, and the policies of institutions like the police, educational systems, or banks. “If you want to understand this individual, you have to understand the world that is embedding that individual,” Markus says. “What we call agency, depends on that world.” An individual’s values, behaviors and attitudes can only be understood within that larger socio-cultural context, a context that ultimately shapes what appear to be choices.

White middle-class people often don’t have any awareness of this context because it supports them, according to Markus. They are unlikely to notice the fact that they grew up in a middle-class neighborhood, they had good health care, and they had a family providing for them. Family members likely paid for their college or they received a scholarship, and they could fall back on a financial safety net. They could turn to a helpful network based on family, school, or neighborhood ties when they went out to look for a job or seek funding for an entrepreneurial idea. All these things feed into success – and all these things emerge out of social, institutional, and historical structures that smooth an individual’s way. The system around a person enables that person’s behavior, informs it, and primes it. “Individuals, their agency, they do what they can do in the larger socio-cultural environment,” Markus says. “The larger socio environment informs what you can do, the likely courses of action for you.”

Of course people can waste opportunities. Some can see good choices where others don’t. There’s room for the individual, Markus insists. It’s the journalist’s responsibility, however, to light up the whole system and all the differences along the way that enable and constrain individual choice.

Even the idea of agency itself can differ according to an individual’s context. Markus and her colleague, Alana Conner Snibbe, used music preferences and behavioral tests to learn about the ways people think about agency. They found differences among the European American adults by socio-economic status, as indicated by educational attainment. Those who grew up with more resources viewed agency as the ability to express their uniqueness, pursue their individual dreams, exert influence over others, and control their environment and destiny. Those from lower socio-economic backgrounds saw agency as exerting self-control, retaining one’s integrity, deflecting influence from others, and having the ability to adjust to circumstances that arise out their control. In general, the researchers concluded, the worlds of high school and college graduates differ in the level of control a person actually has over a given situation in their lives. Thus these differences in perceiving agency are contextually appropriate.¹¹ They also may shape the way an individual perceives and acts upon the choices in their lives.

It’s important to understand here that when we talk about cultural context, we go beyond the customs and values of racial, ethnic, and class groups. We are also including how these groups interact with and are influenced by institutions (such as schools, as one example) and their practices (such as hiring). These symbiotic relationships are in constant interplay and create a foundation for blueprints beyond our individual awareness that inform how we act, think, and feel.¹²

Thus someone with means believes in and values their ability to exert influence on their own environment, the direction of their lives, and their own choices. On the other hand, someone without means may feel quite differently. They must hold true to their ability to stave off influence on their body or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Terminology
• Introduction
• Part I: A New Framework for Covering Race
• Part II: How Opportunity Works
• Part III: Best Practices
• PART IV: Case Studies
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index