The Poynter Institute is a combination post-graduate school, standard setter, and ethics and diversity watchdog for American journalism, perhaps the most influential such center in the country.
Although its hope to instill a “recognition of the value of diversity in the newsroom and in life” is only one of nine items listed on its Mission Statement, it doesn’t take much time exploring the content and links of its various web pages to determine that preaching “diversity” is pervasive at Poynter. There’s a Diversity Bibliography, a DEL.ICIO.US Page For Diversity At Work, a regular column on “Diversity at Work,” a pointer (or would that be Poynter) to conversations about Ethics & Diversity, and a whole slew of Diversity Tip Sheets/Resources, one of which (just to give one example) instructs in Copy Editing For Diversity (“While it is good to talk the talk, it is even better to walk the walk…. Remember: Diversity is always a work in progress. But most papers get a failing grade in it because they are too lazy to go beyond the obvious. When you go back to your newsroom, raise the flag and reach for the skies.”)
Insofar as American journalism, or at least its established major media component, is a church preaching the sermon of “diversity,” The Poynter Institute would seem to be its Vatican. I certainly haven’t looked in all its cathedrals, and certainly not in all its nooks and crannies, but there don’t seem to be any heretics or even agnostics here, no one to challenge or even raise skeptical questions about the one true faith. “Diversity” may be the Sermon emanating from Mount Poynter, but there’s no evidence of any diversity about “diversity” that’s easy to find.
I don’t have time to look at each chant of the “diversity” mantra that permeates the Poynter pages, but just to give you an idea of the message that Poynter pushes let’s look at one example in some detail. Sally Lehrman has written a number of the “Diversity at Work” offerings, and her most recent one, Scholars Share Ideas about How Journalists Can Better Cover Race, provides a good picture of the Poynter perspective. “[W]hen more than two dozen experts met at the University of Oregon in April to talk about racial formation in the 21st century,” she writes, “I took the occasion to ask what reporters often do wrong when covering race, and how they could do better.”
One would have thought that races, whatever they are, had already been formed, but race, like “diversity,” apparently remains “a work in progress.” Indeed, the meeting’s plenary speakers assert, “race is not a fixed, stable, or objective idea.” Instead, it “is a set of categories that the American people constantly police, challenge and change.”
Let’s leave races forming and unforming aside for now, since the assembled scholars at the conference were only too happy to tell her, through their presentations, what reporters and other observers do wrong by race and how to do right. A quick look at the invited scholars and their wares will reveal that there was no much diversity of opinion about “diversity” in Oregon there is at Poynter, but then, as I’ve already indicated, I doubt that Poynter’s Ms. Lehrman was looking for perspectives that differ in substantial ways from her own.
So, what did Ms. Lehrman learn in Oregon and share with the readers of her “Diversity at Work” column? Well, for starters, Devon Carbado, professor of law at UCLA, “laid out some traps that all too easily ensnare us by muddling our writing and introducing bias.” One of those “traps” is
Using “racial preference” as a synonym for “affirmative action.” Affirmative action came into being as a way to equalize opportunity and correct a systemic preference for whites. Instead of giving preference, it is a race-conscious remedy intended to undo preference.
Now this is completely, but revealingly, wrong, although it’s not clear from Ms. Lehrman’s article whether its wrongness comes from Prof. Carbado’s lesson or what Ms. Lehrman thought she learned from it. And not only is it wrong, but the link it includes points to a site that provides relevant portions of the two Presidential Executive Orders through which affirmative action “came into being,” Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 and Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, proving that when it “came into being” affirmative action was in fact diametrically opposed to any “race-conscious remedy.” Both Executive Orders, as I’ve quoted many times (most recently here), required government contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin. [Emphasis added]
Ms. Lehrman apparently never read the two Executive Orders she cited, and as a result she (or Prof. Carbado, if Ms. Lehrman was just taking notes and repeating what she heard) fundamentally misstated what they said. So much for that “trap,” but wait; there’s more! Here’s another lesson Lehrman learned, from another presenter:
Address inequality on a regular basis, suggested Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a sociologist at Duke University. “Race still matters in every aspect of our lives,” he said. It’s not just a historical problem, but lived out routinely in schools, workplaces and newsrooms every day.
Recognize the difference between inequality and discrimination, Bonilla-Silva added. Notice when your own work, and the words and phrases you use, create a discriminatory “racial grammar,” as he puts it, that elevates white people’s concerns above others.
According to the abstract of Bonilla-Silva’s article, he argues (presumably all) “whites (and some minorities) do not see and interpret” American racial realty “the way they should”
because there is a racial grammar — a deep level of race cognition which like grammar operates collectively and interpelates [sic] subjects in an almost invisible way — that shapes the views, emotions, and even actions of all subjects in the racial polity. The “data” I will use to make my case will not be the one [sic] often invoked by social scientists albeit at the end of my lecture, I will address why I believe empirical work on racial disparities is quite limited as a tool to transform the racial order of things. I will conclude by exhorting the audience to realize the severe limitations of the “rational” approach to racial change and urge them to work, “as social analyst Bob Marley articulated so well, for mental, epistemological, and practical liberation from the tentacles of white supremacy.”
I’m tempted to say, if this abstract provides a valid glimpse of Bonilla-Silva’s alternative to a “‘rational’” approach to “transform[ing] the racial order of things,” I think I’ll stick with the rational approach. I may be wrong, but I suspect that most journalists and editors — even those determined through their work to promote our “liberation from the tentacles of white supremacy”— would also prefer to think they’re sticking with the “‘rational’ approach.”
Silva-Bonilla, in short, repeated here what he has said on numerous similar panels, such as this one at Duke in March where, according to someone in the audience, he attacked “color-blind racism” and asserted that a “color-blind society (one in which people are treated equally under the law) enables whites to perpetuate the ‘systemic advantages’ they have over minorities.”
Does Ms. Lehrman really think these values are what journalists should learn at Poynter and bring to their own organizations? Since Bonilla-Silva is a professor of sociology at Duke, I wonder if she thought to check on any role he may have played in the late, unlamented attack by many Duke faculty, the notorious “Group of 88,” on the Duke lacrosse team. They were so convinced the team was guilty of rape (they were white men, many of them “privileged,” weren’t they?) that had no need to wait for evidence before condemning them and everything they were thought to stand for.
If she had done no more than check KC Johnson’s blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, she would have found that Bonilla-Silva was a prominent, “clarifying” member of the Gang of 88. From a KC Johnson profile of Bonilla-Silva:
In effect, he has argued that a quest for white supremacy is embedded within American society, and can be overcome only through government intervention to create an “equality of outcome” between whites and minorites.
At various points in his teaching or scholarship, Bonilla-Silva has used other names for the country of which he is a citizen. In his most recent book, his preface described the United States as “gringoland.” In a course syllabus used at his previous institution, Texas A&M, he wrote, “We conclude the class with a discussion of some of the solutions that have been proposed to deal with the racial dilemmas plaguing the United States of Amerikkka (I will remove the three Ks from this word when the USA removes racial oppression from this country!).” Without explanation, he dropped two of the “Ks” in a forthcoming essay entitled, “Latinos in the Midst: Where Will Latinos Fit in the Emerging Latin America-Like Racial Order in Amerika.”
….
Racism without Racists [one of his books] opens with the following claim: “In this country, racial ‘others’ of dark complexion are always viewed as incapable of doing much; we are regarded and treated as secondary actors only good for doing beds in hotels or working in fast-food restaurants” [emphasis added]….
According to Bonilla-Silva, the United States has scarcely moved beyond the era of legalized segregation. Contemporary America, he has written, features “a rearticulation of some racial practices characteristic of the Jim Crow period of race relations.” This new racialized system, which he calls “colorblind racism,” is upheld in part “through social control (the criminal justice system, arrest rates, etc.).” …. Bonilla-Silva appears to believe … that Jim Crow-like attitudes among whites provide the only logical explanation for the disparate incarceration rates between whites and African-Americans….
Beyond criminal justice issues, what are some of the negative characteristics of this “racialized system” that Bonilla-Silva has detected? Meritocracy, for one. Whites, the Group of 88 member claims, “justify racial inequality” by supporting merit as an avenue for advancement or admission to school; such color-blind racism only helps whites “justify contemporary white supremacy.”
In his writing, Bonilla-Silva regularly employs generic quotes, often invented by him, that he argues typify the “white” viewpoint. (These quotes almost always portray their “white” speaker as transparently racist)….
Bonilla-Silva denies that he seeks “to demonize whites.” After all, he noted, “Historically, many good people supported slavery and Jim Crow”—just like the “good people” in the current environment who “oppose (or have some reservations about) affirmative action”…. And, of course, branding those who oppose his views as the contemporary equivalent of slavery’s defenders gives a sense of how willingly Bonilla-Silva tolerates dissenting opinions.
When translating his theories into specific policy recommendations, Bonilla-Silva lapses into either the banal or the extreme. (Little else could be expected from someone who claims that “today there is a sanitized color-blind way of calling minorities niggers, Spics, or Chinks”) ….
The Group of 88 member has urged minorities to “become militant once again” and adopt “a new, in-your-face, fight the power civil rights movement.” The goal? This movement “must have at the core of its agenda the struggle for equality of results.” In other words, the traditional goal of civil rights activists in the United States—equality of opportunity—would be set aside, replaced by implementation of absolute quotas.
Bonilla-Silva has also devoted some thought to the education system—which is, he has claimed, a place to “nurture a large cohort of anti-racist whites.” For students at Duke, he’s had a direct message: “If you are a college student in a historically white college, you must raise hell to change your college” demographically.
But when minority students at his previous position, Texas A&M, didn’t support his agenda, Bonilla-Silva lashed out. After witnessing a panel in which black and Hispanic A&M students downplayed the racism that Bonilla-Silva sees everywhere, the professor dismissed them as racial Uncle Toms….
With typical overstatement, he compared the thematic difficulty of one of his A&M classes, “Sociology of Minorities,” to the intellectual challenges associated with studying “calculus or the second law of thermodynamics.”
The syllabus for the course stated that students needed to control their “body language” and avoid “irresponsible contestation” with his arguments. Bonilla-Silva further asserted that he would “not accept anecdotal ‘data’ (e.g., ‘I know this because Georgino Bushinsky Presidensky said so and he must know’).” The class ended with a lecture on “Amerikkka’s Racial Future and Social Policy Options to deal [sic] with Racial Problems.”
Ms. Lehrman closes her article by paying homage and, by implication at least, urging deference to “the experts who met at the University of Oregon” because they “have put decades of their lives into trying to understand race.”
“Diversity” sounds good, but when you see what its “expert” advocates actually advocate, it is much less appealing. I suspect that most of Poynter’s enthusiasm about “diversity” is little more than thoughtless, group-think, feel-good faddism, but if I’m wrong it would be instructive to see a column from Ms. Lehrman laying out exactly where — and more importantly, why — she disagrees with the pronouncements of the Duke Group of 88 “expert” whom she commends here to Poynter members and readers.
