CW1975,
Your arguments are dangerous because they are eloquent but manipulative. Randy Harvey's ascension to the LA Times SE job
You say newspapers must begin a grassroots effort in the middle schools of black America to develop minority talent for the future. I mean, that's a nice consideration, but the problems gnawing at black America are larger than whether enough of them are becoming journalists. We can take every statistic about newspaper staffing and turn the percentages on its head - when we talk about crime. That's a serious problem.
Now, why is that? The answer is a complex one, and it involves more than just pointing a finger in the vague direction of the great beast called subconscious racism, where the prophecies of one race are fulfilled without any participation of the person living those lives. The great sins committed at the outset of American settlement can never be fully erased, we know this. There will never be a generation of black Americans, no matter how far removed from it, who won't know the tragic mistreatment suffered through the centuries until the end of Jim Crow. And yet it is no longer the responsibility of white America to pay a guilt tax for these egregious errors; unlike man's inheritance to Adam, whose fall put a pox on man for history with only singular redemption (or so I believe), the modern generation of white America does not inherit the slavery, or abuse, or the kind of blatant discrimination of their ancestors. It simply doesn't. It's not white Americans job to look out for black Americans anymore than any other race, nor is there a penance white America still needs to pay. The responsibility, on a very high level, is merely (and hugely at the same time) to each other, without respect to any identifying physical charateristics. You think whites are hard on blacks? Well everybody's hard on the mentally depressed. And there's not much written by or for those people.
Is that making the answer bigger than the question? Maybe, but I think the eloquence and seeming persuasiveness of your arguments has to be put in the right context. I mean, consider:
On one hand you insist institutional racism and cronyism.
But on the second, you suggest the racists and cronies be responsible for diversifying the newsroom.
If you sincerely believe that journalism has turned a blind eye to the cause of minorities, your assertion that it restore vision to its own cataract would be a semi-miracle. If it's subconscious and all, then why the admonishment to build grassroots organizations, etc. At the end of the day, can't you build all the pipelines you want and still have them fail because, in that interview room, the white editor just isn't feeling that kinship? How are you going to change that dynamic? Have white people read "Blacks For Dummies?" Your assertion all along is not that they weren't minorities worth hiring, but that white people weren't hiring them. Are newspapers going into the middle schools so they know what minorities and girls look like, or what?
Such is the futility of this strategy for solving racism. Malcom X had a audacious strategy of isolationism and community-building that promoted the kind of strict black unity that forced white America to deal with black America as a successful, formidable minority group. Bill Cosby travels the country telling black parents, more or less, to assimilate better, to make their kids speak proper English, go to school and quit being distracted by the hip-hop culture. I'm not saying I agree with either, but they are (were) viable strategies for black America in its relationship with white America. But this strategy where minorities insist the white mean lends some of the cool of his ice while secretly charging he hoards all the ice for himself is a wormhole - it merely folds in on itself.
If you need any more evidence, consider the last time white America was given the paternal role of taking care of a minority: Indian Reservations. Those worked out real well.Â