| Chapter 4
Racial
and Ethnic Issues
By
Melissa Moore
Deciding When
to Include Race
The Associated Press stylebook and most editors and other reporters
will tell you that race should be mentioned in a story only when
it is relevant. It may be relevant in crime stories more often than
in others because many crime stories involve unsolved crimes committed
by people police want to find. Police routinely release descriptions
of wanted but unidentified people. Race is almost always part of
that description. The question is whether it belongs in your story.
The usual answer is only when it is part of a more detailed description.
It may be useful for the public to know the robber was a short,
thin blond-haired white man wearing a denim shirt and gray pants
and driving a blue Toyota Tercel. Merely a white man in a blue car
is less helpful.
Keith Woods of the Poynter Institute, a leading thinker on race
issues in journalism, says reporters must understand the history
of racial identifiers in news stories to put their decisions about
when to use them into perspective.
In his article "The Language of Race," which is available
at http://www.poynter.org,
Woods said that newspapers traditionally have used racial identifiers
to let people know they were reading about people who were not white.
"Racial identifiers were used … to call attention to
the criminal, immoral, or threatening acts of other racial and ethnic
groups to demonstrate that the stereotypes about those groups were
true. In many American newsrooms, things only began to change in
the early 1970s," Woods wrote.
Woods says that racial descriptions of criminals do little to
give people a mental picture of what the assailant looked like.
Within each race are myriad shades of skin color, hair characteristics
and styles, eye shapes, cheekbone placements, nose shapes and mouth
shapes. To say someone is black doesn't tell a reader whether they
should picture someone with skin the hue of say, an espresso or
a latte.
Many reporters choose to include racial identifiers as part of
a fairly detailed description that includes information about physical
stature, clothing, unusual physical characteristics and perhaps
the description of a vehicle.
Woods challenges reporters to question each use of a racial identifier
in stories. If they don't tell the reader what someone looks like,
they don't belong, he says.
News organizations should think about what their standard is for
including race in a story description and practice that consistently.
Newsday, for example, uses this policy:
"We don't use a person's race as an identifier unless it either
contributes to a unique identification or is basic to the content
of the story itself. Describing a suspect as a 'black male in his
mid-20s, from 5-foot-10 to 6 feet tall with a husky build' is of
no use because that description fits thousands of men in our circulation
area."
Many news organizations don't have a written standard, but something
more informal. Again, thinking about the standard and making sure
that it is known and practiced consistently is the key."
Confronting Your
Own Bias
Every reporter brings life experiences to the job. Growing up and
in adulthood, you may have had relationships with people from other
races and cultures. Because of how and where you grew up, you got
messages about people of other races and cultures.
Los Angeles civil rights attorney Connie Rice told crime reporters
at a 2002 conference at the University of Southern California that
"race is like gravity." It affects everything you see
and everything you experience of the world around you.
To avoid bias in reporting, it's critical to examine those messages
and be aware of them. It's common, and good journalism, to ask a
source, "How do you know that?" when the source presents
something as fact. When you sit down and consider what you think
you know, the same question applies. Reporters must challenge their
own assumptions about people of other races or ethnicities. You
may find that you were wrong, or at least that there are ideas and
points of view that you failed to realize or consider. When you
do find new information that changes your viewpoint, you grow as
a reporter and you are better able to serve readers by helping them
grow as well.
I once covered a state trooper's visit to an elementary school
class in a poor, almost entirely black neighborhood. The trooper
asked how many of the children had witnessed a crime. Most of the
hands went up. One little girl explained that in recent days she
had seen her father murdered. One little boy revealed that his father
was in prison for a serious crime. He later worried about having
mentioned that to his classmates. It was supposed to be a family
secret, he said.
This is light years from my experience. In my small town, no one
locked their doors. I never even had a house key. When my father
taught me to drive, he said that if I left the keys in the ignition
I'd never have to look for them.
Clearly, these children, who grew up fewer than 75 miles from where
I did, lived in a world I knew little about. Perhaps as a consequence
of this revelation early in my reporting career, I've remained particularly
aware of how children experience crime and its aftermath. I once
saw two young kids practicing their alphabet using the evidence
markers at a shooting scene in a black neighborhood. Each evidence
marker has a letter on it and they are placed, in order, to keep
track of evidence gathered at the scene of a crime. The story of
how these children differ from most of your readers and viewers
is compelling, important and heartbreaking.
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