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| REGARDING RACE | |
 July 11, 2000  |
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Five experts discuss the scope and effectiveness of a New York Times series on race in everyday America. Editor's note: This series was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
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The series, which is not pegged to any specific news event, is to culminate in a special edition of the New York Times Sunday Magazine on July 16th. To supplement the print stories the Times opened up its Web site for dialogue, offering both reporters' journals and interviews with readers. So far, several thousand people have posted responses. Even the youngest readers are invited by the Times Learning Network to have their say. Lesson plans, puzzles, and discussion guides will be available online well into the next school year. |
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| Reporting on Race | ||||||||||||||||||||
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TERENCE SMITH: Joe Lelyveld, tell me, since this was such a major commitment of your paper's resources, why you decided to do this series, why now, and why this approach?
TERENCE SMITH: Dana Canedy, tell me about that process of reporting, this sort of anecdotal approach, getting people to open up.
TERENCE SMITH: Mary Childers, as someone who has studied racism, what have you taken away from this series so far?
TERENCE SMITH: Keith Woods, journalistically looking at this approach, did you find it valid, did you feel that it broke new ground?
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| Living with race | ||||||||||||||||||||
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TERENCE SMITH: Roger Wilkins, do you think the stories get to the heart of how race affects life in America?
ROGER WILKINS: Much of what I read has been very good. I think that people are more bemused and puzzled than I find them to be in daily life. For example, the black columnist at the Beacon Journal who lost his column was kind of mellow about it, and I don't know any columnists who... white or black, male or female... TERENCE SMITH: Me included. ROGER WILKINS: Me included. If my column would have been taken from me, I would have gone nuts.
JOSEPH LELYVELD: Well, we worried a lot about that, and we asked ourselves many questions about it all the way through, but in the end, we thought it was beyond our possibilities to make this thing demographically pristine and accurate. And we also felt, I think, strongly that at the heart of race relations in America is the still unfinished history of the consequences of human slavery and the black/white relationship. But it's not a perfect or complete portrait. We would love it to be, but it's not. We did our best in that direction, but our real effort was to go to deep into... as deep as we could go into the hearts and minds of people. |
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| Discovering the truth | ||||||||||||||||||||
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TERENCE SMITH: Well, we should turn to Dana of the question of not only the columnist but also the question of, how do you know when you have gotten to the truth.
TERENCE SMITH: All right. Let Roger come back to that.
DANA CANEDY: I guess I don't understand why that's so surprising. I think that another white drill sergeant may have been enraged. This one happened not to be. And, again, I think it goes back to the point that in reading these stories, in conversations I have had with family and friends and colleagues and so forth, I think people do look... gauge, I think, how deeply or how sincere our characters were with their own internal reactions, and that's my belief on that. TERENCE SMITH: Go ahead, Joe. JOSEPH LELYVELD: I think a lot of these characters are surprising in that and other ways, and that just gives you a sense of the different ways race plays out in America. And perhaps if we were doing this as a play or a short story or novel or a parable, we would be able to shape it a little differently to make it more true to our own sense of it. But having fixed on these individuals in each case, we have a certain duty to be loyal to their story. TERENCE SMITH: All right, Mary Childers, Joe Lelyveld made a point; I wondered what you think of it. He said he thought discussion of race had largely subsided in America, that it was in a quiet period. Do you agree with that, and if so, why? |
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| Opening a dialogue on Race | ||||||||||||||||||||
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DANA CANEDY: I agree with you at some level that race is being discussed. I think it's easier to talk about it, and it's being discussed more in comfortable settings where people are with people they trust. What is much harder, and I found this on reporting on journalists who initially were quite concerned about having their names used and so forth, was talking across racial lines. I think, as you say, there are people discussing race, but not often do you hear a black person in a newsroom, for example, out and out say, I think your column is for "crybaby white boys." Those kind of crass statements, regardless of what you think of them, don't often come up -- I think as least in terms of mixed company or in the workplace and so forth, and I think it took months of getting to know these people before they were willing to sort of get at their true feelings. TERENCE SMITH: Let's hear from Keith Woods. Journalistically again, this approach, do you suspect it will have at all a contagious effect with other papers?
TERENCE SMITH: All right. Let me thank all five of you very much.
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TERENCE
SMITH: For the last several weeks the New York Times has been
giving one of the oldest stories in America front-page treatment. Race,
specifically how race is lived in America, is the subject of an extraordinary,
six-week-long series focused largely on the everyday lives of little-known
individuals. More than 20 Times correspondents and photographers
have spent up to a year reporting from schools, playing fields, churches,
movie sets, and other locations to depict life as it is actually lived
by different races in America. 
TERENCE
SMITH: Joining us now to add to the discussion are New York Times
executive editor Joseph Lelyveld, who oversaw the series and is
himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning author; Times reporter Dana
Canedy, who left her financial business beat to focus on race relations
in the Akron Beacon Journal newsroom and edit part of the race series;
former Times journalist Roger Wilkins, who now teaches the history
of race and law at George Mason University; he's a board member of the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund, an author, and a former member of the Pulitzer
Prize Board; journalist Keith Woods, who leads the Poynter Institute
Seminars on coverage of race relations; he was a contributor to an award-winning,
seven-month long New Orleans Times Picayune series on race seven
years ago; and Dartmouth College Professor Mary Childers, who is the
author of a forthcoming book on welfare and a member of the board of
ISM, a national diversity project to generate classroom discussion about
racism, classicism, and sexism. Welcome to all of you.
JOSEPH
LELYVELD: We had a general feeling that race was receding as an issue
in American public life. You can see in the current campaign - not many
candidates want to talk about it a lot, at least since Bill Bradley
got benched. And the - it probably has something to do with the full
employment economy, maybe the welfare reform, maybe the judicial lines
that have been drawn on affirmative action. Now, why this approach?
The logic of our thinking led us to the conclusion that the only way
to look at what was really happening in race relations and come up with
something new was to look at actual race relations. The sense of ours
that things were changing drove it to some degree, and so we wanted
to get down where - especially in the workplace but in other settings
- get down and see what was really going on and discover stories, tell
stories. These aren't just meant to be discussions of a problem, but
stories in the lives of people who don't have spin masters, who aren't
practiced in speaking to the press, and who would be courageous and
gracious enough to allow us into their lives.
DANA
CANEDY: Well, I think that so often when racism is written about or
viewed on television, it is because of some explosive event, a high
profile police profiling case or a shooting, and lots of times average
folks don't recognize themselves in those stories, and so what we set
out to do was to find ways literally that people were living with race,
how they were either figuring out for themselves or not. And so that
required going deep, not just doing what appeared to be the obvious
story after a month of reporting, but going back and peeling the onion,
as we kept saying, they really get to the heart of it, and it took several
months to do that. What seemed perhaps like the obvious story in the
beginning, in the end wasn't the story a lot of times, and these were
everyday people who graciously opened themselves up to us.
MARY
CHILDERS: I think it's unusual and the degree to which it gets people
to be honest about how they think about race. One of the things that
it manages to do is to stay with people over an extended period of time
so that you don't hear them only when they're in an encounter that involves
confrontation, and you don't hear them when they're only involved in
polite conversation. You hear them adjusting to situations, making decisions
about what to react to, changing their minds; and that's an unusual
glimpse into the - sort of this inner life of race consciousness in
this country. Because we live in a still-segregated world, the truth
is that many white people don't have the slightest idea how many highly
accomplished African Americans find themselves on an almost daily basis
having to figure out what happened, do I cut someone slack, am I overreacting?
That's an unusual kind of exposure that happens. People were frank in
ways that they often are not when you sit them down to talk in a classroom
or in a workshop. The same thing is true to the degree to which black
people get to hear white people be serious and forthcoming about their
own history, the racism in their own family, their own doubts about
how much they want to adjust to changes in black politics. It's an unusually
honest glimpse, I think.
KEITH
WOODS: Well, I think that it broke new ground in several ways, particularly
for a newspaper the size of the New York Times, because by focusing
on individuals, as the series does, and by focusing on the depth of
people's lives, rather than trying to focus on a breadth of this problem,
we were able to give people an opportunity to find themselves reflected
both in the people who are like them, the people who look like them
in this story, and also find themselves in the refracted light of people
who are not like them so that a white person who is reading this series
may read a story about black people at Southern University talking about
a white football player, and if they're listening closely, may hear
themselves in the same way as black people who are reading the story
about the church in Atlanta may find themselves hearing some of the
their own prejudices and their own biases reflected in the people who
they're listening to in that story. So the story has offered us an opportunity
to see things in a very different way. It also demonstrates that, when
reporters wait, when reporters instead of taking the first answer from
people on issues of race, wait and patiently ask questions, in this
case they stayed around a while, but we don't necessarily have to spend
a year with people to get this kind of information, if we assume that
it's there in the first place and don't accept the first answers that
we get. 
ROGER
WILKINS: The problem of race in this country is so deep and so close
to the center of American culture and so close to the psyches of so
many people that it's going to take massive undertakings by a range
of American institutions to wipe out what remains, and what remains
is a pretty killing for lots of human beings. So the Times devoting,
being preeminent in the field and devoting these resources to this issue
is just extraordinary. I would congratulate Joe and Arthur Sultzberger,
Jr., and all their editors for what they have done. Having said that,
if I ran my hand across the grainy surface of race relations in this
country, I think I would feel something somewhat different than what
I have read. 
TERENCE
SMITH: All right. Joe Lelyveld, what about that? There is the question
of the intensity, and there are some of the issues, maybe both you and
Dana can answer, about the black/white focus, about the focus mostly
on men. 
DANA
CANEDY: I think after spending nine months or a year with someone you
just know. You use your journalistic instincts and you know. Beyond
that, I would say that the comment about the intensity is very interesting,
because I think sometimes what people respond to when they think about
whether the stories got as deep as they want, is whether the reactions
of the folks in the stories mirror their own. There is no one way to
think about race.
ROGER
WILKINS: Dana, I take your point on that, but another place where the
intensity really didn't seem to work for me is the white drill sergeant
who felt overwhelmed by the four black drill sergeants. He was more
bemused and befuddled and gently disappointed then enraged at the reversal
of fortune. 
MARY
CHILDERS: I don't agree with that, at least in the circles that I travel
in. People talk about race all the time. One of things that's so gratifying
about the New York Times series is that the Times is focusing
on race at a time when the nation is not focused on the one big crisis.
I think it's helpful for us to take account of the fact that even if
politicians are ignoring race, people are either trying to live together
or resenting being forced to be living together. People have conflict
in the workplace. People are watching intermarriage with either glee
or despair at what's happening in their own culture. Race is very much
a topic that's being talked about and sorted all the time in most of
the neighborhoods I know, across class lines. 
KEITH
WOODS: Let me say first off that I think one of the things that the
Times staff has learned, one of the things that staffs have learned
whenever they try and tackle this issue is that, in fact, they are just
like the people that they're reporting on. We often like to think that
we're something different when we go out to talk about race relations
with people, but we are in fact just as reticent, we are just as fearful,
we have all the same hang-ups talking both within our groups and across
race as anyone else does. One of the values then of this series is that
for the reader, you get the opportunity to see what it sounds like to
try out some ideas out loud in public on... in national media. For journalists,
you get an opportunity to see what's possible, what kinds of great stories
there are out there, to be told if you simply take the time and assume
that it's there and assume again that the first answer may not be the
full truth.