When Talent and Resilience Met Staunch Resistance ~~Triumphs and Trials in Sports News

BY MALAIKA HORNE, PHD

In Observance of Women’s History Month

Nita Wiggins has written a masterclass about broadcasting excellence in her book Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and Breaking Barriers in American Journalism. Rising through the ranks of sports news, she landed her dream job at the Fox Affiliate in Dallas, covering the Dallas Cowboys. But the dream had nightmarish tinges. As many Black mega- talents have come to experience. Notwithstanding the negative stereotypes that claim African Americans lack capacity, we now know that this has been simply a shill to cover racism and for her sexism and eventually ageism. She found some White males were galled by her exceptional talents and competitiveness, seeking to undermine her at every turn.

An expatriate now residing in Paris, she is a journalism professor at Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme. Now, Professor Wiggins is conveying her extraordinary skills and knowledge to her students as well as teaching them to be ever vigilant in fairness, objectivity and integrity. This interview has been edited & condensed. First, I loved the book and without giving too much away I want to ask you about your storied career.

Thank you for the positive response to Civil Rights Baby. I filled up my days from age 8 until age 45 with visions of the Dallas Cowboys dancing in my head. Truly, I started at age 8 seeing myself as a reporter not only on the Cowboys beat, but in Dallas, Texas. I am flattered that you called mine a storied career.

I committed early on to outlast all the naysayers as I pursued my place in Dallas. But that it took from age 8 to age 35 to land that dream job. I didn’t necessarily fit the bill as the vivacious and youthful female sports reporter that some station managers considered the ideal. For example, intentional unflattering camera angles on a 35, 38, or 40-year-old woman are far more devastating to her career's longevity than those angles would be to a 28-year-old woman's career.

Yes, there were interviews with the most recognizable Cowboys, as well as Mrs. Rosa Parks, Muhammad Ali, and Jimmy Carter, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and the highest-caliber sports superstars.

Focusing on the big-time interviews is a way to look at a career, maybe that’s the view from 30-thousand feet. But, in the book, I tried to give people the up-close view of a television career. It turned out to be a story of striving, unyielding preparation to be a journalist, building a career by getting unusual credentials. I’ll leave that part to the imagination. A university student who read the book said that a person shouldn’t be almost broken in pursuing a career. The word resilience comes up often. That is what is ‘storied' in the minds of some is the level of resilience they saw in me and that they said they hadn’t seen before.

Wiggins was born on May 7, 1964 in Macon, Georgia, the year of the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act. An award-winning journalist, she worked for 21 years as a U.S. television news and sports broadcaster.

You were one of only a few women of color. What drove you to such excellence and success in these predominantly White male environments? My father, Roosevelt Wiggins, is on every page. If not his name, a trace of something he taught m e is there. My drive to train myself until I improved at something comes from him. He coached my brother’s baseball and basketball teams at the neighborhood rec center. It was voluntary, not his work.

I went to many practices and games. I saw how novice-level players became solid team contributors by the end of the year and after several years of being on my dad’s teams. I copied that ritual of practice, practice, practice and study, study, study from seeing that growth. When a male manager would knock my reporting work during my TV career, I wouldn’t spend time trying to defend it. I would look at what I didn’t do well enough and go back to practicing or studying. It’s what athletes are supposed to do when they fall short of the championship for whatever reason. I took it as my responsibility to up my game and up my skills so that there could be no conceivable way a manager could pick apart my performance.

You worked at Fox during the era of Roger Ailes (head of Fox Broadcasting) and Bill O’Reilly (Fox TV host), which was later revealed to be infused with toxic masculinity even at your Dallas network, fourth largest TV market in the U.S. There were some White males (not all) who seemed hell bent on diminishing your work while you excelled among your peers. How did you cope under such circumstances?

Practice, study, travel

Black Women in Europe® named Wiggins to the group’s 2018 Power List for her prominence as a thought leader and educator.

What concerns you about the industry, particular its treatment of women, African American women in particular?

When I was a teenager, the women who were landing on-camera jobs in TV were former beauty queens. We have to look at the timeframe, the late 1970s. These were primarily White women because few Black women were contestants in major pageants. Black women, who had been in the workforce since forever in the U.S., weren’t in front of the camera. This is the reality that I saw in high school. It coincided with the story of Christine Craft, a white woman and a well-known figure for broadcasters. In her civil rights lawsuit, she says that she lost her studio-anchor job because she was regarded as not pretty enough to be the face of the newscast.

I started my journalism studies in college about the time of the lawsuit. I’m a realistic person, so I knew from my first job and in every subsequent job, that somebody’s judgment of my looks could determine how long my career lasted. And I knew it would be a White man or a group of White men who would have the most control. Whether a woman is Black, White, or anything else, women are united in the fact that a man or several men will hold their careers in their hands. For sure, one of the deciding factors will be how the men assess her looks.

Yes, I agree whole-heartedly. Looks and age can be everything, particularly in front of the camera and it’s so unfortunate. Reflecting on your journalism career, is there anything that you’d do differently?

I did not run a flawless race, but I did move with deliberation and thoughtfulness. There could be something that I could ’ ve tried in a way different from what I chose to do, but I frankly don’t dwell on life that is already lived. I’m very introspective, however. When I’m nearing the end of something that didn’t go as I wanted, I make the players were truly on my side when it came to accepting interview requests and giving me great responses.

As a preteen, I watched Phyllis George and later Jayne Kennedy as NFL reporters. I had already pictured myself as a Cowboys reporter when I was 8 years old, but seeing the two women doing professional, polished and entertaining work solidified that I also was going to make it.

I never told my sports colleague, Glenn Carver at WREG TV in Memphis, that he was my role model, but he was. We overlapped for 2 years in the mid-1990s. I never worked with anyone who worked as hard as Glenn. I patterned myself after him and his work ethic when I moved from Memphis to Seattle and on to Dallas. He respected my work; he valued my contributions and he told me so.

The list of sports royalty you interviewed and how you cultivated so many close relationships are quite impressive. How did you work your magic? Which ones stood out the most?

I do something called the “ person ” -al interview, which means focusing on the “ person ” in front of you. It is, in essence, to delve into what makes the person different from everyone else, even those who are similar. Many people might be chasing a first title or trying to prove to a previous team that he shouldn’t have been released. Those are not “ person ” -al stories and I find that those angles don’t open the interviewee up to share anything outside of the routine.

By the time I interviewed Jackie Joyner-Kersee in Seattle in the mid-1990s, (Named by Sports Illustrated as the 'Greatest Female Athlete of the 20th Century.’) I had my technique down pretty solidly. I know this because she tells me, in around 2003, that she remembers the first interview we did in Seattle. I connected with the person that she was. I questioned her about why, at age 30 -plus, why she’s accepting a back-up role on a team in the American Basketball League. And she answered that she didn’t want the first pro league for women to play basketball on American soil to take off without her name, reputation and support.

Many interviewers stumble in creating connection because th ey repeat a lengthy list of accomplishments and offer stale questions. I created a strategy to build confidence in the interviewee through the right kind of research and then follow it with the questions that allow the person to tell her truth. This is the lesson from not delving into the uniqueness of Mrs. Parks’ motivations.

What struck me was your findings about the high rate of fibroid tumors among African American women. I also had two surgeries for the same problem and as a woman working in predominantly male environments, the stressors of race, class and gender bias appear to be hazardous to your health. Your thoughts? was around 2015 that I began to link these concepts in what became my paper, Testimony on Economic Lynching in the United States, which I released in 2020. I present multiple examples of exactly what you ask in the question: an environment typically headed by a male manager and falling in line with the manager’s biases and calculated mistreatment of subordinates, the group assists the manager in the economic lynching of the designated person. see parallels between physical lynching and economic lynching, and I share the following points: (An excerpt from the paper)

Until 2017, I didn’t know medical evidence existed to show that daily stresses impacted the health of Black people. I knew this anecdotally, but then I heard with surety when a medical doctor asserted it at a panel discussion I attended. This is distressing news. It’s a disgraceful fact of working conditions in the U.S., whether in white- collar careers in an office setting or in labor-intensive, physically demanding jobs. This stings me as a form of workplace violence intentionally inflicted. And I salute anyone who was faced with the health side-effects, as you were, and made recovery.

• Intentionally dismissing a person's pursuit, whether for air to breathe or live or advancement to keep alive a career or simply erasing her.

• Choking her off from her aspirations.

• Enlisting others who may be powerless to rebel, based on a power hierarchy.

Like literal lynching, that stain on our American history, the targeted person is toyed with, mocked, criticized and mentally tortured by willing and/or coerced participants.

Facing that situation at three of my seven television stations led to my fibroid tumors. The imaging technician who discovered the tumors offered me no answers about their formation around 2005, but I now know that medical evidence shows that discrimination can trigger fibroids. I had surgery to remove the tumors in 2008 and I have no lingering effects. And I am a survivor of what I see as an economic lynching of a career because I removed myself from wanting to succeed under those unsafe conditions. My constant effort of trying to work around managers’ biases, my being from an out-group instead of their in-groups, led to my fibroids and a potentially serious health crisis.

It’s a devastating thought when I consider how many people have lived under the thumbs of biased decisionmakers, having their jobs and their pay in the hands of someone who created havoc for them, at will.

Studies show that African American women are four times more likely to have fibroid tumors than White women.

Why did you write the book?

Writing about myself is out of character for me, but I felt the need to reveal the inner workings of the journalism business and the badly run newsrooms that fall short in serving the public. Some readers have told me they were angered by reading what I faced in Seattle, Dallas and West Virginia. What I experienced for parts of 21 years is all too typical and unfair. It was important for me to recount the instances of winning out in the field by landing exclusive interviews but fighting inside the news organizations’ walls to stave off being fired by a boss who would search for flaws in my performance.

I want journalism to do better, both in its treatment of hard-working, serious people and in its programs that need to move away from shiny-object reporting and horserace-type election coverage. I really thought I had the freedom to chase the career goalposts that suited me, but I found manmade obstacles in the male domain of sports journalism and under the direction of mostly male executives. My story is repeated in numerous industries. Civil Rights Baby readers have informed me of specific examples in pharmaceuticals, banking and art.

And add universities to that list as well. Moving on – your book is a compelling read. Is there a screen play for a movie in the works? Yes, I am now working with a pair of writers in France to create a project for the screen. I will keep the information under wraps.

Congratulations. What a milestone. So, what’s next for you?

What I find I thoroughly enjoy is helping people tell their stories to bring out empathy. I never would’ve imagined that writing my memoir would lead people to empathize with a woman or others who are discounted and discriminated against in their places of work. But that is the effect, as people from all walks of life tell me.

~~Malaika Horne, PhD, is a political and cultural commentator and author, Mother Wit: Exalting Motherhood while Honoring a Great Mother.

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