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CJR
VO IC ES OF THE PA ND EMI C
What We’ve Learned The disparities exacerbated by the pandemic and highlighted by the protests didn’t start in March, and they’re not going to end with a vaccine.
We need to make sure we’re telling stories through perspectives of people who are living through them. —Troy Closson Metro reporter at the New York Times
newsroom representation against the population of New York City, which would leave cis white women out of hiring statistics. The BuzzFeed News Union has employed the same New York City–based metric for the purposes of hiring, but the non-hiring-related clauses of its diversity and inclusion proposal are more capacious, including women of all races. Unlike affirmative action plans, which target discrimination, this new wave of hiring initiatives is meant to correct an imbalance. Almost all of the organizers I spoke with conceded that it was only a first step. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Reilly-Collins told me. Quotas are designed to make good on the industry’s foundational claim to representation, but won’t necessarily counteract its racism. When used as a placeholder for redistributive justice, the politics of parity will always be winking, holding as its consolation prize the possibility that white people, if they are one day eclipsed by their nonwhite colleagues, will also be able to reap the rewards of “underrepresentation.” And although it remains an open secret that the easiest way to change the makeup of a workforce is for white people to quit, swift wars are not the union’s to wage. It was a freelancer, Tammie Teclemariam, who in June tweeted a photo of Adam Rapoport, the editor in chief of Bon Appétit, in brownface, leading to his resignation. That same month, when the New York Times published an opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton calling upon the military to violently suppress Black protesters—a decision that Bill Baker, the New York Times Union unit chair, called “the straw that broke the camel’s back”—it was the collective speech of Black employees, who took to social media in coordinated action, that forced the resignation of James Bennet, the opinion editor. “Collective bargaining is more harm reduction than solving for the revolution,” Reilly- Collins told me. Historically speaking, it’s not unfair to argue that the professional diversity movement has no specific or singular aim. As a tactic for facilitating representation, it can be deployed to advance the interests of anyone who claims for themselves the feeling of being in the minority. And without a governing politics to determine whose
