Disappointed and Unsurprised.

[browngirl]

So, of course, in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, people are blaming, not a dishonest journalist and those who did not check up on him thoroughly enough, but AA and political correctness and efforts to promote diversity in the workplace. The way to prevent dishonest journalism, according to them, is apparently to only have White journalists; no one would say such a thing in so many words, but that's the only conclusion that can be drawn. I am disappointed and unsurprised by these reactions.



All my life, I've seen again and again how what one person does reflects on others of their ethnic group, unless that person is White, and especially strongly if that action is a bad one. There are times I feel bad about being the receptionist here, being Black, because I don't just fear, I know that someone is judging what Black people are capable of by me. I have to live my own life as all of me, not just as a Black woman, but I know this, and sometimes it bugs me.

At this moment it bugs me. Not a living soul said White journalists can't be trusted when Mike Barnacle was fired. As they said in this article, "no one says 'I'd hire a White guy if he were qualified'". I don't want them to start saying that; I just want them to stop saying it about Hispanic guys and Black women and so on.

I knew, once I heard that Jayson Blair is Black, that people would be blaming the idea of Black journalists, blaming the fact that Black people *can* be journalists, for his misdeeds. I would have liked to have been wrong.

Comments

Oh, certainly

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I'm not at all defending the dishonest Mr. Blair.

The people I'm defending are those who are honest who may nevertheless end up by judged by *his* actions, because of a deeply annoying process I've seen happen a lot.

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

::sigh::

That certainly does happen. (To women, for instance, who no, do not all "sleep their way to the top," as a lot of middle-aged white men allege every time one of them is caught in flagrante with a subordinate who's risen above - or sometimes, to - the typing pool.)

But because of the dynamics of the industry, I don't think that's so likely to happen in his case. What I do expect is a lot of grousing about how he got away for it for so long only because ...
Which is all the harder to rebut for its having a grain of truth.

Re: Oh, certainly

[trinker.livejournal.com]

As I recall (I don't, alas, have time to recheck this cite) one of the NPR shows mentioned that the fasttrack stuff that was designed to do AA stuff for newspapers resulted mostly in white hires who were also part of the group.