Moving The Race Conversation Forward. You’ve probably noticed that when our news
media talks about Race, when they talk about racism, when they talk about racial justice
issues, they quite often talk about it all wrong. But have you ever tried to quantify exactly
how and why the media gets it wrong about race and what we can do to fix it? Well there’s a new paper published by Race
Forward entitled ‘Moving the Race Conversation Forward,' that sets out to do just that. By compiling nearly twelve hundred articles
from major newspapers and cable news outlets, and systematically breaking down the most
common mistakes we fall into when we talk about race. And in their research Race Forward identifies
seven harmful practices. The seven most common bad habits in media
coverage of race as well as recommended strategies to get us back on track. And I recommend reading all seven for yourself,
but right now I wanna focus on just one of the biggest traps that racial justice conversations
fall into, which is our tendency to focus too much on individuals instead of systems. Because when we talk about race, when we talk
about racism, when we talk about racial justice it is important to remember that there are
levels to this thing. There are least four different levels of racism
that each need to be considered. The first level is Internalized Racism, which
is all the prejudice, bias and blind spots which you might have within yourself as an
individual. The next level after that is Interpersonal
Racism which is what happened when we act out that internalized racism on each other. Those two levels, the internalized and the
interpersonal are the two individual levels of racism, and those are the simplest ones
to focus on and the easiest to recognize in our day to day lives, the ones we spend most
of our time talking about but I’m here to tell you there’s something else - Systematic
Racism. Once you get past those individual levels,
first of all you have to deal with Institutional Racism: The racist policies and discriminatory
practices in schools and work places and government agencies that routinely produce unjust outcomes
for people of color. And when you step beyond that level you have
Structural Racism: The unjust racist patterns and practices that play out across the institutions
that make up our society. The individual and systemic levels of racism
are both important, both necessary to reckon with, and they’re both usually interrelated. But if you want a real, fully, clear sighted
conversation on racial justice, you have to be talking about both levels. And one of the most common ways we fail to
see the big picture on race is by failing to think about systemic racism, by failing
to be Systemically Aware. In their research, Race Forward found that
our media coverage far too often falls into that trap. They found that approximately two-thirds of
race-focused media coverage fails to consider how systemic racism factors into the story. Two-thirds of their coverage of race fails
to be systemically aware. And that is a problem. When we constantly focus only on individual
stories it distorts our sense of how racism works. It encourages us to see racism only as a product
of overt intentional racist acts by individuals, that can be fixed simply by shaming and correcting
those individual defects. And it encourage us to see individual stories
of transcending racism as proof that there is no more racism. That if we have a Black President and Oprah
is a billionaire then there must not be anything else to talk about, and any problems that
other people of color still face must be due to deficiencies on their part. It must be a problem with them instead of
a problem with the system. And that is .. No. Just.. No. We cannot have a real thorough conversation
about incarceration rates for people of color, about the thousands of families torn apart
by our immigration policies, about the perennial disparities in education, housing, healthcare,
employment opportunities, we cannot .. N-No. We cannot have real talk about any of the
biggest issues that affect us all as individuals if we are not also thinking about the systems
involved. We cannot have a discourse that brings us
closer to racial justice without being systemically aware. So next time you listen to the news or read
the news or watch the news or surf the news, you should take a minute to ask yourself - “Is
this coverage systemically aware?”. And read Race Forward’s new research paper
entitled ‘Moving Our Race Conversation Forward’, for more on these issues and for intervention
strategies to help us have some real talk about racial justice.