Discarding The Race Card
When James McBride was a young reporter in the East, other reporters would come up to his desk and tell him he only had a job because of affirmative action, because he was a young black man. McBride would say, “OK, cool.”
But the words stewed inside him, and he’d stay in the office until 2 a.m., working harder and longer than anyone else.
“I knew I was better than them,” McBride said. “I know I’m a better reporter than anyone who comes up and tells me I was hired because I’m black. Because if they have to go there, then they are scared of me in the first place.”
The old cliche says that “living well is the best revenge.” Well, McBride got revenge, not that he wants any. The 42-year-old man is humble about his successes, yet there are many he could boast about.
He’s worked in the country’s best newsrooms, including the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and Rolling Stone. His book “The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother” recently sold its millionth copy. McBride is now working on the screenplay for TNT. McBride is also an award-winning musician and composer, and he recently finished a biography of Quincy Jones, due in bookstores next spring.
Recently, McBride spent the day in Spokane, as the guest of The Spokesman-Review. He did two workshops for newspaper employees on “Beyond Diversity 101.” And he was honored at a luncheon with community members and the paper’s building-wide Diversity Committee.
His visit was part of this newspaper’s participation in a program called “National Time-Out For Diversity and Accuracy.” More than 200 newspapers across the country focused on diversity for a day in May. Editors and reporters across the country were asked to have discussions and do “content audits” of their newspapers.
They were urged to remind their news staffs that the definition of diversity goes beyond race and gender and includes socioeconomic status, political persuasions, religion and sexual orientation. They were also encouraged to approach the diversity discussion not as a political correctness debate, and not as a framework to create quotas for diversifying sources.
David Yarnold, executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News and one of the national coordinators, urged newsrooms instead to “keep the conversation on the common sense proposition behind the Time-Out: In order for a newspaper to be accurate, it should look like its community. Over the course of a few days, a week, a month, our news pages should be as diverse as the neighborhoods we serve.”
The surveys filled out by partipating newspapers are now being compiled and will eventually be available online and in newspaper industry publications. And the results will be highlighted in a discussion at Unity ‘99 in Seattle. About 5,000 journalists are expected to attend Unity, a conference coordinated by the country’s four minority journalist associations — the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Native American Journalists Association.
During his visit to The Spokesman-Review, McBride offered some clear advice on accurately reflecting the community.
“A writer shouldn’t have to show up at the office at 10 every morning just to show he’s busy. A reporter is supposed to have his or her ear on the ground listening to where the buffalo are. I don’t think you can do that if you’re sitting in the office waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for your sources to call you up to tell you what the news is. You don’t gain trust in the community that way. What happens in newspapers is you have people who drive through communities and report on communities that they only see from behind the wheel of a tightly locked Honda.”
McBride says the real story now is the economic disparity in our country. Racism and sexism are sometimes a defense against the anger that arises between the haves and have-nots.
“There are only two classes left: the poor class and the upper middle class. So what’s happening is that people who live in trailer homes and so forth are throwing bombs. They used to think they were middle class and they realize now, as they see other people passing them by, that they were never middle class. Of course blacks, and other minority groups, have never crossed over completely.
“Let’s face it, the real deal is we’re playing a game of musical chairs. There (used to be) 10 chairs and 11 people competing for those 10 chairs. But now in America, they’re making our widgets in Guam so there are no longer 10 chairs. There’s 10 people competing for three chairs. So people just go for what they know. So if someone cuts you off on the road, you say, `That Hawaiian. Or the Indians, they did it.’
“You go there, because in this country we play that race card all the time to make ourselves feel better about our own situation.”
McBride’s book chronicles the life of his Jewish mother who was disowned by her family in the 1940s because she married a black man. She had 12 children. McBride’s book details the struggles of his parents to put all those children through college and some through graduate school.
He said his mother survived poverty and racism by keeping her eye on the prize: the education of her children. And by sluffing off the criticism, the rejection by her Jewish family and the racial slurs.
McBride hopes to pass on to his two children his mother’s message: Ultimately, you are responsible for your own well-being. Playing the blame game gets you nothing but frustration and bitterness.
“We understood that there was racism and people didn’t like us because we were poor and black. But that excuse was never allowed. We have too much of that blame in our society, on all different levels. This whole business of `I can’t do it because they won’t let me.’ Who is they? There is no they.”
“I would hope my own children would learn to take responsibility for their own lives and not to blame others, because life is tough for everybody. It’s tougher for minority people, but what are you going to do? If it weren’t tougher for minority people, hey, we wouldn’t have the blues!”