|
Sunday, August 18, 2002
07:00 a.m.
The Naivety of Diversity
For a piece by a teacher of journalism, this truly causes me to wonder.
To distrust journalists on the basis that they, like politicians, are corrupt as an implication of the job they do is one thing.
[And I don't mean bribery or insider dealing, but their ability to skew, slant, omit, juxtapose information to achieve a particular effect, combined with their manifold incentives to do so - ego, career advancement, personal ideology, etc.]
To distrust them on the ground of naivety is altogether more disturbing.
Yet here we have a piece as sophomoric in its prose as in its ideas.
Some examples:
First, "a professor teaching a sports literature class":
'Challenged by some of his colleagues to expand the reading list or otherwise include the work of people who were not white, he said:
"I get it. You want me to choose the best writers out there, then be sure to add some black people, right?"'
Yeah. And let's do the show right here!
"The moment was pregnant with meaning and potential. The question seemed sincere. Other professors in the room seemed perturbed. The distance between goal and success could be measured by his question, and the peril of even broaching the subject could be calculated by taking the temperature of the room that day."
A charming vignette - he doesn't say whether his colleagues were as lily-white as his reading-list. Surely not?
In which case some offence might have been taken at the notion that a slug of non-white authors should be added, as an afterthought, to salve his conscience. 'Never mind the quality, feel the colour'.
Then he goes on to ask the Big Question:
"What is the value of diversity in journalism education?"
Plus a couple more to work himself up into a rhetorical lather.
And once there:
"At stake is not just the contents of a course or the education of a student. At stake is journalism's ability to tell accurate, complete stories about a society steadily morphing from monolithic myth to boundless mosaic. At stake is the industry's ability to live up to its constitutionally protected role as the connective tissue linking people to the knowledge they need to function in this democracy."
Amen, brother! Not.
If, as a humble amateur, I'd written
"a society steadily morphing from monolithic myth to boundless mosaic"
I'd hope I'd have the decency to keep it to myself. But this guy teaches the scribes of tomorrow, for Heavens' sake!
And when exactly was US society a "monolithic myth"? Absurdly reductivist, if not downright false, surely.
There's more:
"On its worst days, the morning newspaper or local newscast is still the most common way communities connect, learn about one another, identify mutual interests and separate needs, and get enough information that they can decide what to do next. But on their best days, news organizations also misrepresent, ignore, bend and distort the stories of whole groups of people."
Hasn't he got that the wrong way round? Rhetorically, I mean - 'worst' and 'best' should change places, surely? No, I think, on reflection, he means it the way it is. (Either way, the fact I had to spend time thinking about the point means it's bad writing.)
As for the substance, does local TV news do much more than belch sensationalised crime stories, and do traffic and weather? When does it ever allow communities to "identify mutual interests"?
We still haven't got to why diversity's important, and he's losing me with all this generalised, high-flown waffle. The journalism teacher.
"It hires people of color or white women because of their "difference," then makes no use of that difference...."
He means, the blacks doing the gang stories, the Asians hi-tech, the girls fashion, presumably.
".....newspapers and TV stations in Utah, North Carolina, Iowa and Minnesota find themselves needing to substantially increase their knowledge of Hmong, Somalis and Mexicans as immigrants transform cities, counties, states and regions."
Now, I'd won't beat him up about the split infinitive; but "Hmong"? How much is there for outreach to the Hmong in the budget of local TV news in Duluth or Council Bluffs?
And, as for the Somalis - how about their habit of slicing the genitalia of their daughters? Where does in-depth investigation of that fit into our friend's happy-clappy rainbow world, I wonder? Not quite what the owners mean when they say "If it bleeds, it leads", I suspect!
You've got to believe the guy has a big finish after all this. He's going to answer that most vital of questions, surely?
"It's as simple and profound as this: the values of journalists and journalism are established in that classroom. If students are to learn that all people must be heard in order for a democracy to thrive, then professors are among the first to deliver that message. They deliver it by expanding the books and articles students read, the broadcasts they see and hear, the speakers who come before them, the issues raised in class."
This gets to the heart of the matter, though not, perhaps, quite as our friend thinks it does: breadth of experience, direct and mediated through books, broadcasting, etc, is no doubt a good in education. But not for its own sake.
And that is the key objection to giving 'diversity' houseroom as a goal in education of any sort - let alone of journalists.
If the immediate goal is exposure to the best writing from around the globe - fine. Is it possible to find enough excellent writing from outside the WASP tradition to fill the time allotted by the syllabus - certainly.
But excellence never seems to be an essential element to diversity. His sports journalism colleague seems confused: I'll assume that, in his field, the 'best writers' include some that are not white. But all he suggests as necessary is to "be sure to add some black people". (Not, "and some of the best writers are black".)
And the author talks of
"expanding the books and articles students read".
Now, leaving aside the fact that he should have put something like "the range of" after "expanding", again, he's talking quantity, not quality.
The suspicion here is of an ideology which suggests (without spelling it out) that the work of a Nigerian author, say, has value simply because it is not produced by a WASP. And to seek to make the same critical judgements of the Nigerian's work, as one would naturally do of the WASP's, is to fail a test of ideological purity. Especially, of course, where the person offering the judgements happened to be a WASP.
To see an ideological connection between the goal of 'diversity' in reading lists and that of 'diversity' in the student body would not, I think, be wholly fanciful. There must be Hmong enrolled; and once, enrolled, it would be disrespectful not to include one or two of their authors in reading-lists. Hmong empowerment demands it!
So, though the guy's tone and message are of the naive "I'd like to teach the world to sing" speech of a 15 year old running for class president, the ideas that seem to underlie his piece are, I believe, thoroughly pernicious.
|
