This post concerns a story from Friday’s New York Times:
“WNYC Employees Demanded Diversity. They Got Another White Boss”
By Ginia Bellafante
The New York Times
July 3, 2020
WNYC is the trademark and a set of call letters shared by a pair of nonprofit, noncommercial, public radio stations located in New York City and owned by New York Public Radio. WYNC, once only a local station, has become very popular and is listened to everywhere thanks to internet streaming.
*****************************************************
To quote from the article:
… How an institution so central to the identity of progressive New Yorkers had allowed harassment, predation and benighted attitudes to fester for so long had [recently] become an ongoing and vexing question. …
… Last year, New York Public Radio, WNYC’s parent organization, named a new chief executive, Goli Sheikholeslami, a woman and Iranian immigrant who came via Chicago public radio and Condé Nast. At the same time, Andrew Golis, a white man who arrived via Harvard and Vox Media, was made chief content officer.
In the new spirit of inclusiveness, they asked the staff, last fall, who should lead WNYC’s daily news coverage. There were listening sessions that had come after all the committees and task forces and studies. ….
The response was unambiguous: Reporters and producers sought a person of color, someone who deeply understood New York and who had experience in public radio. So it was with great consternation that the staff greeted the news, delivered on June 11 … that the editor in chief of WNYC [Audrey Cooper] was going to be a white woman who lived in California, grew up in Kansas and was not from the world of audio.
And so on.
[Ms. Cooper’s] appointment quickly sparked a second revolution built on the laments that were never sufficiently addressed during the first. In a letter delivered to top management and the board of trustees on July 1, which has since amassed more than 145 signatures … staff members expressed a sense of betrayal.
They had listened to rhetoric about the need for greater diversity for years. “Some of us for decades,” the letter stated. Now the signatories were demanding more than the incremental change they had witnessed for so long — an expansion of the team of reporters and producers to reflect the city WNYC serves, one that has not had a racially monolithic population in more than a century. The letter did not call for WNYC to rescind the offer to Ms. Cooper, but it seems clear the staff hopes she takes the hint.
After the talk-show hosts John Hockenberry and Leonard Lopate left amid accusations of sexual misconduct, WNYC replaced them with Tanzina Vega and Alison Stewart, both women of color. …
Nonetheless, newsroom leadership remains almost uniformly white, and most reporters are white.
*****************************************************
My thoughts
Martin Luther King Jr. was an idealist. Sadly, his ideals are regarded as passé today. He wanted to bring an end to RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. To see the end of discrimination as public policy and legal fact and in daily life.
What is a person of color? I looked it up. It is defined as a person who is not white or of European parentage. The category is so broad as to be meaningless. It’s a buzzword (code word) that has no validity or value conceptually or as a linguistic artifact.
*****************************************************
Why should someone be rejected as a hire for an important position mainly on account of the color of their skin? I have news for you: This is racial discrimination.
It’s a sad day.
Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” comes to an end when a little child cries out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”
I feel like crying out: But I thought racial discrimination was wrong!
— Roger W. Smith
July 5, 2020