When it comes to race, The Inquirer may be trying to improve. But it needs to try harder. | Opinion

It has been painful to read some of the responses to the first article in The Inquirer’s promised series examining how the newspaper has covered African Americans in Philadelphia, ”Black City, White Paper.”

Painful because much of the criticism seems to dismiss the possibility that a newspaper with a clear record of promoting diversity could also be guilty of not doing as much as it could.

These things are not mutually exclusive.

I am a proud Inquirer alumnus, having spent more than 20 years at the paper during the ‘80s, ‘90s, and ‘00s, including more than a decade as editorial page editor — I was the first African American to serve in that role.

During my tenure, I led many discussions with aggrieved community groups that demanded an audience with The Inquirer’s leadership to complain that the paper’s coverage was racially biased. This despite all of the journalism awards received by The Inquirer over the years for pointing out racial prejudice.

Typically, the complainants said The Inquirer didn’t interview enough or the right Black people. They criticized the paper for being too quick to report the bad in Black neighborhoods and too slow to report the good. That imbalance, they said, left the impression that any Black people living positive lives in Philadelphia were the exception, not the norm.

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As I recall, The Inquirer news editors who participated in those conversations generally agreed that the paper’s coverage wasn’t perfect.

But they also pointed out the number of Black men and women holding management jobs in the newsroom, which suggested that they agreed that it was important to have that perspective in deciding what news should be covered in the Black community and who should cover it.

That’s true in covering any community — be it Black, Hispanic, Asian, LGBTQ, or disabled. But acknowledging a need isn’t the same as addressing it.

Because The Inquirer hasn’t adequately addressed that need — as the Rev. Mark Tyler pointed out in “Black City, White Paper” — many Black Philadelphians have written it off as irrelevant.

There was a time when The Inquirer’s unbalanced coverage of Black neighborhoods might have been offset to a degree by Black columnists Acel Moore and Claude Lewis, who often tried to fill in the gaps. Chuck Stone and Elmer Smith did the same thing in their columns for the Daily News. But it shouldn’t be a columnist’s job to compensate for a newspaper’s perceived bias.

The Inquirer’s financial problems since it was sold by the now-defunct Knight-Ridder news chain 15 years ago exacerbated the problem.

Genuine efforts by The Inquirer to increase diversity were all but forgotten when the paper tried to avoid going out of business by laying off hundreds of workers, including Black reporters and editors.

The perspective of those journalists has been missing from the paper ever since. So has the perspective of several of the paper’s top editors who voluntarily left The Inquirer after being offered better opportunities elsewhere.

And perspective matters.

I disagree with editors who say good reporters will get the whole story no matter who they are and where they go. In the real world, a Latino reporter is likely to get better interviews in a Latino neighborhood, and a Black reporter gets better interviews in a Black neighborhood.

“Our children need to be uncomfortable with America’s racist history, so they won’t repeat the mistakes of the past. So, too, should The Inquirer be uncomfortable with its past.”

People feel more comfortable talking with people they identify with.

Similarly, an editor’s ethnicity may help him or her see and correct mischaracterizations of a particular community before errors appear in print.

That The Inquirer has written articles and headlines that many Black people found biased doesn’t mean it isn’t trying to be fair; it means it needs to try harder.

The truth shouldn’t be ignored, even when it hurts.

That’s especially so now given the pushback against so-called “critical race theory,” which seeks to erase those parts of American history that make some people feel uncomfortable about their ancestors’ support of slavery and segregation.

We need to feel uncomfortable with what this country was to inspire us to work harder to make it what it should be.

Our children need to be uncomfortable with America’s racist history, so they won’t repeat the mistakes of the past.

So, too, should The Inquirer be uncomfortable with its past.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the paper for making me its first Black editorial page editor in 2007. In 2017, my department was reorganized, and when a managing editor of opinion position was created, I did not get the job.

Instead of keeping my office, I was given a desk in the newsroom. That was a first for an Inquirer editorial page editor. Was my treatment racist? Given similarly demeaning treatment received by other Black editors and reporters who confided in me during my 20 years at the Inquirer, I would have to say yes.

I am proud of the paper for acknowledging its past bias in “Black City, White Paper,” written by Wesley Lowery, and a subsequent apology by Inquirer publisher Elizabeth H. Hughes.

Now it’s time for those appropriate steps to be followed by corrective acts. The Inquirer should hire and promote enough Black people and other people of color to make a more discernible difference in how Philadelphia is covered.

Harold Jackson spent two decades at The Inquirer and served as editorial page editor from 2007 to 2017. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1991 and retired from the Houston Chronicle in 2020.