The Inquirer’s failures on race are rooted in America’s foundational lie of white supremacy | Solomon Jones

This week, when The Inquirer published an article examining the paper’s racist history, the publication joined a trend that has swept through many major newspapers in the last few years.

I was not invited to weigh in. However, I’ve never been one to hold my tongue. But rather than rehashing the offensive headlines and the biased coverage that was outlined in such exquisite detail in a piece titled “Black City White Paper,” I’d like to focus on the underlying assumptions that enable white supremacy to fester even at left-leaning media outlets like The Inquirer.

First, there is the historical reality of America’s foundational racism. After all, ours is a country where the partial humanity of Africans was codified in constitutional law with a clause that explicitly defined Black people as three-fifths human. Is it any wonder that even the most progressive whites would struggle to overcome the myth of Black inferiority? Is it beyond the realm of possibility that even some Black people would support racist ideologies in the hopes of receiving scraps from the master’s table? Is it wrong to assume that all of us have been affected by the constant barrage of images and stories that define Black people as fractional human beings? I don’t think so. In fact, I believe Americans of all stripes spend an inordinate amount of time denying racism, and we do so to maintain our own sanity.

» READ MORE: I’m The Inquirer’s only Black male news columnist. That speaks to a larger problem. | Solomon Jones

For Black people and other communities of color, the denial of racism is a matter of self-preservation. Knowing that our advancement is purposely curtailed by inferior educational systems, biased financial systems, and racist criminal justice systems is a heavy emotional weight. Many of us take the path of least resistance by ignoring the injustice of it all. For white people, denying racism is a matter of self-love, because accepting the reality of racially biased systems means admitting that white supremacy is a lie. It means accepting that whites don’t remain at the top of the social pecking order as the result of their own hard work, the divine intervention of God, and the criminality, worthlessness, and laziness of everyone else.

To maintain the lie of white supremacy, white America needs storytellers who can shape the narrative. It needs guardians who can prevent raw truth from being told. It needs images that reinforce our country’s misshapen picture of itself. In other words, white America needs reporters, editors, and photographers to choose whose truth will emerge.

Historically, American newspapers, including The Inquirer, told stories where the racial bias was hard to miss. Black people were identified as Black, mainly when they were being portrayed as criminals or deviants. The humanity of Black people was routinely and crassly ignored in favor of stories that reinforced racist stereotypes. White people were characterized as good and honorable, and when one of them faltered from the path of Christian piety, they were simply outliers. They were never emblematic of the community from whence they came.

“Today, in newsrooms that like to see themselves as progressive, the racial bias is more nuanced.”

Today, in newsrooms that like to see themselves as progressive, the racial bias is more nuanced. Diversity will be discussed as an abstract concept, but it will seldom lead to more Black and brown hires. Coverage of Black communities will be presented as a novel concept, and then that coverage will revert to crime. White liberals will be elevated as voices of the oppressed, rather than allowing the oppressed to speak for themselves.

In today’s left-leaning newsrooms, it is not the offensive headlines that best illustrate the presence of latent racism. The racism is embodied in the structures that prevent many Black people from ascending to positions of power in the first place.

There’s nothing The Inquirer can do about the racism of the past, but to address the racial animus of the present, journalists must elevate voices from the Black neighborhoods we cover. We must wrestle with the reality that white supremacy exists. We must accept that doing otherwise will render us irrelevant.

Then we can truly begin to change.