Uri Berliner, NPR and Liberal Racism (Part 2)

Journalists call it "identity politics." It's really "experience politics." That framing makes a difference.

Back in 2016, I was part of a Facebook group of female journalists. The idea was to have veteran journalists give advice to newbies. But the entire group ended up being about the newbies asking the veterans how we handled sexual harassment.

Every day, it seemed, there was a different story.

There were two stories that stuck with me. One was of a woman who left her job because of harassment by her boss. The young woman who replaced her contacted this woman a few months later to inquire about why the first woman had left. The one who left simultaneously felt guilty about not warning her replacement beforehand, and worried about getting sued if she was honest with the woman now.

The other story I remember is from a young woman who noticed that men tended to walk in the middle of her organization’s somewhat narrow hallways, and observed that women had the unconscious habit of moving to the side when they passed these men. This young woman did an experiment. Every time she saw a man walking down the middle of the hallway, she squelched her instinct to move to the side. And every time, the men ran into her. Each of them said some variation of the same exact thing: “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.”

This is what it’s like to EXPERIENCE sustained bias. It’s to be unseen. It’s to deal with people who are not aware that you are literally standing aside for them. And who then get angry when you ask them to, sometimes, stand aside for you. Or at least share the damn hallway.

The people who don’t see you often think of themselves as kind, goodhearted people, who would never run you over on purpose. Many of them identify as liberals.

They think of sexism or racism as something that is done by INDIVIDUALS. Bad individuals. And, since they are good individuals, when you point out their bias and how it affects you, they think you’re calling them bad.

The irony here is that bad individuals - i.e. white supremacists like Christopher Rufo or Alex Jones - absolutely see you walking down that hall. They see you and they aim to knock you down.

White liberals often think it’s the intention to knock down that is the difference. Whatever the intention, though, the result is still the same - you are on the ground.

Public radio is full of well-intentioned white people knocking folks over and then getting defensive when people tell them why they are on the ground.

More Bad Journalism

In last week’s column, I detailed how (now former) NPR business editor Uri Berliner got most of his facts wrong.

Turns out there are more factual errors.

Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep pointed out that Berliner’s 87-0 count of registered Democrats to registered Republicans in NPR’s newsroom was inaccurate. First, there are far more journalists than 87 in the D.C. office (known in public radio as The Mothership) and Inskeep, who keeps a photo of his voter registration card on his phone, is registered as non-partisan. As are many other journalists.

Inskeep also did the research on Berliner’s accusation that NPR relies on the term Latinx, which Berliner says, “many Hispanics hate.”

In his 90-day search, Inskeep found 197 uses of Latino, 201 uses of Latina, and nine uses of Latinx “usually by a guest on NPR who certainly has the right to say it.”

It’s almost like Berliner - who a lot of people at The Mothership had previously respected as an editor - has decided facts are no longer important.

The only thing that Berliner said that rang true for me was that NPR folks are unfailingly polite. Public radio is unfailingly polite. Which is not to say that public radio is kind. Public radio is the most passive-aggressive culture I have ever encountered.

As a friend of mine notes about the station we both worked at, it is “elitist, arrogant and cruel.”

Which is exactly how Berliner’s piece comes off.

Disbelieving Facts at Hand

“One of the tried-and-true tactics in the racism playbook is to relitigate a question that’s been answered ad nauseam,” wrote NPR Code Switch Senior Editor Leah Donnella last week.

Donnella was reacting to this paragraph from Berliner’s piece, referring to NPR’s coverage of the murder of George Floyd:

“Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way.”

Donnella listed just some of the stories NPR has done on the subject of systemic racism “in law enforcement… In education… In housing… In healthcare… In hiring… In government and environmental policy. Oh yeah, and in journalism. 

“But that’s rarely the point of re-asking the question,” Donnella noted. “The point is to cast doubt where there is none.”

That’s what Berliner did. And it was disheartening - though hardly surprising - to see how many public radio folks on various Facebook groups were willing to follow Berliner’s twisted line of inquiry, and lament a lack of “viewpoint diversity.”

“This bias standard should be the same regardless of what you look like or how you identify,” wrote one former member station journalist (who doesn’t work in journalism anymore). “Just because a person has an identity that isn't cis/white/male, doesn't give that person free rein to bias the pursuit of truth.”

This is the problem I see a lot in well-meaning, liberal white people - including me at one time in my life. They see talk of equity as one of “identity” rather than one of “experience.”

And, for them, you talking about your experience comes out of nowhere. They have been working with you for years. They “know” you, and they never heard you complain about racial or gender bias before. So it must be some DEI groupthink that is making you talk about these things.

This line of thinking became clear to me after the killing of Michael Brown, when Ferguson protestors were calling attention to the disproportionate number of traffic stops targeting Black people in and around the town. The white mayor was stunned. He played darts with a group of men every Wednesday night, he said. Half of them were Black. And they never told him anything about being targeted by Ferguson police.

Of course they didn’t. Because they didn’t feel safe. Because most of the time, when people who are targeted talk about their experiences, they are punished for it.

That is part of the experience.

When Black and Brown people talk about racism, they talk about the experience of walking into a store and being followed or watched. They talk about the fear they have at becoming “the next Sandra Bland” when they are pulled over by a cop. In fact, Philando Castile - as noted in the law enforcement piece Donnella linked above - was pulled over 46 times in 14 years before he was killed for driving while Black.

I have been pulled over, maybe, five times since I turned 16 (and I was a speeder). Which was way longer than 14 years ago. A few years ago, my daughters and I were driving between Milwaukee and Madison and I got pulled over in a speed trap. I drove away with a warning. All three of us knew that I had gotten the warning because I was a confused white woman (the roads in and around Madison confused the hell out of me), and I had two pretty, white teen girls in the back of my car.

My Black friends are happy to just drive away unscathed.

People who use identity rather than experience to frame issues of diversity are saying that there is one “truthful” identity. And people who have a “different identity… bias the pursuit of truth.”

When you look at it in terms of experience, you understand that there are truths among some people that are completely unseen by others.

And DEI is just an attempt to get people to see others walking down that proverbial hall. To acknowledge the truth of the people whom they don’t even realize are stepping aside.

Real Harm

What I found most problematic about the former member station journalist I quoted above is that his comment was in response to a person who had flippantly referred to Berliner as a “cis-man.”

The person he was responding to does not identify as cis, and was actually fired for being gender nonconforming. At the time, it was all over internal NPR channels.

He was dismissing her experience because he was hurt that he fit into the category she was named. And in doing so, he kinda proved that she was right.

What worries me is that Berliner’s piece may end up actually hurting people - far beyond being knocked down in a hallway.

Elahe Izadi, in her piece on Berliner in the Washington Post, notes that female staffers of color at NPR have been getting more hate messages since Berliner’s screed was published last week. This is something that female journalists experience at an unprecedented rate. I doubt Berliner - who wrote and edited business stories - has had to deal much with the online vitriol that most female journalists just live with. Especially Black and Brown female journalists.

What he wrote was dangerous. Not just because it was nonfactual and gave credence to conspiracy theories. It was dangerous in the same way Trump’s “be there, will be wild” Jan. 6 tweet was dangerous. It could spur the lunatics who want to take down all journalism that doesn’t conform to white supremacist ideas, no matter who gets hurt.

Berliner, in the statements he has made regarding his piece, clearly considers himself a nice guy. He says he has no problem with DEI initiatives. He just thinks they’ve gone too far.

Let’s hope that Berliner hasn’t gone too far, and that he hasn’t, in his white, liberal anger, put his former colleagues in danger.

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NPR’s Uri Berliner Exposes How Liberal Racism Works (part 1)

Journalism Failed Claudine Gay (and all of us)

Perception, Truth and Body Language