Over 200 Audio Professionals Sign Anti-Racist Open Letter to Public Media

An open letter entitled “An Anti-Racist Future: A Vision and Plan for the Transformation of Public Media” was published today, Monday, January 18th 2021, via Medium and Current, signed by more than 200 worldwide audio professionals. The letter is a five-step vision plan with actionable steps towards dismantling white supremacy and oppressive structures in public media, starting with making amends, and then moving through every aspect of having equitable, just, and diverse workplaces and coverage: hiring, promotions, pay structures, training, reporting and coverage, and accountability practices.

“Public radio has grappled with its diversity problem for decades, and yet it remains a largely white, largely male industry,” notes Celeste Headlee, the letter creation team’s lead and former public media host with NPR, PBS, and PRI. “When we began this work, we were all reeling from George Floyd’s death (and Brianna and Ahmaud, among too many others) and from the exposure of long-standing discrimination and harassment at several public radio stations. We were angry and upset and ready to fight to force our leaders to implement anti-racist policies.”

The letter comes during a long and arduous fight for anti-racist workplaces and reporting across public media that has been pushed into the light, in part thanks to the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. Diversity reports from NPR have long shown that Black voices are rarely reporting on Black stories and that upper management is overwhelmingly white and male. Even though audiences and employees have been pushing for more diversity, and even though this diversity rhetoric has been at the forefront in public spheres for years, white employees make up almost 71% of NPR’s staff. Between 2015 and 2019, NPR’s staff showed a 3.5% increase in Latinx employees, a 0.8% increase in Black employees, and much less than even that for every other person of color.

“A Vision for an Anti-Racist Future” also arrives while several public radio stations and public media organizations are grappling publicly with the effects of their ongoing racist reporting policies.

Last month, The New York Times was forced to retract the bulk of reporting for Caliphate, a podcast about ISIS based heavily on the stories told by Shehroze Chaudhry, a 26-year-old arrested by Canadian police in September 2020 on a terrorism hoax charge. Just this weekend, Michael Barbaro delivered his apology on Twitter, a day after New York Times’ The Daily was pulled from four major radio stations; it was, unsurprisingly, not well-received.

Also in September, Martin Di Caro was finally dismissed from WAMU for a long history of sexual harassment at the station, after a flurry of departures by employees of color, specifically women of color. These events are only some of the more recent turmoils that public media has faced in terms of their lack of adept handling of racism and sexism in the workplace.

“A Vision for an Anti-Racist Future” addresses these hiring practices and payment structures, demanding that every station have a proportionally representative demographic of the community it serves. It also envisions a full pay transparency policy and standardized chart in order to address the wealth gap between people of color and white people, especially Black women who are undervalued and face extreme bias when negotiating for their salaries.

The third section details equity and accountability in training and professional development, with a vision of competent and accountable leadership when it comes to commitments of justice and equity. As noted here, “public media leadership is dominated by whites” at 87 percent, a managerial system that is failing both its responsibility towards Black journalists and its need to attract the next generation of journalists.

In covering this letter, Discover Pods reached out to a few signers to talk about the letter’s intent and why they had signed it. Keisha Dutes, co-executive producer over at Spoke Media, described her experience with job-hunting in 2020 as a Black woman.

“When the uprisings were happening in the summer of 2020, I had just gotten laid off, and you know how the industry is, people know that.” This is how digital media industries work, especially ones that run heavily on hiring contractors and freelancers: when people get laid off, everyone knows it thanks to the grapevine and social media boosting their request for work. “It was such a weird thing to be laid off in the middle of an uprising [. . .] and then being solicited for jobs and going into interviews at this time, when you’re the most mentally exhausted.”

This phenomenon last year could be seen all over several industries: opportunities for Black people to have manuscripts checked and pitches accepted, to come in for interviews or apply for grants. The lack of concern for people who most likely do not have the mental and emotional resources to fill out forms, complete an interview, or polish off a manuscript was transparent in these moments.

Read more: How to make your podcast more accessible using transcripts

Dutes explains, “When you’re an interviewee, you don’t have any power. But as the interviewer, if you zoom out and the conversation is about how to best support Black people and workers, it was very weird that in their fervor to hire ‘good’ Black workers, interviewers would often overstep and not realize that they’re asking for a lot of attention in a time that is very terrible. Coronovarius, uprisings, people getting killed, the cops rolling up on Black Lives Matter, all this replaying over and over on the news.

“And then they’re talking about oh well, if you’re stressed then take a break.” Dutes laughs. “I can’t take a break if people more powerful than me are asking for my time. I think folks are so into getting into this diversity shit and inclusion shit, and they aren’t even realizing that the people they’re targeting are people.”

Morgan Givens, an independent podcast producer who used to work as a producer on 1A at WAMU–and who is not signing the letter–agrees.

“If we don’t do what they want us to do, there’s a problem. Because there were things they wanted me to do, but they wanted me to do it in a way that would continue to uphold white supremacy and would have made me a token. And I’m not about being a token. I’m not anyone’s token.”

We are past that point where we ask them to meet us where we are because we have been asking them to meet us and they say, ‘We’ll get there when we get there.’

Morgan Givens

People at his station asked Givens to apply for an open host spot at Pop Culture Happy Hour, right before the news broke about Di Caro, and Givens expressed how flabbergasted he was. “Why would I want to join y’all when you can’t even recognize the issues you have within your journalistic departments, you can’t even recognize it within headquarters, you can’t recognize it within your member stations? And you think I want to join something called Pop Culture Happy Hour where I am going to have to, [in order] to do my job well, not hold back at all when it comes to talking about different systems of oppression and how they manifest themselves in art.  At NPR? No thanks!”

This letter is a vision plan, full of hope and concrete actionable steps that public radio leadership needs to take in order to improve their working conditions for their Black and brown employees. And, as mentioned earlier, it hopes to help decrease income disparity and attract more journalists. Givens elaborates on what the future will look like if something doesn’t change:

“[Public radio are] getting themselves into a situation where they don’t have a lock on our ability to reach people and they’re going to suffer what is colloquially known as browndrain. Who do they think is going to want to try to work with them?”

When asked why he isn’t signing the letter, Givens expressed both support of his friends and colleagues who have signed the letter and a deep, understandable frustration with repeating the same story over and over.

“At a certain point, if they need a letter still, I don’t know how to help them. If they still need me to sign my name to a letter that has the list of all the things they already know to do, I’m not doing that. We’ve done this before and we’ve done it before and we’ve done it before. I feel like we’re past the point where we need to be sending these people open letters. We are past that point where we ask them to meet us where we are because we have been asking them to meet us and they say, ‘We’ll get there when we get there.'”

The United States is now two weeks past the January 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol, and two days from Joseph Biden’s presidential inauguration. Notably, several public mainstream media outlets did not call the attack an insurrection or coup during the entire day (and some still have not). Headlee has said, “In my opinion, [what happened two weeks ago] in DC is directly related to the tolerance of bigotry and racism at all levels in our society, including our workplaces and our newsrooms. We wanted to take a stand and now, thanks to the dedicated work of hundreds of public radio employees, we can.” (Farai Chideya, host of Our Body Politic, recently updated her 2016 article “The Call-to-Whitness” to talk about how public media’s responsibility in this outcome).

Givens states plainly that “public radio is a problem: they both sides everything to death. The problem I am seeing with these institutions is that they have fallen for the lie that the truth is partisan. The truth is the truth; the partisan people will twist the truth to make it partisan.”

Read more: Podcast Spotlight: Latina to Latina

The letter ends with sections on the transformation of coverage and accountability, particularly “ending the pursuit of objectivity,” a journalistic standard that upholds white supremacist and oppressive structures in the newsroom and in the media. It is why the coverage on the insurrection at the Capitol looks so different from coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. Journalistic objectivity is a standard that actively prevents people from telling the truth, as happened to Lewis Wallace with this article that led to his firing from Marketplace in 2017. As he says there, “We should own the fact that to tell the stories and promote the voices of marginalized and targeted people is not a neutral stance from the sidelines, but an important front in a lively battle against the narrow-mindedness, tyranny, and institutional oppression that puts all of our freedoms at risk.”

The pursuit of objectivity would typically consider me, a signer, ineligible from reporting on the letter, even though I signed due to my first-hand experience with the issues the letter has addressed. Why would someone lacking that experience understand the letter and its intent more than myself?

And even though Dutes signed the letter and Givens did not, their thoughts on the matter remain closely aligned for their entire interviews, to the point where they used the same phrases and referenced the same experiences — because all of this racism keeps happening, continuously, because we have not yet done the work to dismantle the structures that enable its existence.

Quoted from the letter’s introduction, “The first public report on public radio in 1978, decades ago, said that ‘public radio has been asleep at the transmitter’ on issues of race.” This is the root of Givens’ reasoning.

“I’m not going to keep letting them say oh, we’re listening, we’re working on it. No, you’re not. You’re lying to me because you said that last year. And you said that the year before. And you said that a decade ago. And you said that in the 60s, and in the 50s. You’re lying. Stop lying to me; be honest and come out and say you don’t want to do the work.”

You can’t be new and improved and better if you’re just imitating your old boss.

Keisha Dutes

Both Dutes and Givens, though interviewed separately, commented on being pushed into a trope by public radio: the Magical Negro. When hiring Black people, public radio still assumes their new hires will be the ones to fix the workplace, instead of fixing their own workplace to make it safe for Black people.

Dutes discussed this trope when talking about turning job opportunities down: “I realized what it means to say no and how the conversation changes when these places call you to be their Magical Negro. And how the tone changes when I say I’m not interested. It’s, ‘Wait, did she just say no? Did she just say she’d rather stay out of work?’ [. . .] I think we, as people of color and especially Black people, the mode of conversation in talking about us is as though we are all underprivileged and we need their help. So how dare you not take this thing I gave you?”

Givens cited the trope when discussing how he views public radio these days: “I question whether public radio is worth saving because it does not seem like it wants to save itself. I am not going to be out here trying to save something that has no desire to save itself, was not made for me […] Why am I trying to hold on to something that has clearly shown through the years that does not care about me and mine when I can make something new? I am sick of us being called in to fix the problems they created when this is something that no longer had to be a problem.”

“I’m not here to be their Magical Negro,” Givens stated flatly.

And Dutes is not here to fix anyone’s diversity problem because “a lot of independent houses and other audio creation places are built by people who are offshoots of public media. They bring the same attitude and structure to their new workplaces, because if that’s what you know [. . .] you should be improving, but a lot of times, people are rebuilding the same structures that they came from under the guise of new, and improved, and better. You can’t be new and improved and better if you’re just imitating your old boss.”

Dutes expressed what this letter requires from signers for it to be successful. “People have to live this letter. Are you living this letter? You can’t have this standard for your job, and not have this standard at home. If you can’t talk to your kids about racism, about sexism, about all the -isms, you’re not living it. I need you to talk to your kids, I need you to talk to your spouses, I need you to live it, and then come and tell me about how we’re going to do this shit at work.”

You can read the letter and the list of signers here.