How not to democracy: racial 'representation' in journalism
Lessons from a non-white mainstream in Newark
This is the third in a series of “culture” posts proceeding from a premise: journalism doesn’t yet convene the spaces and peoples that will reconfigure, at scale, how the broad public experiences and relates to it. I won’t know the content of the posts nor number in the series till I write them. Come explore with me.
In my former classroom at Rutgers-Newark, I couldn’t see my job as teaching journalism. That’s a quick ride to Gen-Z stare; not even my journalism majors and minors rarely if ever consumed it. My job was to make journalism (consumption and production) relevant and that requires a strategy of listening to students’ worlds and meeting them there. Along with other community-making tactics inspired by an old friend and fellow banana peppers enthusiast, Matt Birkhold, students eventually open up.
Here, I want to bring readers into a world by sharing a few conversation snippets1 . They strengthen my book-of-essays argument against journalism’s half-century approach to incorporating the nation’s race/ethnic diversity. It’s not that the approach—racial ‘representation’— hasn’t yielded results since the 1960s; rather it’s an outdated measure of progress, it undermines coalition-building and is anti-democratic for the nation that we are.
My argument requires much more space than this post, of course.
I share the snippets only to suggest the culture-layers that journalism’s approach to connecting the nation—racial ‘representation’—can’t see.
“Yeah, I am white but not that kind of white.”
The speaker is hijabi. To better contextualize her original point for the class, she distinguished between perspectives derived from Northern/Anglo heritage vs. “white” that originates from the Arab World, Turkey, Iran, etc.
“I wish there was more conversation about the tensions between Latinos and African-Americans in Newark.”
The speaker is Newark born-and-raised by immigrant parents from Colombia.
“Sometimes it feels like there isn’t a place for African-Americans like me, here.”
The speaker is referring to the absence of African-American political expression amidst the campus’ dominant student politics, i.e. Gaza, immigration. Her family are New Jerseyans with roots in the U.S. South. This was an office-hour conversation.
“I took this class because I don’t get to talk about current events with people who don’t look like me. I know that the world I’m going into isn’t just people like me, anymore.”
The speaker, a non-journalism major, is a white New Jerseyan and one of up to three white students in my class every semester. Residential segregation remains high in the state. This was an office-hour conversation.
For context, the RU-N student population is about 70-80% non-white. The orienting framework for sense-making isn’t the historic white::non-white dynamic as it is in mainstream news; it’s the extraordinary diversity within that 70-80%. Like so-called majority-minority states, cities and districts across the U.S., the diversity within is the canvas. It’s the backdrop influencing all possible stories and conversations. It’s more illuminating to know that orienting framework and then, re-read my students’ comments. They hit different when the diversity within—not a majority white audience, as mainstream news disciplines us—is understood to be the dominant relational context.
I share these particular comments because they gesture at entire worlds or mainstreams with their own frames, norms and inter-cultural negotiations that—along with white::non-white negotiations2—are the dominant feature of U.S. life. They gesture at worlds that are equally important as those dominating commercial news media and whose sense-making mainstreams aren’t proportionately-funded. Instead these worlds exist to be “represented.” What and why is that?
I aim to make the case that as a load-bearing pillar of democracy, my profession should be looking at methods of doing integration that are neither racial representation nor assimilation. The U.S. is not a white democracy; that’s a contradiction in terms. It is fighting desperately, as indicated by Trump’s second rise to power, to remain a white-dominant one.
So it’s productive to ask of our news media system, to whom are you representing non-white groups? Into what are you assimilating them? Let’s get clear. If not a white audience, nor a white democracy or a white-dominant one, then, what?
Regarding the “what,” last thing I’ll say before closing with a Scot Nakagawa quote: it seems to me (and I want to be proven wrong) that our media system’s Fix-Its—the various professionals working to keep journalism/quality, verified information going, myself included—headline everything except race, culture and place. We gather in private or professional spaces around: product; metrics; engagement; audience; impact tracking; sustainability; donor relations; revenue; operations; civics; participation; etc. But the chaotic narrative layers that race, culture and place3 combine to manifest are unmentioned as legitimate organizing frameworks or they’re camouflaged.
Thing is, if the “what” is a pluralist multi-racial nation, the only route for journalism and information architects runs through race, culture and place, i.e. what’s relevant to our big beautiful publics.
We need to identify bridge-builders not racial reps. Those aren’t the same thing.
“Race is not a distraction from democracy. Race is the mechanism.” — Scot Nakagawa in The Breakthrough Trap, The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook.
-end-
No single quote could possibly capture the wide-ranging discussions nor perspectives of my students. I use these quotes only to advance my point.
Institutionalized white minority rule (i.e., U.S. Senate) exists because the threat of white mob rule precedes it (the Second Amendment is a failsafe); it isn’t a negotiation. I use the word only to compare an idea not describe the actuality.
For a useful demo of how to incorporate ‘place’ and ‘culture’ as an analytical framework, see Realities 1-3 in the recent Merrill College report about Marylanders, The News People Need: A Local News Network Study. (June 2026)