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Chronology | Reflection | StudyPERSONAL REFLECTION
I've worked in Student Media for quite a few years, and it never ceases to amaze me how quickly knowledge and lessons are forgotten. They are things of the past; they are nothing to those who replace the editors and manager of Oregon State University's Department of Student Media. I've seen seasons change. I've covered the good times and the bad. It was when the media spotlight was turned toward me that I became a little shell-shocked. Planes can crash into houses, beloved students can be killed in tragic car accidents and still I am able to continue working. It was when I made the mistake and became the subject of media attention that I started to falter.
We are all human. But, in our history, we don't treat all humans equally. Blackface was a term that I was not familiar with. I had seen the images of Al Jolson and other minstrel-era performers. They were coating themselves in black paint, leaving grotesque features and playing on very negative stereotypes to get a laugh and a buck. In an attempt to create a photo illustration for an event happening on campus, I asked my photo editor to dress a student up in black clothing and put black face paint on his face and hands. We dressed this kid up, took a picture and put that picture on the front page of The Daily Barometer. I included a caption that said "Paint your face black, it scares the Wildcats." Sports writer Casey Grogan created this event on www.facebook.com called "Blackout Reser." Our names will be forever tied to blackface and the racial insensitivity of the university.
I've been asked, in the barrage of media attention that followed publication of that issue of the newspaper, what I was thinking. I wasn't thinking. Seven other editors and I weren't thinking of blackface. I had suggested that maybe we were passed thinking of blackface when we saw black face paint. No one believed me. It has been just over a year since that paper printed and the image is still burned into my mind.
On Oct. 5, 2007, a man named Wolofbamanaigbo Ovimbundumakua called the newsroom, according to Barometer columnist Renee Roman Nose. Ovimbundumakua said that someone answered, but didn't believe what he was saying. They hung up on him. Reports of that phone call didn't reach me, the editor, until much later in the game. Two weeks later, Roman Nose - a leader for the voice of Native students on campus and frequently the voice of reason when it comes to racial diversity - submitted a column that did a number of things: First, it said that the Barometer had offended students with its recreation of the blackface image; second, it apologized on behalf of the staff of the Barometer for our insensitive behavior. I was not willing to allow publication of this column until I was able to verify the claims that it was making. I was also unwilling to allow Roman Nose to apologize on behalf of the staff. I believed that particular responsibility fell to me as the editor.
That week, I accompanied my mom and grandmother on trip to San Francisco (my mom had raised money for the Leukemia/Lymphoma Society to compete in the Nike Women's Marathon). Because I was away, printing Roman Nose's article was delayed. Even though this was explained to Roman Nose, a number of OSU community members believed it was because we were unwilling to hear their voice. Roman Nose's column was circulated via OSU listservs and was widely distributed over the Internet. Letters to the editor poured in and media entities began calling. At a football game, members of the OSU community protested the Barometer, calling us racist. I was contacted by KVAL-13 TV station, based in Eugene, The Oregonian and The Chronicle of Higher Education for stories. The offended members of the OSU community had contacted media sources to expose the situation.
It hurt. It hurt that instead of knocking on my office door and talking to me one-on-one, these people contacted media outlets to do that for them. I spent more time in interviews with media than I did responding to letters to the editor or running the newspaper. I felt alienated from the OSU community, and there were times when I feared for my life (however irrational that may have been).
The university - specifically the Office of Community and Diversity - held meetings where students would be able to talk to each other in a group setting and air out some of their concerns. However, in this case, the Barometer staff members weren't equals. We were simply wrong and we were treated as useless and uncomprehending human beings. The group meetings, open to the entire university, turned into forums for students to abrasively humiliate myself and members of my staff. At that point, I was unwilling to allow my staff to participate in such meetings. We conducted internal training to discuss what had transpired. I met continuously with the director of Student Media to discuss my options for continuing. Though no one ever filed a formal complaint with the University Student Media Committee, there was talk of removing me from my position as editor. Most of the talk, however, originated from me. I wasn't so sure that I was still qualified to be editor of the publication. Later during the week of Oct. 5, a noose was found hanging from a tree at a fraternity. It was a leftover Halloween decoration. The witch that had been hanging from the tree was removed, but the noose remained. Just a few months before, six individuals were charged with beating Jena High School student Justin Barker. The Black teenagers who beat Barker were allegedly responding to escalating racial tension after nooses were found hanging from a tree at the school, as well as other incidents. The noose, which originally held a witch, also offended members of the OSU community who were pagan.
The noose, while being a symbol of American Revolution-based lynching, was not a welcome sight during those weeks. Racial tension on campus grew. The meetings my staff and I attended were hot with anger, and there was no way that I could try to defend myself or my staff. In smaller meetings, held again by the Office of Community and Diversity, I explored my own feelings of guilt and tried to push my level of understanding. I honestly didn't get it, and it took a few minutes for me to really understand the feelings that our depiction had stirred. One of the issues we had to tackle while meeting in small groups was grasping the particulars of this specific event. Some of those who met with me were bringing feelings of years and years of oppression as well as years and years of mistakes from Student Media. At one point, someone commented, "We expect this in spring. We expect this from a new editor." OSU community members expect the worst from the new. Those who have been around a while expect someone to screw up at some point; they expect lacking judgment and troubled discretion. This is not acceptable.
Director of the Office of Community and Diversity Terryl Ross worked with the small groups to identify the specifics. He questioned each one of us, probing us for direct answers and rational descriptions. While I was searching for a way to explain my situation and grappling with my emotions, I was unable to continue. I broke down, apologizing for my actions. It seemed, to me, that most of the problems that had been created were a result of slow response on behalf of the Barometer staff. The problems were a result of my slow response. Arguably, however, we created a horrific recreation of blackface embodied in OSU school spirit.
I was broken. I was living in fear, losing sleep, eating little and spending countless hours preparing for and completing interviews with media outlets. Concurrently, I was handling a 12-credit course load and the daily production of the Barometer. I had reached my breaking point. I was not functional for the rest of that meeting and many of the discussions that followed. One of the meeting's attendees told me that my apology was the only thing she had wished to hear. She wanted to know that someone was really sorry.
Through training with my staff, a few eyes were opened. Jeff Wick, my photo editor, had a light-bulb moment with former reporter for The Oregonian David Austin who was discussing "Blackout Reser" with us. Austin started to describe something like the classic "birdcage" theory to us. Feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye explains in her "Oppression" that oppression is like a birdcage. If you look at one individual strand of wire that makes up a birdcage, you cannot see the others strands or the birdcage as a whole. You don't understand why a bird can't fly around that strand. When there are hundreds, if not thousands, of strands of oppression, all of the strands work together to hold us captive. She says, "It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon."
Wick, in our meeting, asked why blackface was offensive. Wick was struggling to understand why our photo illustration was infuriating to some. Austin said the oppression that black men and women face in our society. Austin explained that white skin - and the perspective of white men - is the default in our experience. Wick asked why that was a bad thing. Austin made it clear that when we always approach situations or problems from the same perspective, we don't always find the best answers. It's not fair to always tell the story from the perspective of the privileged white male (see: Peggy McIntosh's "Invisible Knapsack"). He said that the white male viewpoint is universal in this country. It is continually influencing every media outlet, every TV show and every conversation. Austin said he has to act like a white man to get ahead.
Wick was able to understand what Austin was saying. I think that it helped that Wick and the rest of my staff were hearing this from an African-American reporter. Austin asked us the tough questions; he encouraged us to create a more diverse newsroom. If we weren't able to do it in numbers, he challenged us to at least think like people of other cultures and skin colors. He encouraged us to push that sometimes-frightening envelope and ask the tough questions for the underrepresented members of our community. He told us that it's okay to ask questions like "how does this affect Mexicans at OSU?"
Not long after the Austin meeting, OSU Professor of New Media Communications Pam Cytrynbaum asked to meet with the same group of editors. We discovered that this group of editors continues to be horribly sheltered from those of other cultures, skin colors, financial situations and religions. While we boasted one Jewish Ukrainian, she was only one person. However, the rest of the staff was from the state of Oregon - a.k.a. mostly white - and we boasted very little racial diversity. I heard OSU President Ed Ray say in a State of the University address that one of the missions of the university is to expose students from small-town Ontario, Oregon to international students and students from other backgrounds. As the university started to explore this topic, working to create a living document (the "Diversity Plan," if you will), officials started to realize that the students of OSU hadn't been socialized to understand these topics.
Why didn't seven editors see blackface when they saw an image of a student wearing black face paint? There are a number of reasons, but the first that comes to mind is that I don't look at images looking for the offense they can potentially create. This image, to me, was a picture of a student in black face paint. I hadn't spent enough time around black students to understand what kinds of things are offensive. I understand that using the word "chink" is derogatory, but only because I've been around Asian people who told me that it offended them. Perhaps those from the West Coast have perspectives that those from the East Coast do not. Perhaps we understand more about Asian, Native, Pacific Islander and Russian Orthodox cultures than someone from the South would. I can only speculate the differences. While Oregon has a very small population of African-Americans, we do have growing and significant populations of Asian, Russian and Mexican people.
Whether it is a lack of sensitivity or a lack of experience with diverse cultures and conditions, there is a problem that continues to plague The Daily Barometer. No matter what we learn over the course of our individual reigns as editors, we lose that knowledge. There is no institutional memory for that kind of thing. That is why I sit and write today. This cannot be explained more easily than by walking through the steps, thoughts and reactions of those involved.
It was largely accepted that the Barometer staff did not intend to offend members of the OSU community and that is what made this situation even more difficult. When an action is taken with intent, the response of the community is generally easy to understand. However, when an action is unintentional, ensuring its never reoccurring is impossible. I live with this fear. What if I were to create another image of something so horribly offensive that I can never work in my field again? This would be because I didn't know enough to know what is offensive. I can't know what I don't know, otherwise I'd know it. I'm afraid of missing a piece.
Some in the OSU community believed that the Barometer printed the blackface image intentionally. That it was unintentional, however, was well-accepted. But, we didn't know. We hadn't learned before that day. How do we make sure that we learn after? We talked, we discussed and we worked toward understanding what had happened. Protesters at the Washington State University football game held signs that read "The Barometer hates black people," and "We deserve a voice at Oregon State." Another protester held a sign that read, "OSU 4 ignorance not diverse people." Intent is important. Intent is one of those factors that a court, or perhaps the University Student Media Committee, will look at. In this case, the intent would have been a factor in our favor, but instead, it was a factor that ruled us ignorant and plain-old stupid.
THE PROTEST
I brought my dad to the Dad's Weekend, football game vs. the University of Arizona at Reser Stadium. Before we left for the game, I explained the situation with which I had been faced. I showed my dad the newspaper and told him the general circumstances of the fallout. I explained the situation because I knew that Dad and I would encounter this protest when we made the walk from our dinner with University President Edward Ray to the President's box. I was considered a student leader, therefore I was invited to participate in this event with other student leaders, including the student body president. My father and I left the dinner and walked over to the stadium and I stopped to catch my reporter and photographer covering the protest.
I watched for a few minutes, walking close to the protest. TV cameras lined against the pushing crowd and protest. Police officers stood ready to break up fights between the silent protest and the crowd. People yelled inappropriate things like "Go racism." James, a student who was quoted in the Barometer on the Monday after the protest, said, "That's stupid they're upset about the blackface. The fact is we were just trying to get some team spirit up. It was not racist. We needed a win."
My heart dropped a bit that my dad was there to see my mistake being protested at a major university. However, more than anything, I think he was impressed by the turnout. I think he was impressed that I had the (for lack of a better word) power to stir that many people to action. I know that he had taken what I said about the protest to heart, but I am not sure how well he understood its implications. I wonder if an older generation would understand an image of blackface differently than my generation. Did Dad understand it immediately? Or was he left wondering exactly what the big deal is?
There were a couple of circumstances under which it was important for the Barometer staff to respond to the OSU community and to those people who had contacted us. In the spirit of good business, it is important to answer the phone, respond to voicemails and e-mails and generally just be available for people who need to talk or complain. The Barometer staff should have done a better job of listening to those who called or tried to contact us in the early days of the "Blackout Reser" coverage. When Renee Roman Nose submitted her column, I let my reservations about a few editorial things hold me back. I didn't want Roman Nose apologizing on behalf of the staff and I didn't really believe that this had happened, since her column was submitted more than a week after the initial incident. Her column should have gone in the paper the very next day; many problems would have been solved.
We ran an apology side-by-side with Roman Nose's column. One line, though, put another thorn in the side of OSU community members: "To this we ask, couldn't that be a good thing that the era of offensive mockery is now far enough behind us that it was not present in our active memory?" This statement was unbelievable and unacceptable to many who read it. While I still believe this statement, it continues to show my ignorance. I realize now that it doesn't matter what is in my active memory, but what is in the active memory of my readers. While I may be a little too young to understand what blackface looked like, that doesn't mean my readers are. Age and ignorance are not excuses.
The Daily Barometer continued to run letters to the editor in the print pages of the Barometer. Many letters were excluded on the basis of length. I also fault my forum editors for not keeping very good track of what letters were being printed and which ones weren't, as those who were submitting letters believed we were actively censoring them. To remedy part of this belief, I posted long letters online. However, I still believe that many of our letters to the editor were lost in the bureaucracy of our system. For this, I'm not sure how to create a remedy. We simply weren't staffed to handle the number of letters we received.
In the meetings we attended, I recommended that members of my staff let me speak for them unless they wanted to speak. I suggested that we keep quiet and mostly listen, allowing others to vent their frustrations. This didn't work. This was a mistake on my part. When my staff was actively participating in the conversation freely, they were able to learn for themselves via interaction. While I still believe it was best to simply listen at the group meetings that were held originally, it worked very well, for example, when my staff started talking at the Dave Austin training session. I was trying to keep my staff from suffering the same emotional strain that I was. I didn't want their spirits to be massacred by those who were killing mine. However, when they started talking, I wasn't as responsible for filling the silence. The responsibility for our actions was pulled away from me, though I will take responsibility for this story for the rest of my life.
I've noticed that even though I continue to work for the Barometer, the people who were involved in the conversations following "Blackout Reser" were never actually concerned with me as a human being. They were concerned with the Barometer as an institution. There were those who called for greater regulation of the Barometer on the part of the university. Letters were sent to OSU President Ed Ray; however, because the Barometer is not directly student-fee funded, the president of the university has little say in what we do. Ray has chosen not to exercise jurisdiction over the Barometer. He defaults to the institutional structure, which includes the University Student Media Committee. To this day, I continue to recognize readers who were involved in our discussions, but it seems that none of them remember me. Some will even enter the newsroom and interact with me directly, but there will be nothing but professional courtesy. It seems that I was but another white face in the history of racism in this country. This means that my learning experience was necessarily valuable in the eyes of some involved.
CAMPUS CULTURE
We faced one problem in particular while trying to react appropriately to those who were affected by our coverage. Students - generally white students - believed that we had done nothing wrong. While defending the actions of those who attended the game in black clothing, face paint and Afro wigs, the white students also defended the photo illustration of the Barometer.
Part of me wanted to jump ship and go find friends who believed that because of the intent of the event and the illustration, nothing was done that should have been offensive. However, logic dictated the correct course of action, which was to diffuse the tension in the best way we knew how. While playing to the offended masses (apologizing and giving due consideration to each respondent) we also needed to work to help others understand why this was a very bad, very offensive and unintentionally racist thing Remembering what Ray said in his State of the University address, it is important to introduce that student from Ontario, Oregon to a few international students.
When I was a freshman at Oregon State University, there were individuals in my dorm area who would say offensively racist things. These individuals were outwardly racist, made derogatory comments about African-Americans and Mexicans and used offensive slang. This seems to be the general attitude of many at Oregon State University. Many of us are from middle-income families, and another subset of us is from small towns and may be first-generation college students. Some of those characteristics tend to also equate with breeding grounds for racism and classism. This is a university-wide problem. This is why students are required to take one "Difference, Power and Discrimination" course in their stay at OSU. But is it enough? When students are writing in to tell us that Black people are just trying to get attention, we have a problem. I don't think that the Barometer will ever be able to do enough to break that type of racial tension. The best solution is to not give white students a reason to write in and complain about minority students. However, avoiding reporting that is aware of the situations of all types of students is not the solution for that. Perhaps we can create awareness of minority students by asking questions and looking at situations from the perspective of those who are not so white-male.
THE QUESTION
Were we wrong to print a photo illustration of a student in black clothes and face paint? I don't think we were. But we touched on an issue that hadn't been institutionally-recognized until we printed the image. There have always been students wearing black face paint and Afro wigs at football games, but we weren't aware as a university that there were students who were scared or bothered by that.
What did we do? We created university-wide awareness of this problem. There were really three issues going on. The first issue was that students at the university were willing to create an event like this. The second was that the Barometer chose to cover this event (and add the not-requisite black face paint). The third issue was that some students realize their behavior offends people, but they continue to do it anyway.
These three issues created an exemplar for the Marilyn Frye "Oppression" birdcage theory. Our university has an issue of perspective. We are the epitome of the white male. How to do we apply this situation to the future? We can use this event as an example of how to try and understand. There will always be things that we don't understand and images whose meanings we don't always know all of the possible meanings to. The first step is to report, rather than create. Instead of photo illustrations and creating images, it's important to capture images with as many accurate facets as possible. Photo illustrations are sometimes necessary, but avoiding stereotyping is key. Black face paint, nooses, red paint, swastikas, stereotyped Asian hats and similar symbols are important to notice.
Filling newsrooms with those who have a different perspective is also important. Personally, I can give you the perspective of a white female. I can tell you when something is offensive to me as a female. But I can't necessarily tell you when something is offensive to a Native person or an African-American person. But an African-American reporter may have an edge on breaking those boundaries. If a newsroom just doesn't represent the population in coverage area, it is important to think like a minority. Think in terms of religion, financial situation, education level and race or heritage. It's important to ask the questions that underrepresented groups need the answers to.