***Reporting on Race and Class:***
The Art of Storytelling

By Sarah Lolley

How, in a world so segregated by thought, can journalists weave race and class into a public conversation.

A panel of six authors gathered at New York University March 30 to discuss their own coverage of race and class. The authors, Alex Kotlowitz, Isabel Wilkerson, Tamar Jacoby, Les Payne, Nicholas Lemann, and William Finnegan spoke of past work and new projects in a panel moderated by Susie Linfield, a professor in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at the university.

Though there was plenty of disagreement, all concurred that narrative was the most potent device in addressing issues of race and class and all have used narrative to great advantage in their work. Concentrating on people's lives and allowing the reader to step back from the written work with a different perspective can serve to refresh an otherwise tired subject.

Of race and class, Kotlowitz said, "There are no two subjects harder to engage readers... There is a sense in this country that class doesn’t necessarily exist." In the reporting for his best-selling work There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in America, Kotlowitz said he never brought the subject of race up with the two main subjects of his work. The reader, however, through the lives of the boys, was given the opportunity to observe the world from their perspective.

The message of each of the panelists to young writers was to keep focus, let the material speak for itself, and identify those aspects of the narrative with which readers will most readily identify.

For Kotlowitz, the most predictable way to open his book would have been for one of the kids living in the Chicago projects to be caught in gang fire. Instead, he follows the boys as they hunt for garter snakes on the railroad tracks. "Our challenge for our readers is not to have our readers feel sympathetic for our characters, but empathetic," said Kotlowitz. "The scene was really so compelling to me because it was really about this common ground we have."

Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times story about a 10-year-old boy growing up on Chicago's South Side. She said she prefers not to mention race directly in her work but concentrates instead on story-telling and strong development of characters, allowing the lives of people she reports on to emphasize a point. "I personally don't like to focus on writing about race," she said, adding that concentrating on people's differences wasn't particularly instructive.

Payne, the Newsday columnist and assistant managing editor said he believes columnists should take a stance and write frankly about race-related topics rather than skirting them to avoid controversy.

"My view is that the social contract of America is black and white. It is intractable. My position in the column is that White America is in almost total denial about racism, white racism," said Payne, adding that to avoid speaking about race grants innocence to "white America."

Jacoby said the conventional wisdom in America discourages the raising of questions of race and class. The New York Times, for example, came late and without luster to the ethnicity debate over Census 2000 and the controversy over charter schools, she said.

"I grew up in the sixties very attached to this dream that I call integration," said Jacoby. She sees integration as a "larger ideal of creating one community, sharing in a single community where both blacks and whites feel at home and feel they belong." Her own book, Someone Else's House, in part grew out of an incident she had while working at Newsweek. She happened to read the e-mail of a fellow employee, a middle class black woman, and was stunned to learn of the hostility the woman felt from and expressed towards her white colleagues and other staff members.

"This woman along with a lot of other blacks and whites have fallen into a cynical self-fulfilling prophecy about race," Jacoby said. That prophesy, she said, is that blacks and whites can never really get along and that they are fundamentally different. The result is a separate and superficially peaceful coexistence.

Arriving late to the event, writer Stanley Crouch, took one look around the room and asked why there were so few African-Americans in the audience. His point was race was not being talked about in a diverse setting with both whites and blacks present.

Finnegan, who has reported on subjects ranging from the war in Mozambique to youth subcultures in the United States, said when a white, college-educated man like himself decides to write about poor black kids, the topic is loaded. "It's infinitely easier to write about race in a foreign context then it is to write about [it] here in this country," said Finnegan.

"In general, writing about international topics for American readers you have latitude, you can make all sorts of flamboyant generalizations that your readers don’t know enough to contradict," said Finnegan.

Kotlowitz added, "So much about the story of race today is a story about absence." He said he had a more difficult time discussing race in white communities, where the subject is considered "negative," than he did speaking about race in black communities.

A questioner in the audience asked if is it harder to sell such unpopular topics in the current economic prosperity.

Lemann replied, "I have this rule I call the 99-1 rule. And that is, 99 percent of the journalists are always writing about 1 percent of what’s going on. If you are one of the 1 percent then you have 99 percent of the world to yourself."

No matter the topic, it is a struggle to attract readership, Lemann said. He compared his work and that of his fellow panelists to the work to "indie" filmmakers as opposed to big budget movie-makers.

"To me what always saves us is the story," Wilkerson reiterated. "People will never get tired of a topic as long as there is a good story behind it."

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