Gawker's Special Correspondent for Brown-People Issues: 'NYO' on Lily-White Magland
The Observer's lead media story this morning was Lizzy Ratner's shocking — shocking! — expose on the near-uniform lily-white-ness of the magazine business. Confronted with such an important topic — race, America's original sin — and with such a lengthy look at it — 2,500 words — we knew this was an article we must address. But, still getting our minds around the simple idea of gentiles in publishing (a shonda!), we also knew that we're not at all the right people to address it.
And so we called in Gawker's newly deputized Special Correspondent for Brown-People Issues, The Assimilated Negro. TAN, as we guilty white liberals prefer to call him, spent his afternoon reading and analyzing Ratner's piece, and everything he learned — the stats, the defenses, the depressing takeaway — awaits after the jump.
TAN writes:
Waddup up to all the homeys and beeotches out there. Are any of y'all trying to lose some weight up in this motherfucker? You big poppas seeing the effects of drinking too much Steel Reserve? You mamis worried your trunk's getting a little too junky? Cause if so, then we have the bomb-ass diet & workout plan for you....
Editors at New York's glossy mags are convinced that's the copy they'll receive if they were ever to assign a standard service piece to a minority writer. How else can you explain the apparent anti-affirmative action (negative action?) documented in Lizzy Ratner's expose on the lack of diversity in the magazine industry?
Want to provoke a Million Minority March? Take a look at the statistical breakdowns Ratner provides. I'll use the term "POC" to stand for persons of oolor, and then, to get yourself in the right frame of mind to think like a mag exec, it may be helpful to imagine a little thumbnail of Tupac as graphical representation for each POC on staff:
Conde Nast: 29 top editors, 1 POC
The New York Observer: 40 editors, 2 POC
Vanity Fair: 203 staffers, 6 POC
Conde Nast Traveler: 85, 11 POC (Double digits, holla!!)
The New Yorker: 130, 11 POC (It appears one more than ten is the cutoff)
Rolling Stone: 73, 4 POC
New York: 90 staff, 6 POC
Forbes: 116 staff, 7 POC
The Nation: 99 staff, 8 POC
[We'll even add: Gawker Media: 25 staff, 1 POC (who's unpaid)]
In total these magazines are listing 836 total staff, with 55 POC, for a robust 6.5 percent POC rate. And once you see that percentage is when it all makes sense.
See, the demographic breakdown for the population of New York as a whole is 65 percent non-white. So obviously these New York-based magazines figure they can move the decimal over and have what the marketing heads like to call "synergy," and what normal people might call "bullshit."
Or we can consider editors' and executives' stated explanations. Upon cross-examination by Ratner, they make some interesting defenses. Here are my favorites:
"Several industry professionals traced this silence to the fact that magazines are, in the end, just magazines: waxy-paged collections of ads and articles that may provide everything from political analysis to eyebrow-waxing advice, but are hardly essential guardians of the public interest," Ratner writes. This, then, is the We Also Promote Eating Disorders And A Low Self-Esteem So Why Get Huffy Over Racial Discrimination defense.
"But, on the other hand, there is a diversity of magazines," Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker tells Ratner. "So it's just a different kind of diversity exists already." This one is the Y'all Motherfuckers Got Vibe and Essence So Shut The Hell Up defense.
"There is definitely no sense of shame about not having a diverse staff the way there was 10 years ago," an anonymous Asian-American glossy-mag editor said. Now we're seeing the Y'all Not Wearing Chains No More, So We're Not Going to Feel Shame No More defense.
And finally, "I think, in people's minds, it's not like, 'Let's not hire any black people,'" said Hung author Scott Poulson-Bryant, a founding editor of Vibe. "It's just like, 'I don't really know any black people to hire, and I don't really want to do the work to find out who they are.'" Which is the beloved Where the Hell Are All the Black People When You Need One? defense.
So with these four defense stacked up together, what's left for a young, aspiring minority writer to do? It seems clear now there's only one option: Go scale the walls of the Conde Nast building, naked, with a piece on "How Mothers Can Lose Those Pregnancy Pounds" taped to your ass. Then jump.
You may lose your life, but quite possibly you'll gain a byline in the process.
