It is one of the more unlikely places – a rural community struggling to move on from its “sundown town” reputation – that a small, curious audience gathered recently at the Anna Arts Center to listen to Harry Dougherty’s freedom story. 

It was told by local historian and educator, Darrel Dexter, who first learned of the African-American’s emancipation story 30 years ago while snooping in the Old Union County Courthouse archives. 

“Harry Doughtery’s story is unique because we know it. I can tell you the story of Harry Doughtery,” Dexter told the all-white audience. “Thousands of Africans and African-Americans were enslaved in Illinois. At least as early as 1720 and through 1865. For most of them, we don’t know their story. We don’t even know their name.” 

Dexter’s research explained that despite the common belief that Illinois was a free state, it truly operated as a slave state, even in northern Illinois. Doughtery’s story demonstrates how white settlers used legal loopholes to bound kidnapped African-Americans, like himself, into servitude. Dexter’s presentation was a portion of Union County’s Civil War Weekend celebration. 

Residents annually commemorate local Civil War history with presentations, re-enactments, and historical exhibits. Usually, the focus is on President Abraham Lincoln and the war battles – rarely ever slavery. 

Though, this year was different. 

After concluding Doughtery’s story, Dexter introduced the “I Was Here” project. An effort to reframe the national conversation around racism and slavery. 

The project synthesizes history, poetry, collage, a soundscape and augmented reality. It began as a set of archetypal Ancestor Spirit Portraits created by photographing contemporary African Americans to embody the human family. The photoshoot developed into a set of 21 “Ancestor Spirit Portraits” which mark significant locations across the country creating a visual for an invisible history. The project aims to provoke an inquiry into how we see each other, who we are as a nation, and how we can heal the spiritual, economic, educational, and political chasm that enslavement created. 

“I see these images being symbolic of the humanity of the world. And hopefully, they’ll shift the perspective in the long term, but I know it won’t happen in my lifetime,” said “I Was Here” Photographer Patrick Mitchell. 

One of the underlying goals of “I Was Here” is to establish a connection between citizens, the past, and the present through the physical remains of a very uncomfortable part of American history, said the Community Liaison and model for “I Was Here”, Marshall Fields. 

This connection is established by using art to trigger an experience that is social, political, spiritual, and historical all at once. 

The project’s approach allows slavery, a historical subject typically known through academics, to be recognized as a lived experience, he said. If it’s taken as something that was and continues to be real, people might stop avoiding certain conversations about race, or even acknowledge that racism is a problem.

Bringing forgotten history back into view to confront a never-ending problem

Avoiding conversations about race and unequal citizenship is standard in southern Illinois. 

The subject of racism is rarely touched on by local newspapers and TV stations. Exceptions are regulated to certain events. Annual coverage includes Martin Luther King Jr. Day and anti-racism marches in the college town of Carbondale. It’s only when racist incidents are impossible to ignore, like when white supremacist groups in the region put racist propoganda on cars in community college parking lots, a mixed-raced Murphysboro man is threatened by his neighbor, or when a local high school group is caught with naming their Facebook group chat a racist name, does discrimination in the area make a public appearance. 

Information on Anna’s Civil War Weekend was only mentioned by WSIL TV and Cape Girardeau, Missouri’s newspaper the Southeast Missourian. WSIL provided preview coverage of the Civil War Weekend, briefly mentioning slavery while discussing quilts that were used as maps for the Underground Railroad. The Southeast Missourian re-published a user-generated press release. 

As the discussion of race gains more momentum nationally because of hate crimes and the anti-racist response, public pressure to bring local racism to the front of the public conversation trickles into the region. 

Less than two years ago, ProPublica Engagement Reporter Logan Jaffe brought the story of sundown towns and Anna’s notorious anagram into national view with her article  “The Legend of A-N-N-A: Revisiting an American Town Where Black People Weren’t Welcome After Dark,” co-published with The Atlantic. 

Through her reporting, Jaffee examined this question: Is Anna a racist town? 

The answer is impossible to answer succinctly because it is contradictory. 

To say Anna has acknowledged and moved on from its past as being a racist community does not consider the subtle sympathy still shared among some residents for the Confederacy – an attitude that dates back to the civil war. 

But to claim Anna is forever bound to being racist overlooks Dexter’s work and the Black Lives Matter Protest that took place in the town over the summer. 

“Darrel is a testament to the fact that there are truth-tellers and truth-seekers in communities that might not prioritize the most truthful version of their history,” Jaffe said in an interview with the GJR. “He’s read every obituary. The entire newspaper, from the beginning. He transcribes things and he gives people like me and you, and the public, access to information that he takes it upon himself to do. And I think that is radical.”

Anna and the neighboring towns of Jonesboro and Cobden are interesting because, despite the low population, there are plentiful resources and spaces for rich storytelling, Jaffe said.

“The more attention you can pay to diversify the narratives that exist within a community, it changes the way a town tells the story about itself over time,” Jaffe said. 

Continuing to tell the story of the Civil War as battles with heroes and losers avoids dissecting the reason why the war happened in the first place, she said. 

Reframing the discussion on the wound of the Mid-Atlantic Slave Trade 

That reason – the mid-Atlantic slave trade and the trauma it sowed into the nation’s foundation is the focus of “I Was Here”. 

“If you were to cast a shadow within the U.S. and America on every place that was impacted by slavery or all of the subsequent unequal citizenships that happened, it would be a very dark continent,” Fields said. 

America’s inability to atone for the trauma of slavery is due to avoiding the discussion of the uncomfortable subject, Fields said. “I Was Here” is very susceptible to be misunderstood as “another project about slavery.”

As Community Liaison for the project, Fields’ task is to ensure “I Was Here” is perceived for what it is – a project intent on reshaping the essence of the nation. 

“It has to do with shifting the spirit of the nation by talking about a lived history and the things that stem from that.” Fields said.

This place-based approach to interacting with history through our environment earned “I Was Here” several honors including an award of excellence from the American Association for State and Local History, a 2020 CODAawards in the Public Space Budget Category, and a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts. Installations are planned for the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum in Inwood New York, at the Octagon Museum in Washington DC, and a template for Illinois high school history students is being created.

Through the support of the local Market Manager, Region, and Diverse Clients Segments Team, Syndy Deese of Wells Fargo was able to work with the Wells Fargo Foundation to provide a grant to kick off the project in 2018. Deese volunteers her considerable administrative skills as a volunteer for the project.

Originally, the project was intended for Lexington, Kentucky, home of Cheapside – the largest auction site for the enslaved west of the Alleghenies. 

Cheapside Park is now called the Henry A. Tandy Centennial Park after it was renamed in August of 2020. Henry A. Tandy was a successful Black entrepreneur in Lexington during the Reconstruction Era, said Mary Quinn Ramer, CEO of VisitLex, Lexington’s tourism organization. Tandy’s stonemasonry business helped build the Old Fayette County Courthouse that sits next to Henry Tandy Centennial Park. 

Marjorie Guyon is the collage artist who spearheaded the “I Was Here” project in 2016. Quickly, she realized the project’s central focus, to heal the wound that enslavement created, was national. 

“You know, that’s just how these spirits work. They move people together,” said Jim Embry, historian for “I Was Here” referencing the Ancestor Spirit Portraits symbolic meaning. “First of all, that’s how we use the word ‘ancestral spirit’. That’s what ancestors do. They help guide and help mentor us. They help point the way.”

Once the project is requested for a historic site, an installation of Ancestor Spirit Portraits is carefully planned, Fields said. 

A central element to “I Was Here” is its focus on the dignity of the enslaved and the wound that enslavement created in the American subconscious. 

The subconscious is often said to be a source of implicit bias, a term used to explain how people can act with prejudice unintentionally. Biases are programmed through the culture people are raised in and consume and the beliefs they hold dear. 

“Can you badger people into thinking differently? Probably not. Can you shame people into thinking differently? It probably won’t work, but can you spirit shift them? This is the question,” Guyon said. 

Racism is a way of thinking that can be internalized by people and perpetuated, explicitly and subtly, by institutions and cultures. It affects everyone but in very different ways. 

By default many people harbor racism simply because they were raised in a racist society and not taught how to not be racist, Fields said. To be able to free oneself from a racist default mode of navigating the world is to shift the subconscious. 

“I Was Here” Installation writer Barry Burton told GJR in an interview that he hopes “I Was Here” can be a platform that will improve Americans of all races and their interactions with each other. 

“We have to fix it. Or, if America doesn’t fix it in the end, we all lose. It’s just that simple,” he said. 

Although the project has received awards and a warm reception by many, racism that kept Africans and African-Americans in bondage for centuries still remains, Burton said. 

“I realized America is still not ready to change. It still will not let loose of its hold on Back people,” he said. “It puzzles me. What it is that America refuses to relinquish because I don’t know what type of power they’re after or what they’re afraid of?” 

Why a subconscious shift is necessary to heal slavery’s wound and affect change

For as long as the country has existed racist beliefs initially established by slavery have been reiterated for generations in more pervasive and elusive ways to maintain America’s stratified society, Fields said.

“When laws change, people don’t necessarily change,” Fields said. 

If individuals who make up society are not persuaded to support a law, they’ll simply find loopholes around it. Harry Dougherty’s life story proves this to be true. What allowed Dougherty’s original white owner, Owen Evans, to continue enslaving him was a law created in 1805 that circumvented the Northwest Ordinance of 1787’s ban on slavery and involuntary servitude, keeping Dougherty in enslavement for 31 years of his life. 

For there to be a cultural change, there must be a massive shift in the collective subconscious that draws in everyone. Education can help start it. But education alone will not sustain the change.

Fordham Law School Professor Tanya Hernádez said education left to its own devices can not dismantle invisible but powerful racist systems and structures.

“People can still choose to not be aware of the knowledge if it is not paired with trying to have concrete reform on the ground,” she said in an interview with GJR. “To make an institutional change, people can be brought on board by seeing the change is actually to their benefit.” 

The fight to abolish legal clauses in several state constitutions that still permit slavery as a punishment for a crime is a current example of how America is still shedding its layers of being one of the biggest actors in the mid-Atlantic slave trade. 

For persuasion, people first need to be engaged, Hernádez said. Art can engage people in a conducive way that creates the space in an individual’s thinking habits for change. 

A possibility of progress 

After Dexter’s presentation at the Anna Arts Center, some of the audience members said they found Dougherty’s story interesting and that they are open to learning more about slavery in the area. Some mentioned openly that their interest in this subject is partially attributed to having direct ancestors who fought to keep slavery.

“I think it’s fascinating to learn about a slave that worked and lived where we do,” Makaya Larson told GJR. “You think Lincoln gave the emancipation proclamation and then slavery was over, but that’s not what happened. There is still so much rebuilding to happen.” 

Larson is from Buncombe, Illinois, a small village very close to where Harry Doughtery lived. She is teaching her kids, who are homeschooled, about the civil war, she said. Larson said teaching local history about the region’s role in slavery and its past with racism in schools and the community is difficult, particularly in southern Illinois.

“There are still a lot of feelings on both sides in this community. I don’t know that they could teach it in an unbiased way,” Larson said. “There are people who have a family legacy connected to this, and that requires them to ask themselves tough questions about it.” 

She said that self-interrogation can start with the powerful visuals presented in “I Was Here”.  

Larson echoes what ProPublica reporter Logan Jaffe believes is holding towns like Anna back. 

“A timeless answer, a fear of change and racism,” she said. 

Dexter, an Anna-Jonesboro life-long resident himself, knows well the tradition of discrimination and disdain for change in the region. 

But, he also knows through his historical research that things can change. The world that Harry Doughtery lived in is no longer today’s. However, Doughtery’s and other kidnapped African-American’s stories are testaments to the long struggle for freedom in the country that was founded in the ideals of liberty and inalienable rights. 

“Harry didn’t let the circumstances that he was born into overcome him. I think that’s something that I and everybody else can learn. That whatever your circumstances at birth were, whatever family you were born into, there’s a lot more you can do with your life,” Dexter said. “You don’t have to be bound by that.”

Dougherty’s story turns towards freedom on Christmas Day in 1835. 

His lawyer, John Dougherty, freed him after Dougherty was under his “ownership” for two years after Dougherty sued for his freedom. In 1837, Dougherty married in Madison County, Illinois, bought 80 acres of land and started a family. Two of his sons fought in the Civil War in the U.S. Colored Troops. Dougherty’s granddaughter Alice Dougherty was one of the founding members of the NAACP in Madison County. She marched in Selma, Alabama, and in Washington D.C. with Dr. Martin Luther King. 

Dexter met Dougherty’s descendants in 2016. Some still own the land originally purchased by their ancestors. 

“This wasn’t just someone I saw in a record, but somebody I can see, touch, and hear and is a direct descendant from that person – flesh and blood,” Dexter said. 
Amelia Blakely was raised in Anna-Jonesboro, Illinois. She reported from Anna and Nashville, Tennessee. She graduated from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is a 2020-2021 Campus Consortium Fellow with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington D.C. You can find her on Twitter @AmeilaBlakely.

In September 2018, racist flyers from a neo-Nazi group were left on cars parked at a community college in Southern Illinois. A few local news outlets reported on the incident and the college’s subsequent denouncement that followed.

But then the story was mostly dropped until the next year when the same flyers from the same group appeared a second time. This time a suspect was found and banned from the campus. He was never named in the media, however, and no additional reporting revealed the extent to which the organization, which is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups, was active in Southern Illinois.

“The incident received only cursory coverage in the local media, and I think a lot of people — perhaps both in the media and the public at large — might have been taken by surprise that such a fringe element would reveal itself so explicitly,” said Geoff Ritter, managing editor of a string a small community papers, including the Carbondale Times, Murphysboro Times and Benton News.

The lack of coverage of a known hate group, which GJR is choosing not to name to avoid giving it more attention, shows the difficulty that many news outlets face in documenting hate and extremism in their communities, especially in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. That failed insurrection, which left five people dead, including a police officer, highlighted how white supremacy and political violence has not only grown in recent years but also has been mainstreamed in many ways. 

Even as it has grown, community papers have struggled to document it because of a lack of resources but also because these stories are just hard to tell, especially as distrust and attacks on the media grew under former President Donald J. Trump. A 2020 Knight/Gallup poll found that while 84% of Americans say the news media is either critical or very important for a functioning democracy, 49% of those surveyed think the media is very biased and roughly three-quarters believe the owners of media companies are influencing coverage.

In October 2020, a man was arrested and charged for allegedly threatening to blow up the Belleville News-Democrat newsroom. In a voicemail left for a reporter, he complained that the newspaper was biased against Trump and had refused to publish his letters to the editor.

Todd Eschman, the News-Democrat’s senior editor, said when he first heard the voicemail message he thought about the 2018 shootings in the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis in which five staff members were killed. How was it, he wondered, “that we have arrived at such a place in our history, both as a nation and as an industry, where journalists at a mid-sized regional outlets..have to be equipped with protective gear and the windows at our buildings have to be reinforced with bullet-resistant film.” Others in the News-Democrat newsroom had the same concern, he added.

Since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, which led to Trump’s second impeachment but not a conviction,  the Department of Justice has pledged to renew its focus on domestic terrorism and domestic violent extremism. More than 300 people have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack in one of the largest law enforcement sweeps in U.S. history.

The story is not one that emerged primarily from small and rural communities or even communities that mostly supported Trump, according to an analysis by the Daily Yonder, a Kentucky-based news outlet.

People arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 invasion are less likely than the overall population to be from rural counties, the analysis found.

About 14% of the U.S. population lives in rural, or nonmetropolitan, counties. Only 10% of the people arrested for the Capitol riot list their homes in one of these rural counties. That means rural people are underrepresented on the list of arrestees versus their share of the population, said Tim Marema, editor of the Daily Yonder, which covers rural communities and rural culture.

“It doesn’t surprise me because it’s proportional to where Americans live,” Marema said. “This is not a geographic program, it’s an American problem, and it shows up where we live.”

Documenting Hate

Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, ProPublica began an ambitious project called “Documenting Hate,” in which it ultimately partnered with more than 180 professional newsrooms, around 20 college papers and many journalism schools. All told, the non-profit news outlet collected more than 6,000 reporting tips and thousands of pages of police records on hate crime. It produced more than 230 stories, including a 2019 piece on the history of racism in Anna, Illinois. 

The Bellingham Herald in Washington state was one of the last news organizations to partner with ProPublica before the project ended after three years. Bellingham, a community of about 200,000 just south of the U.S.-Canada border, is a mostly white community. The marches and rallies for racial justice last summer there were peaceful compared to protests in Seattle to the south.

But the town also has a history of racism in which the newspaper played a role. In 2007, it issued an apology for its role in its coverage of a 1907 riot that resulted in the rounding up of East Indian mill workers. “It’s time to apologize for the venomous racism, for the demeaning talk, for the refusal to defend human beings against a mob because of their skin tone and ethnicity,” the paper notes to its readers “We apologize to the East Indian people in our community today, and to any right-thinking person who is disgusted by the actions this newspaper took in one of the darkest times in our community’s history. We are disgusted too.”

The paper gave readers a way to offer confidential tips of suspected hate crimes, explaining what one was and how to report it. In February of last year, before the summer’s Black Lives Matters protests, it also explained how to fight racism.

Editor Julie Shirley said the paper also has made a commitment to diversifying its sources, making exceptions for people whose voices might not otherwise be in the paper. “During the summer rallies, I allowed reporters to quote people as ‘a speaker’ or just their first name,” she said. “Rallies aren’t organized and there’s no list of speakers. And sometimes it was unclear about who the organizers even were. But we took a leap of faith and allowed for stories we would not have gotten had we required first and last names, city of residence, before we quoted them.”

False equivalency

As news outlets report on hate in their communities, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy has published a list of 10 tips for covering white supremacy and far-right extremism. Among them, author Denise Marie-Ordway cautions news outlets from letting white supremacists use their own terms to describe themselves or even quoting them directly. “That’s because members of these groups often use code words or numbers in their remarks to signal their ideology to other extremists,” she writes. “Reporters who don’t recognize this coded language might unknowingly include it in their coverage.”

She also warns against amplifying the message of the hate groups, something Shirley also wanted to avoid in the Bellingham Herald’s coverage.

“In the past, we would hear anecdotally about hate crimes several times a year,” she told GJR. “But they were rarely reported officially so we found them hard to report on with no official sources. And, we didn’t want to write about incidents that only bring attention to offenders when we knew there would be no consequences. We decided to turn our frustration around, doing stories that explained the law and how readers can be allies.”

Gregory Perreault, an assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Appalachian State University, interviewed 18 journalists in 2019 as part of a research study that sought to understand how journalists conceive of their role in covering white nationalist rallies.

It found that journalists face numerous challenges in terms of not wanting to appear biased in order to gain access to sources but also not wanting to promote false equivalency as Trump did after the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. A few days after the rally, Trump was asked by reporters about the protests, to which he responded that there were “very fine people on both sides.”

“I think one of the important things we know about these groups is that they desperately want the media oxygen to amplify their message,” he told GJR. “Journalists in some ways play right into this in their understandable interest in trying to provide a comprehensive picture of an event. This also explains why white supremacists are so devastatingly effective in their use of social media–leveraging algorithms, memes–to find ways to share their messaging. Their visibility in the last four years is certainly not an accident. They clearly ot only gained a strong sense of how to ‘play’ the social media game, but also felt emboldened by our prior president.”

The trick then is to put white supremacy into context. “A common refrain among journalists was that covering white nationalist rallies was necessary to help people understand an evil side of their community,” according to the research findings. “Moreover, respondents expressed a desire to show members of their communities that white nationalism was more insidiously complex than conventional wisdom would suggest.”

That’s what Ritter, the managing editor of the Carbondale Times, has found.

“I think of the scene in ‘The Blues Brothers’ with the Illinois Nazis,” he said. “We always knew there were hate groups out there, and they were a little easier to identify. Now, at least to me, it seems, the internet has allowed this kind of thinking to proliferate in the obvious ways, but it’s made the hate groups a lot more difficult to identify. That’s part of what was so shocking about Jan. 6; you could see clearly how all of these fringe movements had networked and come together from the grassroots. Some of them might have looked like the ‘Illinois Nazis’ in the movie, but most did not. The profile of the woman who was shot and killed was devastatingly similar to that of a good friend of mine whose mind also seems to have been twisted by these dark corners of the internet, despite her otherwise sound mind and reason.”

He doesn’t have the answer to how local papers like his can better report the story.

“Obviously, more resources would make it easier, but that’s sort of a stock answer to how to fix things in journalism,” he said. “The problem gets even more difficult because the very people pulled into these movements are ones now disinclined toward trusting anything we report, so I don’t know.”

One way journalists could start trying to understand better, he said, is to explore the online reaction to local coverage.

“Some of this ugliness is rearing its head in our own comments sections,” he said. “I see it every day on the local television station’s Facebook page.

Eschman, the senior editor in Belleville, said one of the difficulties is that “it’s not all Klan members or Proud Boys.”

Those organizations “don’t get much ink from us due to the common industry concern that coverage could legitimize their respective messages. But hate isn’t most commonly expressed in cross burnings by people in white sheets. Covering attempts to mainstream it has got to be a concern.”

As an example, he said, Mary Miller, a freshman representative from the 15th Congressional District that represents southeastern Illinois, quoted Adolph Hitler in her first public address in D.C. After the News-Democrat (and others, eventually) reported it, she apologized, saying she regretted the reference but defended the words. Her point, she said, was that movements grow best when the youth are properly engaged. 

“From a reader’s standpoint, isn’t it reasonable to wonder how an elected federal lawmaker, from a sea of similar sentiments expressed by countless others, came by an obscure line from a speech given by Hitler more than 80 years ago?” Eschman said. “Was this an attempt by Miller to mainstream the author of mass genocide? And who, exactly, does she represent besides the people who elected her?”

News coverage can’t ignore those questions, he said, nor can it call comments by an elected lawmaker a “one off.” 

“There is a part of me, however, that has the same worry that covering her legitimizes some potentially rogue ideals to others,” he said.

But it’s also tricky walking the line between true hate and basic fear of the unfamiliar. The News-Democrat’s efforts in that regard have been “more conservative, sensitive and — again, this is strictly my view — useful,” Eschman said.

Kelsey Landis reported on a Black Lives Matter protest in Anna for the News-Democrat last summer. “There were opposing opinions and, of course, some confrontations,” Eschman said. “Kelsey handled the tensions with a lot of care and expressed the varying views fairly and without judgement. It was textbook, street-level journalism that followed the basic rules of style and ethics.”

But there are still barriers.

When the News-Democrat covered another Black Lives Matter demonstration at the public square in Highland, Illinois, in September that drew counter-protestors, the reporter, Megan Vallely tried to talk to both groups. Black Lives Matters demonstrators spoke freely on the record to Vallely, who reports for the News-Democrat through a Report for America grant. “But she was rebuffed by demonstrators on the other side of the police line because they didn’t trust the ‘fake news’” Eschman said. 

Miller, for that matter, also has never returned a call from the News-Democrat.

Jackie Spinner is the editor of Gateway Journalism Review and an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago. This story is on the cover of the spring 2021 issues of the magazine.

Here we are yet again. 

We just can’t seem to get it right when reporting on race.

On March 18, a 21-year-old white man was arrested and charged with murder after allegedly going on a shooting rampage at three Atlanta-area businesss that left eight people dead, six of whom were Asian women.

Although the suspect has not been officially charged with a hate crime, the shootings are part of a rise in attacks on Asians in America.

In writing those last two paragraphs, I followed the guidance of the Asian American Journalists Association. I listed the race of the suspect because I noted the race of the victims. I avoided using the coded term “massage parlor” because of the way Asian women, in particular, have been hypersexualized. I also put the shootings into context of the larger problem that is occurring right now, in many communities. 

Across America, attacks against Asians and Asian Americans are on the rise, according to the national coalition, Stop AAPI Hate. (AAPI stands for Asian American and Pacific Islanders.) Already in 2021, there have been more than 500 reports of hate-motivated attacks. The Pew Research Center found that about three-in-10 Asian adults (31%) say they have been subject to slurs or jokes because of their race or ethnicity since the outbreak began, compared with 21% of Black adults, 15% of Hispanic adults and 8% of white adults. 

When our newsrooms don’t reflect the diversity of the communities we cover, and they don’t, it’s up to us to go out of our way to figure out how to report fairly and inclusively, seeking out diverse sources and looking for guidance from journalism organizations like AAJA or the National Association of Hispanic Journalists or Journalism and Women Symposium.

Much of the reporting from Atlanta, particularly at first, seemed hesitant to make the connection between the victims and their race. Whether these shootings officially end up being a hate crime or not, the fact is that a white man targeted Asian-owned business, and we can report that. We can report that the victims were almost all Asian Americans. We can report that there has been a rise in attacks on Asians and Asian Americans, notably since the pandemic began.

Instead news outlets seemed to give deference to the shooter who allegedly told police that he targeted the businesses because of a “sex addiction.”

News outlets jumped on that narrative because it reinforced their own stereotypes of Asian-owned “massage parlors.” Many did so without even knowing that it was wrong. That’s the problem with not having diversity in our newsrooms. There is no one to point out an alternative narrative to the predominant, privileged one that exists.

Although small community newspapers may not have reported on the breaking news story to the extent that major publications or outlets did, that doesn’t mean they can’t use this moment for reflection about what’s missing from their own coverage. That doesn’t mean we can’t all figure out how to be better.

The first step is to get sourced. Who are the Asian Americans in your community and have they experienced an increase in hate? I’m not talking about running out to get reaction from Asian Americans about the attacks in Atlanta. I’m talking about looking at our communities and thinking about who lives there and what challenges they face before and after the shootings, which could be thousands of miles away.. I’m talking about asking our school boards how they teach about Asian American history. I’m talking about asking our elected officials what they plan to do to address hate crimes in our own communities, whether the hate is directed at Asian Americans or Black residents or Jewish residents. I’m talking about inviting conversations about race and difference and better monitoring our comment sections and social media accounts.

If you are feeling weary about the additional layers required in thinking about how we cover these kinds of stories, imagine the fatigue of our readers who have to watch us get it wrong time and again. Imagine the conversations the Asian American parents in our communities must have with their children when we report inaccurately or when we perpetuate stereotypes.

Sure, some of our readers are going to roll their eyes or push back at what they see as attempts to be “politically correct.” Maybe some in our newsroom agree.

It doesn’t matter. The time has long passed for us to step up. 

This story first appeared in Publisher’s Auxiliary, the only national publication serving America’s community newspapers. It is published by the National Newspaper Association. GJR is partnering with Pub Aux to re-print Jackie Spinner’s monthly “Local Matters” column on our website. Spinner is the editor of Gateway Journalism Review. Follow her on Twitter @jackiespinner.