Locating Whiteness in Journalism Pedagogy

Abstract

A consistent thread woven through scholarship on diversity and journalism education recommends appending multicultural content onto existing curricula or adding bodies of color to student or faculty ranks in order to improve the way marginalized communities are reported by the news media. Less attention, however, has been paid to studying the ways whiteness manifests in their academic socialization and whether its presence impinges the training of students to reflect the lived realities of communities of color. This essay explores how the teaching of various newsgathering routines and values might be fashioned by whiteness. Data collected using a mixed approach (observations of two journalism classrooms and an ideological critical analysis of traditionally used journalism textbooks), is analyzed through a critical whiteness studies lens, primarily by identifying rhetorical configurations of whiteness, but also by locating boundaries established by a white perspective. Findings indicate that three pedagogical strategies encouraged students to generate news stories delimited by predominantly white experiences and that the pedagogy and material used to teach about racial diversity mirrors many of the subversive discursive strategies whites use to engage conversations about race—individualism, distorted racism, negation, and normativity—essentially obscuring white privilege and sabotaging racial progress. As a result, current journalism pedagogy can be read as impeding racial justice because of the pervasiveness of whiteness in media training leaves a racialized social structure unchallenged.