Multiple Mainstreams

Abstract

Multiple Mainstreams Carla Murphy (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 24] I suppose I'm meant to care how "the left" talks about race and class. I fit the profile; I'm a black female journalist. My stories since the early 2000s have featured men and women made invisible or marginalized by society, sometimes by their own communities, and certainly by newsrooms. But as a news gatherer, I've always tinkered on the borderlands of mainstream and progressive journalism, the left's gathering space. I never fully committed. That's because early in my career I settled on an important distinction: it's not how you talk about class and race that matters; it's to and for whom. Audience determines how. Left conversations about race and class rarely center my folks as their audience: the precarious middle-class, working-class, and workingpoor residents of my Brooklyn street; recent immigrants; and native-born Americans like them. Left conversations seem unaware of the value of redistributing news media power such that non-whites and working people construct their own left conversations about race and class. This, to me, is the problem—not how the left's well-educated upper-middle class, unharmed and unbothered by journalism's poverty wages, talks about race and class. As a journalist I always conceived of my role as working for folks who are not in the room. I don't view the progressive or liberal journalist's pursuit of news about marginalized people as progress. From my view in the borderlands, the progressive mission should be to expand the production of news (about race, class, and gender) for these audiences. It should be to create multiple mainstreams strong enough to compete with the mainstream. Producing news about low-wealth people for a better-off, highly educated audience carries a high civic and socioeconomic cost for folks on the losing side of economic inequality and those of us driven to expand democratic participation. It never made sense to me to believe that a shooting in a New York City outer borough has gotten sunlight because a white guy in Greenwich, Connecticut, read about it in an issue of the New York Times. What [End Page 25] does informing him have to do with journalism fulfilling its public service for the people living in that outer borough? Where is their trusted mainstream for surfacing debate, sifting truth from misinformation, and building consensus? I come from city blocks that at one point seemed to be losing one member of every five households to Rikers and to prisons upstate. No mainstream outlet has ever covered that phenomenon commensurate to its effect on generations of families in the sending and receiving zip codes. The affected persons—black, brown, and white—aren't whom those outlets produce news for. Otherwise, we would see newsroom beats like "community health and safety," "justice," or "the prison economy"—instead of "crime." The way that mainstream news media covers healthcare, housing, and higher education, for example, is also shaped by the audience it values. These outlets don't consistently answer the practical, mundane, or even existential questions of people and communities that are low wealth, of color, or immigrant. They answer the white guy in Greenwich's questions. However those outlets talk about race and class, it's for him. They explain the world to him. They center him. They seek to expand his world. They seek to persuade and convince him. They engage and value him. They believe his civic participation matters more than that of the audiences I value. Meanwhile, the nation is browner in real life, and even browner on Gen Z's TV shows and social media. Right now, to paraphrase Ian Haney López, white people are trying to figure out what it means to be white in the United States. For low-wealth families the cost of upward mobility is prohibitive. Is our news system designed for now? It makes sense to me that the journalism industry should serve pluralities, or multiple mainstreams—not only the imagined white, suburban one penning in the black and brown inner-city. That's a throwback to when white...