Tools to Help Reporters Examine Their Racial Biases
Reporting guides and other materials to guard against unconscious bias.
Among the biggest challenges journalists face these days: covering race issues accurately and fairly. Reporters not steeped in the subcultures they’re sent out to cover must especially guard against ways their own unconscious biases, or ignorance might cause them to unintentionally reinforce unwarranted stereotypes or even reinforce community traumas.
Below, we’ve gathered reporting guides; materials to help you acknowledge your privilege; books on racial inequities in schools; and places you can donate.
Confronting How Race Appears in Your Reporting
- How to be Antiracist in Coronavirus Coverage, Press Club Institute
- Race Reporting Guide, Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation
Places to Donate:
- Covering a Country Where Race is Everywhere, Columbia Journalism Review
- Is a Journalist Calling Out the Impact of Racism “Bias”?, Nieman Lab
- Not sure if you should call something racist? Here’s AP’s guidance, American Press Institute
- “Coming to Terms with our Own Racism”: Journalists Grapple with the Racialization of their News, Research by Emily Drew
- Talking About Race, National Museum of African American History and Culture
Podcast Episodes on Race
- Code Switch (entire series), NPR
- Miseducation, The Bell
- The Criminalization of Black Girls, EWA Radio
- Think Twice Before Doing Another Historical Simulation, Cult of Pedagogy Podcast
- The Problem We All Live With (Part One and Part Two), This American Life
- 1619 (entire series), The New York Times
- Seeing White, Scene on Radio
- How Colleges Are Mishandling Racial Tensions on Campus, APM Reports
- Teaching While White podcast
Resources on White Privilege
- The Problem With School Policing [Infographic], ACLU
- 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice, Medium
- “Who Gets to Be Afraid in America?”, The Atlantic
- “America’s Racial Contract Is Killing Us” by Adam Serwer
- “The Intersectionality Wars”, Vox
- ”White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Peggy McIntosh
Books on Race and Racial Inequality in Schools
Please consider purchasing reading materials from one of these black-owned online bookstores.
- Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum
- Black Teachers on Teaching by Michele Foster
- Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America: An Oral History by Wallace Terry
- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander - So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
- How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
- Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins
- When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson
- White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
- Black Journalists: The NABJ Story by Wayne Dawkins
- The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement by Jon Hale
- Ghosts in the Schoolyard Racism & School Closings on Chicago’s South Side by Eve Ewing
- Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community Edited by Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell
- Raising Race Questions: Whiteness and Inquiry in Education by Ali Michael
Have any additional materials you’d like to see linked above? Please email Allison at akowalski@ewa.org.
