How Local Media Can Help Give Agency to Black Voices: Go Back to the Basics
A personal essay written by a journalism professor who describes how a local news outlet attempted to unmask white supremacy, but still left her voiceless.
By Alysia Burton Steele
Associate Professor of Journalism Instruction
The University of Mississippi
School of Journalism and New Media
I have been a journalism professor at Ole Miss for eight years. I am the only Black female tenured faculty member on a staff of 32.
I’ve been ignored and excluded from campus conversations. I’ve faced microaggression and racism from students who have been openly contemptuous. I’ve been called a Black bitch. I’ve watched students walk out of lectures because they didn’t like what they heard. I’ve had fragile-egoed white male students challenge me when I talk about injustices Blacks have endured in this country and how the press has portrayed them. White female students have told me they are tired of hearing about Black Lives Matter. Other white female students have threatened to have me fired because I am a tough professor and their dads “donate millions of dollars here.” White male students have told me they weren’t going to call me Professor or Mrs. Steele because where they “come from, you are to call me Mr. So-and-So.”
I think of leaving often, but have decided to stay for now because I have work to do.
I came here because I believe students of color need to see faculty who looked like them because representation is critical. (There are also five other full-time Black faculty members in my school.) I moved my family here and came to a state that scared us.
My husband said, “You want to move where? Mississippi? Oh, hell no … didn’t they make a movie about it burning not too long ago?”
That’s why it was painful when, in August, a local journalism nonprofit published an exposé on the racism of Ole Miss donors — yet some of their journalism didn’t rise to the level I’d expect from my students. The four-part series released Aug. 2 by The Mississippi Free Press expanded on the university’s deep-seated racial history by publishing emails between my former dean and a donor. The series showed how university officials were still entertaining donors who yearned for the white supremacist attitudes and iconography on campus.
As part of its series, The Free Press used my name and quoted me from a secret recording made at a staff meeting. They did not reach out to me before publishing and confirming what I said.
I applaud this local news organization for taking a critical step in exposing the underbelly of racism and white supremacy in higher education at my Southern university. However, in failing to allow me to comment or confirm, this organization silenced me, devaluing my work experience and perspective.
Like many other colleges, my employer, the University of Mississippi, clings to the symbolism of systemic oppression.
Working here is a heavy emotional burden that I carry willingly to help my students. But when well-meaning press institutions fail in their duties to elevate the Black voices most impacted by their work, I feel compelled to speak up.
I read The Free Press, and believe they do important work by exposing systemic oppression that largely affects marginalized communities in Mississippi, but I can’t overlook their blinders in this instance.
If journalists want to talk about racism on this campus and the challenges presented in this journalism school, they need to talk to current faculty of color.
I’m not defending the administration or the man who hired me. Reading his forwarded emails hurt. I was on medical leave for a year caring for a dying mother, so I didn’t know what was happening in the school. The trauma I have endured in this state would crush me if I allowed it, but I know who I am and what I contribute — my body of work speaks for itself.
After I shared the first part of the series on my social media, the Free Press editor asked if I would write a column or be interviewed in a planned “solutions piece.” I declined. I had questions about the organization’s journalistic integrity — their basic failure to reach out to me to confirm a recording made in secret reduced their credibility. A week after the first article ran, an editor’s note added to a follow-up implied I and other faculty were part of the toxic culture because we challenged the reporting and lack of integrity in the series. We were simply asking if anyone quoted in the story was contacted. None of us were. The editor wrote in part, “We were very careful not to expose people inside or outside the School of Journalism or the university overall by bringing them into a story that wasn’t directly about them. Despite the pivotal faculty meeting in 2018 being important to the series, the larger story was not centered on the journalism school itself, but specifically on its dean and the broader fundraising mechanisms and approaches at UM.”
Well, they had no problem inserting me in the story in the first place.
On a national stage during my 2015 book tour, a writer asked me why I stay at Ole Miss when Black students would appreciate my work at a historically black college and university. I countered by asking, What about Black students at predominantly white institutions who need support? What about white students needing to be challenged by professors who don’t look like them?
I think about the white female student who thanked me, for if she hadn’t taken my class she might have turned into a “racist redneck” like her family. Or the Black male student who talked with his head hung low — I challenged him to look people in the eye, to hold his head up high and give a firm handshake. I think about the LGBTQ+ students who trust me while they talk about parents trying to convert them.
What wasn’t reported in the Free Press is the hard work journalism professors and administrators are doing to change climate and culture.
Balanced reporting is a basic ethical standard we should aim for in every story. We have three Black female assistant deans — one has worked in the school over for 10 years, another dean for over five years, and we just hired our latest dean in August 2020. No other school or department on campus has that much representation of people of color in positions of power. We’ve won three Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Awards for investigative pieces — work that highlighted the historical significance of Greenville, Mississippi, public awareness about roads and community development in Belize, and a report examining the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Without hesitation, journalism administrators dedicated funding for three years for my multimedia workshop Lens Collective, a four-day program that invites universities within Mississippi and from out of state to report on diversity issues within the state. We highlighted civil rights leaders like Amzie Moore and Fannie Lou Hamer, and sponsored civil rights activist Charles McLaurin as a guest speaker. Among other stories, a team project about the Emmett Till sign being repeatedly defaced won an award and was picked up nationally by PBS.
Our journalism school created a social justice reporting emphasis in our degree program. Our diversity committee releases annual reports of faculty teaching and research that specifically relates to diversity and we also examine work that we’re featuring because representation matters. This is a short list of action items that don’t solve a problem. We know our job is unfinished. We aren’t knee-jerk responding to a series. We deserve to have our voices heard.
Here’s what I saw that needed to be done, and what other media outlets can learn from this work.
1. Do real solutions journalism. Solutions journalism is supposed to provide accountability in reporting and ask what people are doing to acknowledge and address problems. Failing to give university administrators and the journalism school an opportunity to discuss how they’re addressing problems defeats the purpose. Not talking with faculty members who were quoted fails to give those faculty members agency and voice to discuss a work environment that affects their lives. They have a choice to talk or not. The stronger the work, the more people learn, the bigger impact it will have on communities, and the better likelihood there is for change. That’s solutions journalism.
2. Be balanced. I teach students to report on both sides of an issue so there isn’t a question of bias. Quantitative research shows due diligence. Words like “many” aren’t substantiated and should be avoided. Numbers add credibility.
3. Good visuals matter. As a former deputy director of photography at a major newspaper, I am acutely aware of representation in visuals. Use recent photos and give credit to where you got them. Solely using historical images that sensationalize content also demonstrates bias.
4. Don’t claim to be solutions journalism until your solution is filed. It’s been almost two months and a “solutions piece” still hasn’t published. In journalism, our goal is to help educate so people walk away with a better understanding, and we provide answers so there’s tangible evidence of change. Dropping a “bombshell” and not doing due diligence demonstrates poor news judgment.
The bottom line: This organization failed to advance the story with answers from the journalism school and university officials.
Students and faculty on this campus deserve better from this news organization and from the administration. The rest of the nation’s journalists should take note.
Alysia Burton Steele is currently earning her Ph.D. in U.S. History, focusing specifically on the civil rights movement and women’s labor. She is co-authoring her second book with her husband Bobby D. Steele, Jr., which consists of oral histories from the last generation of those who hand-picked cotton in Mississippi.