So you want to talk about race on public radio

What happened when Ijeoma Oluo was interviewed on Wisconsin Public Radio

This is the first of a two-part post.

One day while on Facebook I saw this post from Ijeoma Oluo, Seattle-based writer, speaker, and self-described “internet yeller.”

What jumped out to me was her frustration with white men calling in to give only statements, and no questions, to a black woman who was invited on to have a conversation about race.

Oluo is the author of the New York Times bestseller “So You Want to Talk About Race” She said she wrote the book to help facilitate an informed, positive dialogue. That clearly isn’t what happened on this call-in show.

Oluo’s post caught my attention for two reasons. First, because I had her book in my to-be-read-pile for my John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship research on bias in newsrooms. And second, because I am on leave from Wisconsin Public Radio and we produce this type of call-in show.

I was disappointed, but not entirely surprised, to hear that she’d had this experience. I have heard this type of dynamic play out on public radio before, especially during call-in shows.

Later I found out her post referred to The Morning Show — produced by the very organization I work for, Wisconsin Public Radio.

I felt a deep responsibility. I would have wanted the interview to go so much better than she had described. The caller guidelines we have in place ask callers to advance the conversation. It seemed that instead of advancing the conversation, what had happened was a mixture of whitesplaining and mansplaining.

I contacted Sheryl Gasser, my manager and the director of the Ideas Network of Wisconsin Public Radio. I asked her if she would mind if I replied to Oluo’s Facebook post, own it, and apologize. Gasser said, “Yes, I think it would be good to name it and discuss it.”

First though, I needed to listen to the show.

Here’s how the host, Dean Kallenbach, who is white, set up the interview: “Here on The Ideas Network, we’re used to difficult conversations. We see our mission within this democracy to provide a safe place for those conversations around the issues of our time. But even we wrestle with issues relating to race relations in this country.”

He welcomed Oluo and had a brief back and forth about the book and her purpose for writing it. Then he opened the phone lines. The first listener who called in said,

“I am always really leary about any conversation about race, in that race isn’t something that you can really define. A lot of times, we’ll have a researcher on saying there’s a gap in this or there’s a gap on that. And people can define themselves of any race they want.”

The message from the caller is race doesn’t matter because it’s a social construct. People can just opt in and out of being defined as a race.

Oluo responds by explaining how race operates in her daily life as a black woman.

“Racially, I’m black and I’m black because of how that functions in society. So as I’m walking on the street I am viewed as black. I am treated as black. I am treated with the historical trauma that has been put upon blackness. When cops pull me over, I’m treated as black. When I go for a job interview, I am treated as black. And we have to understand that just because at times it seems arbitrary doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

Another listener called in.

“If you work hard, I don’t care if you’re African-American, Mexican, it doesn’t matter. If you work hard, you’re going to go places. I guess I just don’t understand that race card thing.”

Oluo explains there is a system of race functioning from birth. And shares some key facts including: black mothers are three times more likely to die in child birth, living in racist society takes toll on overall health of people of color, and white-sounding names receive 50 percent more callbacks for job interviews than black-sounding names.

Then she addressed the idea of a “race card.”

“This is not a race card. The race card is not a thing that exists. These are real measurable impacts to life. And you can try as hard as you want in life but if you can’t even get a job interview because your name sounds black what are your efforts going to do then?”

After listening to the whole interview, I could understand how it was frustrating for her. The interview set out to explore how we have conversations about race and bridge our racial divide. What I heard was a black woman, who was invited for her expertise in talking about race, being minimized and having to live out the same micro-aggressions she described in her book.

Calls continued to come in saying:

• Race doesn’t matter because if you work hard you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
• Race doesn’t matter because we should all be colorblind.
• We don’t need to talk about race anymore; action is the only thing that’s needed.
• It’s really more about wages rather than race.

Over the course of the hourlong interview, we heard from eight listeners. That’s pretty usual for this program. Of the eight, seven were men, which is unusual, although the gender split is never balanced. Three self-identified as white, one as a man of color.

Talking about race is hard. I’m not unforgiving of folks attempting to talk about race and getting it wrong. I’ve been that person many times. But for me, the interview was problematic because it was a barrage of attacks from the callers with little reprieve. I wondered how the conversation could have gone better if the callers had been different. Should we have stopped taking comments and asked for some questions? Should the host have asked more questions rather than giving so much time to white male callers with criticisms?

I replied to Oluo’s Facebook post.

She responded to my comment pointing out the toll conversations like the one on Wisconsin Public Radio have on guests of color, especially women of color.

I asked both Kallenbach and Oluo to reflect on the interview.

Regarding the callers making statements rather than asking questions, Kallenbach said, “When we have conversations we don’t always have questions. It’s an exchange of ideas. I don’t think someone making a statement is bad. But it would have been if we didn’t give her a chance to respond.”

At Wisconsin Public Radio, call-screeners for talk shows often answer the phone with, “What is your question or comment?” The call-screener for that interview, Nyajai Ellison, and I reflected on how things might have gone if we had a different policy discouraging comments, and favoring questions. Should we always invite questions and comments?

Oluo said, “We didn’t get a chance in that interview to really get anything of substance because it was just lined up with [the callers’] reasons why they didn’t feel like they need to care about this. And that’s important to get past, but you get past it once and you move on. You don’t get to indulge every different variation of it for an hour and then think you had a productive conversation.”

Kallenbach said, “I thought it went really well. The way I judge it is, did she have time and space to really get into the topic and examine the issues? I thought it was a great hour and a lot of people got a chance to learn.”

Obviously they didn’t share similar assessments.

I asked Oluo about the caller who “didn’t understand the race card thing.”

She said, “Wasting someone’s time is a weapon. You know it’s a tactic. And deciding you’re going to take the time to call in and say ‘What about the race card?’ you’re not doing that because you want to have a conversation.”

This interview spurred many conversations at Wisconsin Public Radio. Staff members shared that they wanted to learn from this and improve.

Public media is disproportionately white

As of January last year, 76.3 percent of hosts and reporters working in public media were white and 23.7 percent were people of color, according to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The U.S. population at that time was 61.3 percent white and 38.7 percent people of color.

Oluo told me, “No one wants to acknowledge the overwhelming whiteness of it all. And you can ask the questions but you have to at least let people know they are only looking at white viewpoint. They think it’s ‘the’ viewpoint. And it’s treated at surface level. It is so rare to hear an interviewer acknowledge they are asking questions from a white perspective or even ask ‘What am I missing? What am I not asking?’”

The same day Oluo posted about her interview on Wisconsin Public Radio, she posted again praising two other public radio interviews she did about her book.

It got me wondering. How many public radio interviews did Oluo do on this book? Who was interviewing her? How did the caller interactions go at other stations? What are the race and gender of the interviewers and callers? And how did the conversations play out?

In my next post, I’ll share what I found out when I compared this interview with others Oluo did on public radio during her book tour.