Yahoo sports writer Graham Watson used these words in the title to describe the stereotypes that she feared facing should her picture be shown by her college football column. While her name conjures up an old British man with a pipe in mouth, Watson is an African-American woman who resisted adding the website photo “for the longest time”.
Was Watson pictureless just long enough to establish unbiased traction? Did it help her establish credibility worthy of her moniker “Dr. Saturday”? Do white men fear photos too?
These were some of the issues discussed at the “Diversity in Sports Media” panel at the Blogs With Balls 5 conference in Toronto this past weekend. While Watson’s anecdote made me immediately think of “Whistling Vivaldi, Claude Steele’s brilliant book on “stereotype threat”, I also thought of something else:
Blogs With Balls 5 was not the same conference I attended in 2009.
Some panelists even showed an awkward but funny discomfort saying the words “Blogs with Balls”. Despite similar testosterone levels, the event may have outgrown it name.
That’s mostly a good thing. BWB5 highlighted excellent new endeavors like the humanitarian “Right to Play” initiative, promising new websites like Sports on Earth, and panels that were far more substantive and diverse in content than in the past (see my take on Moneyballs: Measurement and Analytics in Sports Media).
On the negative side, part of that change was the removal of almost any line separating “independent” new media, and big-corporatized sports giants. Judging from the compilation of all the panels, they have basically morphed into one entity (see Awful Announcing for more). This merger raises larger corporate questions like:
- Who is really going to hold ESPN and big media accountable if everybody is sleeping in the same bed?
- Can there be a substantive conversation on say, Sports Illustrated’s sexist coverage when so many critics share the same values?
- How much does writer diversity really matter without diversity of sports editors and ownership?
While answers are for another column, let’s get back to the panel:
“CHANGING THE GAME: Diversity in Sports Media“:
Panel context: The New York Times William C. Rhoden has called today’s sports media a “modern-day journalistic apartheid”, journalist Norman Chad said “we’re whiter than Newt Gingrich’s 4th of July Barbeque”, and in 2011 Dr. Richard Lapchick documented that 97% of all sports editors were white, and 94% were men (sorry, no data on heterosexuals). The sports blogosphere has basically replicated this dynamic.
After Bomani Jones attended BWB4, he asked in his must-read column, “Why aren’t more Blacks in the Sports Blogosphere?” and “How in the hell did the personality of the entire sports blogosphere become so damn white?” While his first question is straight-forward, I took Bomani’s second question about “the personality” to depict a certain type of whiteness — namely rooted in a white frat boy culture that I know well.
Despite all my natural advantages (see straight white man), I was never a member of the sports blog club. Although I started blogging in 2007, snark wasn’t my style, neither were near-naked pics of the 10 hottest WAGs, and I just didn’t find the one-liners in Deadspin’s comment section as funny as most. Besides, writing about white privilege in sports wasn’t sexy. So if a white dude like me was put off by Deadspin’s dominant blueprint (which is now changing), it’s easy to understand why Jones wrote this priceless line:
“the line of black people looking to write for a site that profits from Caucasian men’s peculiar relationship with their penises vis-a-vis others’ penises probably won’t have a line of Negritude applying to get on.”
Specifically, Jones was referring to Deadspin’s penchant for posting embarassing photos of naked athletes.
To their deserving credit, the organizers at BWB5 responded with a panel which was also pushed for and moderated by ESPN’s Jemele Hill. As mentioned up top, Graham Watson’s name ignited the most interesting exchange which was technically fueled by her parents. Watson said that they deliberately named her in a way that would hide her gender and race. According to Harvard resume research, names really matter, and sadly, scrubbing out one’s Blackness is a common job-hunt strategy.
Fellow panelist Patrick Allen reflected on Watson’s double dilemma and his own privilege:
“That sucks. And that’s not something that I ever had to even think about. How can we open the door and say: we want to know that you’re a woman. We think that’s great. We want your perspective”.
Panelists stressed the importance of awareness, and Jemele Hill discussed the pitfall’s of alleged “colorblindness”:
“Being color-blind in a lot of ways is not good because you want to recognize a level of diversity… If you look upon in a room and you notice if you keep getting the same version of the same person, then you’ll have to take a look at that.”
Sports writers should be the very first folks to understand Hill’s message. Would any baseball team start five shortstops and four catchers? Could a basketball team of five guards — even all-star guards — win games as a team? Sports GMs hire talent to make the team better. Sports editors hire individuals who look and think like them.
Cyd Zeigler from the pioneering website Outsports explained the value of inclusion wasn’t about diversity for its own sake:
“You get better ideas when employees look different”.
Zeigler also took the time to dispel some gay myth-busting:
“Our readers are like everybody else in the United States, they love the NFL more than anything else. This idea that gay men like gymnastics, diving, and tennis, right, it’s just not true! The NFL is king on Outsports because it is king in our culture.”
Write that down.
While Michael Tillery’s valuable voice from The Starting Five was missed, rounding out the panel was Tyler Tumminia who spoke of the barriers facing a woman executive working in Major League Baseball, and ex-ESPN exec Keith Clinksdale who has recently started up “The Shadow League”. If you want to get a review on ESPN’s “Broke” documentary or learn about the great humanitarianism of Derek Rose, check out TSL. And be sure to drop by WarRoomSports afterwards.
Sports media and America has a long way to go before the next Lakesha Watson is perceived as Graham Watson in print. One workshop won’t change that.
But the “Diversity in Sports Media” panel was a great addition to BWB5 and it seems the next step is to build upon this beyond one panel or one conference.
Check it out below.
Related: BWB5 Moneyball Panel: “If You Are Not Embracing Analytics, You’re a Fool”
TELL GOODELL: NO MORE RACISM
THE LAST CLOSET
