Washington Post videographer Evelio Contreras

Evelio Contreras, a Washington Post videographer, grew up in Eagle Pass, Texas, across the Rio Grande from Piedras Negras, Mexico, “with a divided understanding” of himself.

He was a first-generation Mexican American with, he said, a strong connection to the United States. He also had deep ties to Mexico. His parents were born there.

His mother, who sewed clothes, and his father, who worked construction, stressed education for Evelio and his siblings: “They taught us about working hard in school.”

Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism represented Contreras’s first experience with diversity. Eagle Pass “felt like 99 percent Mexican,” said Contreras. “There were no African Americans.”

So Contreras spent 2000-01, his first year at Medill, exploring a different student community each quarter: blacks in the fall, Asians in the winter, and the student daily newspaper staff, largely white, in the spring. Used to direct Eagle Pass residents, he found he needed to study whites to learn “how to read what they were saying.”

In his junior year, he was in the first group of Medill students to report a quarter from Johannesburg and Cape Town for South African news organizations.

After dealing with racial categories different than those familiar to Americans and 11 official languages in South Africa, Contreras felt that he returned to the United States with “a South African identity,” comfortable with the country’s diversity.

Dan Tham’s video records the explanation by Contreras of how his background and training have led him to connect in his reporting with people who have a strong sense of their “otherness.”

Loren Ghiglione

Her journalism career began when, as a welfare mother of two, she attended the Borough of Manhattan Community College to become a secretary. She soon became interested in journalism and, sometimes accompanied by one of her children, started covering community news events.

“I didn’t know I was [four-year] college material,” she recalls. “I didn’t know I had a voice.” Nevertheless, she won a full scholarship to New York University and, following graduation, began reporting for the Bridgeport (Conn.) Post. The only Latina in the newsroom, she says, “I fell in love with Bridgeport and the issues.”

She also became active in the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which led eventually to her election as president of Unity: Journalists of Color. Her two-year term, for 2011 and 2012, probably qualifies as the most time-consuming and tough in the organization’s history.

The National Association of Black Journalists recently left Unity, with the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association taking NABJ’s place. Hernandez hopes to encourage NABJ to rejoin Unity.

She also focuses on a new strategic plan for Unity that she expects will reflect an agenda involving sexual orientation and gender identity as well as race and ethnicity. In addition, the difficult economic times, especially for news media, have diminished companies’ focus on diversity. It is important to diversify “so that the stories that are important get told,” she says. “I see us going backwards.”

At home, as Dan Tham’s video makes clear, she faces other challenges, including her son’s questioning of her notion of ethnic identity.

Loren Ghiglione

We met Trevor Thomas in a futuristic office on Massachusetts Avenue. Blue neon lights cast a ghastly hue on the employees at Media Matters, a Web-based progressive research and information center. The employees’ eyes were focused on the television and computer screens at their desks. “We monitor television, radio, blogs and newspapers to be able to push back on what we perceive as misinformation,” Thomas, director of external affairs, explained. I noticed most of the screens were turned to FOX News.

Thomas is a gay man from Marne, Mich., a small, unincorporated town. He was recently the director of communications for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an organization that worked to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

At Media Matters, Thomas has noticed an “uptick in misinformation” when it comes to reporting on lesbian, gay and transgender issues, particularly around bullying and homosexuality as a choice. He understands that especially in small towns like Marne where he grew up, the media play an important role in shaping the opinions of “everyday Americans in their living rooms.”

“If there’s bad facts out there, we do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t become mainstream media,” Thomas said. In this video clip, Thomas talks about how his small-town roots help him stay grounded.

Dan Q. Tham

Loren Ghiglione

Juan Williams

The writings and remarks of Juan Williams, Fox News political analyst and provocateur, have a habit of generating controversy.

He titled his recent tribute on The Root to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, after 20 years on the court, “Clarence Thomas: Black Nationalist?” Williams called Thomas “a leading black conservative,” admirably independent: “His race neutral approach is a sharp contrast to race conscious programs approved to remedy past discrimination.”

Jack White, former Time magazine columnist who also contributes to The Root, dismissed Williams’ column as a “ludicrous piece” that tried to “remake Thomas into a black nationalist icon instead of the Uncle Tom that many blacks consider him to be.”

A second controversy occurred while Williams was working for both National Public Radio and Fox News. Contending on Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor” that fear of Muslims should not be used to restrict their rights, Williams said, “When I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried, I get nervous.”

NPR terminated Williams’ contract two days later, on Oct. 20, 2010. Fox signed Williams to a three-year contract reportedly worth $2 million, and Williams wrote a book critical of NPR titled Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate.

Despite the recent controversies, Williams’s earlier journalism commands respect. During 23 years at The Washington Post, he served as national correspondent and political columnist. He wrote a distinguished biography of the first African American on the U.S. Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, and Eye on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, which accompanied a documentary TV series. His TV documentary writing earned him an Emmy.

So we sought his opinion about a vexing challenge for America, how to respond to a black underclass that seems to lack the education and support network to succeed. In an earlier interview, Pulitzer–winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson had recommended to us a domestic Marshall Plan, equivalent to the huge U.S. effort after World War II to rebuild European economies.

In another interview, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, had called for a second civil rights movement.

But Williams takes a strikingly different approach, perhaps reflected in the title of his 2007 book Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About It.

Williams thinks it is unrealistic to count on help from new government programs: “Now it’s politically untenable to get more money for stimulus.” He stresses individual responsibility—educating yourself and choosing to be accountable for your own circumstances.

“What would I say to my daughter, what would I say to my sons? ‘Here’s what you can do to help yourself,’” Williams continues. He suggests staying in school and the job market, not getting married and not having children until you have a job, and being realistic. “Don’t think you’re going to be a rap star,” he says.

Born in Panama, Williams, 57, describes his roots in the West Indies and the sense of black people there not as broken, but as strong and capable. He talks about the “much higher” educational level in the West Indies and the stress on taking advantage of academic opportunities.

Williams majored in philosophy at Haverford College in 1972. He voices skepticism about Haverford’s initial civil-rights-era efforts in the late 1960s to achieve student body diversity by recruiting black inner-city high school students. He sees the black students in his class of ’72 as a reaction—three African princes and three prep school boys.

But he credits the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King for opening doors for him, recalling a time when The Washington Post had no black writers. Pointing to the absence of black TV anchors, Williams says race still remains “a real ceiling and a real issue for me.”

For his children, however, race is less important. His daughter, Rae, is married to a white man. His two sons, Antonio and Raphael, find race “real, but not defining.”

The generational difference is captured in a Fox segment in which Williams takes his two sons along King’s route on the day he helped lead the 1963 March on Washington and then to the new Martin Luther King Jr. Monument.

“I grew up in a world that was being changed by Dr. King,” Williams says. “But for you, you grew up in a world that’s already been changed.”

Loren Ghiglione

Eugene Robinson spoke to us in his office at the Washington Post, where he’s a Pulitzer-prize winning columnist. On one of many book-lined shelves in his office, there’s a piece of paper stuffed among coffee mugs, his nameplate and a trophy. It’s a bit of mail he received from a reader: a picture of a stern-looking old lady giving the finger. We weren’t sure what to make of it, and Robinson wasn’t either—there was no note inside the envelope.

In any case, Robinson knew exactly how to summarize his latest book, Disintegrated: The Splintering of Black America, about what he calls a “new taxonomy of black America.” Whereas a few generations ago there were “black leaders” and a “black agenda,” today the black community is split. Robinson identified four groups:

1. The Transcendents, or upper-class blacks with money and power, who are revered by everyone, regardless of race (think Oprah and Obama).

2. The Mainstream, or black Americans who have established themselves in the middle class.

3. The Emergent, which comprises immigrants from Africa and the Carribean, as well as biracial Americans.

4. The Abandoned, made up of blacks who haven’t gained access to the middle class, and have been deeply affected by the failing education system and the decline of the inner city. Robinson said he looks at the Abandoned as in need of a Marshall Plan, and we have to concentrate our resources to help them.

Alyssa

Video by Dan

Raymond Hernandez

Raymond Hernandez, 45, and I reminisced over coffee at a Starbucks in Chevy Chase, Md., about a career that has taken him from cub reporter for a 6,000-circulation, Massachusetts-mill-town daily to Washington-based investigative reporter for The New York Times, the world’s most powerful newspaper.

We recalled our first meeting, at a 1988 newspaper job fair in Syracuse, N.Y. I was editor-owner of the Southbridge (Mass.) News, recruiting for our dinky daily. He was a 22-year-old Pace University graduate who had majored in history. He had never taken a journalism course. He had no clips from the student newspaper and no professional journalism experience.

But he spoke perceptively about the writing style of New York columnists, showed me a writing sample about the aesthetics of color (he recalls it as awful, I recall it as good) and conveyed extraordinary passion about becoming a journalist. I offered him a job. No other recruiter did. He joined the News in January 1989.

I cannot remember his first article. But I can remember how he produced it—by staying up all night to write and rewrite. He sought perfection. A favorite photo of mine shows Hernandez in the early morning, after yet another all-night write-rewrite session, asleep at his desk. Of his 12-hour days at the News, he said, “It all seemed like one sleepless night.”

He wrote the bulk of a prize-winning, ten-part series, “La Tierra de Promesa: The Promised Land,” about Southbridge’s Puerto Ricans—1,500-2,000 people in a town of 17,000—and the discrimination they faced. Of Ecuadoran and Puerto Rican parents, Hernandez helped translate the series into Spanish so that we could reach the broadest possible audience.

Raymond Hernandez, circa his Southbridge News reporter days

Hernandez recalls our “really diverse newsroom,” with at one point 40 percent of the staff reporters of color, and the anger of some white readers at the paper and our series. “There was a lot of resentment,” Hernandez said, part of a larger fear that their town was being taken from them.

Hernandez regularly beat the big-city competition, the Worcester Telegram. As a reporter, he said, “I have to be willing to go through a wall.” That attitude was reflected in a January 1990 memo to me from Executive Editor Richard Osborne.

Osborne credited Hernandez with breaking several stories, including one about a head lice program in the Southbridge schools that the superintendent had wanted to keep quiet: The upset superintendent “demanded that School Committee members surrender their packets of official memos in a futile attempt to find the leaker.”

Shortly after, Hernandez moved to the Dayton Daily News and then, after three years, to a reporter trainee position at the New York Times. Often in 1993 he covered stabbings, stranglings and street protests from the Queens bureau and other Times outposts far from midtown Manhattan.

Eventually he undertook investigations and political coverage at the Times. He recently reported on irregular campaign donations to John C. Liu, the New York City comptroller who is a likely contender to succeed Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg: “People listed as having given to Mr. Liu say that they never gave, say a boss or other Liu supporter gave for them, or could not be found altogether.”

Perhaps Hernandez’s most controversial investigation led the paper’s front page on May 17, 2010. Hernandez reported that Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a Democrat running for the U.S. Senate who claimed military service in Vietnam, gained five military deferments that allowed him to escape going to war.

Blumenthal supporters, media critics (especially Times haters) and Clark Hoyt, public editor of the Times, dissected Hernandez’s article. A Gawker column captured my sense of the controversy: “Even if every single point of criticism was 100% true, the Times still assembled enough unassailable facts to warrant the kind of full-frontal assault it launched.”

Hernandez and I ended our conversation by discussing an important question about identity. He has two sons, one in college, the other in high school. Do they see themselves differently than Hernandez sees himself? He said, “I see myself as a Hispanic man of color. It informs me in a way that it doesn’t inform my children.”

Perhaps that is more good than bad, an example of the next generation moving beyond categories of race and ethnicity that often defined and confined people in my Sixties generation.

Loren Ghiglione