That magic moment when the importance of diversity lit me up

Like the stunning end of Roe a year ago, this time the Court rejected affirmative action measures at colleges and universities across the nation. Decades of work aimed at ensuring everybody has a fair shot at pursuing the American Dream, was once again casually tossed away by these bought-off renegades who seem intent on settling scores instead of protecting settled law.

As if we don’t have enough to worry about with the Republicans’ hourly attacks on our democracy, we now have a high court that answers to nobody except, apparently, the highest bidder.

President Joe Biden said it best, and bluntly, when he came out swinging immediately following the 6-3 ruling, saying, ““Discrimination still exists in America. Today’s decision DOES NOT CHANGE THAT.”

He then responded to a reporter’s question about their latest rulings this way: “This is not a normal court.”

Since its inception, affirmative action has been a hot-button issue animated by people, like Biden, who believe racism still exists in America, verses people who think discrimination is a thing of the past, and we should all just move on.

Polls are all over the place on this issue, but today I want to argue from a journalist’s standpoint why ensuring minorities are fairly represented in colleges and at the workplace is absolutely vital to an enlightened society.

The year was 2000. Bill Clinton was wrapping up his last year of the presidency, and looking back, it seems like we were in the final months of what passed for normalcy in America. The contentious Gore-Bush election was just around the corner (which was ironically decided by a Conservative Supreme Court), to be closely followed by 9/11, the Iraq War, the Great Recession, unhinged vitriol by the Right over President Obama’s tan suit, and finally ending with the election of a stone-cold traitor …

In the spring of that year, I was privileged to represent Stars & Stripes newspaper at American Society of Newspaper Editors Annual Managing Editors Conference in Reston, Virginia.

I had been with Stripes for nearly two years and had recently been promoted to managing editor of the important, editorially independent newspaper that serves our troops and their families overseas.

I also want to add for emphasize, that Stripes was one of five papers I served during my career, and was by far the most editorially independent of the bunch. In fact, Congress mandated it — even if our hard-hitting reporting would occasionally drive them and the Pentagon crazy every now and then. The truth can hurt.

Stripes is a newspaper that reports on the Pentagon, not for the Pentagon. It’s been 14 years since I worked at the place, and still reflexively feel the need to clear that up.

At any rate, I was in for five days of top-notch conferencing at the ASNE confab.

I was surrounded by my peers representing daily newspapers from Minneapolis to St. Louis, and from San Antonio to Denver. I reckon there were about 35 or 40 of us managing editors at this thing, but it’s been long enough now that I can’t remember for sure.

For some reason I can, however, vividly remember looking at the schedule they handed us for the week while battling with a coffee and donut that first morning. On the afternoon of the fourth day we’d be talking about “Diversity in the Newsroom.”

“Uh-oh,” I mumbled to myself. “This is when we’re gonna catch hell from some well-paid, uninformed “expert” for failing to have enough diversity in our newsrooms. Can’t wait ...”

Before I tell you what happened in that session, and how it radically changed my thinking on the subject, I want to stop right here very quickly and pat myself on the back just a tiny bit.

At the time of this conference, I had 10 assistant managers reporting to me. Here was the makeup of these managers:

• Four white women
• Three white men
• Two African-American women
• One Asian-American man

I’m not saying that I was staffing up the United Nations, but I am saying I worked with real intention to make sure my newsroom didn’t look like White Man’s Appreciation Day at the yacht club.

The overall makeup of our newsroom admittedly wasn’t as diverse, because getting and then keeping diverse candidates was a real challenge.

Because we were located in the National Press Building in downtown Washington, D.C., we were surrounded by two huge national newspapers: The Washington Post and USA Today.

Just as quickly as we were hiring and training up diverse talent, those papers were poaching them away from us. They, too, had diversity initiatives in place, and far bigger budgets at their disposal to lure away ambitious newspaper people from mid-sized papers like Stripes.

While it was a backhanded compliment that these newspapers were interested in our journalists, the constant churn presented a real challenge for us as we tirelessly pumped out seven editions of the paper to our readers all around the world 365 days a year.

By the time the Thursday afternoon diversity session of that conference rolled around I was feeling noble, haughty, and ready for what was coming at me.

The session was led by David Yarnold, the Managing Editor of the San Jose Mercury News. Turns out, I’d heard of Yarnold and his innovative initiatives to make diversity a key pillar in building a successful newsroom, but like any ornery journalist, I was skeptical as hell he really knew what he was talking about.

I was about to be schooled.

Yarnold opened by making light of the skepticism that wafted over the auditorium concerning this diabolical subject. He’d obviously done this a time or two, and slowly began winning us over, before he positively blew my mind.

Yarnold asked us what a good newspaper must do to be successful. There was some mumbling in the audience, before somebody finally piped up and said, “Accuracy! We must me accurate!”

“Good, good,” said Yarnold, “What else??”

Once again there was some murmuring, before somebody shouted, “Credibility! We must be credible!”

“Here, here,” we all shouted in agreement.

“OK, OK,” said Yarnold. “So … If a good newspaper has to be accurate … and a good newspaper has to be credible … Can a newspaper hope to be accurate and credible if the readers in its circulation area are comprised of 35 percent white people, 25 percent Hispanic people, 25 percent Black people, and 15 percent Asian people, while 85 percent of the newsroom is staffed with white people???????”

That’s when I said, “Whoa …”

I never looked at diversity in the newsroom, or any workplace, the same way again.

All men and women are created equal in America, but not all men and women are treated equally. This has everything to do with the sex of the person, the color of their skin and/or what station they started at in life.

Systematic and institutional racism abounds, and still holds far too many people down. If this reprehensible Supreme Court would rather ignore it, or somehow pretend it isn’t so, then they can go straight to hell.

Under this obscene court, women are losing rights and protections; voters are losing rights and protections; and our environment is losing rights and protections. These are facts.

How can we we claim to be a credible, caring country, if we won’t do everything in our power to lift all our citizens up to make sure everybody has a chance to shine and contribute to the American Experiment?

How can we claim that we are addressing this seismic issue accurately and get the results all of us deserve, if we can’t even have the decency and awareness to admit there is a problem in the first place?

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough