During the summer of 2000, The New York Times published "How Race Is Lived In America," a six-week series examining race relations in the daily lives of ordinary Americans. It was the culmination of a year's work by more than 20 reporters and photographers. On Thursday, October 19, four representatives of The Times-Deputy Managing Editor Gerard Boyd, Assistant Managing Editor Soma Goldan Behr, and reporters Dana Canedy and Amy Hartman-came to NYU to speak about the series in a panel that drew in hundreds of students, teachers, and many other attendants.

Amidst all the praise the editors and reporters received and gave themselves, one of the main criticisms they got about the series was its under-representation of Latino Americans and Asian Americans. Out of the 15 featured articles, four articles covered Latinos in some way or another, and only one article covered an Asian American alongside an African American. Even if four out of the fifteen articles included a Latino, however, fourteen out of the fifteen articles dealt with the relations between whites and blacks. To them, "How Race Is Lived In America" is mainly lived between whites and blacks only, not blacks and browns, whites and browns, yellows and whites, browns and blacks, yellows and browns, and blacks and yellows. Add red into that mix, and you have a whole series of combinations that somehow the Times overlooked.

---

How can you expect to have the Asian American story when you didn't even have an Asian American journalist?

---

Responding to the criticism that the series did not adequately cover Latinos and Asians, Ms. Behr said, "It's been done before…the discovery of Latino America and Asian America…what we were doing was totally new." The discourse between whites and blacks have been written about since the times of the Bible, and in America, since the slave trade that brought Africans to the Americas in the sixteenth century. I don't know how she missed that one.

During the Audience "Question and Comments" portion of the October panel, I spoke and said, "In all honesty," since they had been stressing to the audience the importance of honesty and bringing things out in the open, "I was one of the people who thought that there was an under-representation of Latinos, Asians and Native Americans, and the series was overwhelmingly black and white." After hearing from the panelists that on their large team, the majority was white, the rest mostly black, a few Latinos, and one Asian photographer, I proceeded with the question, "How can you expect to have the Asian American story when you didn't even have an Asian American journalist? All you had was one Asian American photographer -" Ms. Behr then cut me off and made a hilarious joke, "But we didn't have one Asian American journalist, we had one Asian American layout designer." She laughed and faced the crowd while many laughed along with her.

next ~>