*According to the Reuters Institute, newsrooms in Brazil are primarily staffed by White employees even though 55.7% of the population identify as Afro-Brazilian, while 43.2% identify as White.
Luiz Fernando Boaventura Teixeira writes for the outlet, “To measure the human impact of racial representation in Brazilian newsrooms, I created a questionnaire, asking basic biographical details and inviting journalists to indicate if they would like to talk further about their experiences.”
Sixty-one people responded to Luiz’s questionnaire, which included “27 men and 34 women working for TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, websites and magazines – mostly as reporters, some freelancers and a few in management positions,” he writes.
The racial breakdown of the sample included 52.5% White, 41% Afro-Brazilian, and 6.6% Yellow. Indigenous reporters did not respond to the query, according to Luiz.
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Per the report, below are some of the things the interviewees said about the lack of diversity in news production and the effect on the journalists:
“Diversity is pretty much non-existent, not only racial. The newsrooms here are composed predominantly of white cisgender heterosexual men, usually upper-class, and those in management roles are [just] older version of them.”
“I believe that we are always reproducing some kind of racist stereotype and that people don’t actually mean to change it inside the newsroom.”
“I once wrote an article that only gained attention because my editor, a black woman, personally said that the proper angle should be about race and not only put that on the front cover of the newspaper but also pushed for a headline that didn’t mince words. I had never seen anything like that in the media before”.
Additional comments included:
“There was an occasion on which my boss – a White woman – threatened to quit her job because her own boss wanted to shut down an entire article that featured four Afro-Brazilians that was labelled ‘too activist’ to be published. Months later, my team and I received a warning that we were publishing too many stories ‘about minorities’.”
“I pitched a multimedia special about racism in the workplace and I basically had to do everything by myself because my bosses wouldn’t give me resources to go to places in person or let me have a cameraman to record the interviews. They thought that it wasn’t that important. However, after it was released and had major positive reviews and recognition, it was sold as a company effort, which was a lie.”
“My boss apparently never noticed that almost all of the sources we used were old white men, and was confused when we pointed this out to him. He seemingly did not think it was an issue because ‘we should not choose our sources’, but complained to us when we used quotes not from sources that he already knew.”
The respondents also shared their personal experiences with micro-aggressions in the workplace and struggling to fit in with colleagues.
“When I decided to braid my hair I became the joke of the newsroom. Even my boss was comfortable saying things like ‘here comes the real negro’, and everybody laughed. They never respected me,” one interviewee said.
Luiz writes, “My interviewees mentioned an impact of under-representation in newsrooms was the development of tokenism in assignments, wherein Afro-Brazilian journalists became responsible for all stories about race by default, because “they were the only ones there” “.
Read the full report here.
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