From the smallest single-person newsroom to the largest media conglomerate, journalists are grappling with how to address prejudice inside the industry, and how to report responsibly about the deep rifts around race, gender, class and ability. Several sessions at the 2021 Knight Media Forum addressed these issues head-on, challenging both funders and news executives to interrogate their own biases and change the ways in which they allocate resources and address historical disparities.

The conference took place in the shadow of the Jan. 6 insurrection, in which perpetrators carried Confederate flags and white supremacist symbols while violently seeking to halt the certification of the presidential election. Speaker Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” stressed the gravity of this transgression during an inspiring and eye-opening talk. However, she noted, it was not, as many have claimed, a betrayal of what America stands for, but rather “the consequences of unaddressed history.”

It might have looked like a different country, a different century, she said, “but it is ours… This is the country’s karmic moment of truth.” Both journalism and philanthropy have a role in unraveling the narratives that uphold the American caste system, and unveiling the ways in which the ideologies of slavery still distort our assumptions about whose lives have value.

She described the striking image of masked Black janitors, cleaning up after the attack. While the rioters were ushered out with little violence, she observed, “if people looking like the janitors in that crew deigned to break into the U.S. Capitol — well, we know what would have come of that. It is inconceivable. They would not have lived to tell.”

A panel titled “Dismantling Systemic Racism: The Way Forward for Funders and Newsrooms,” tackled these issues directly, with a panel of women of color who have been advancing bold correctives in the midst of 2020’s “racial reckoning” in journalism. That, in turn, came on the heels of firings of many high-profile media personalities and executives as a result of the #MeToo movement.

Both journalism and philanthropy “demand a lot from others…but don’t necessarily do the work to look inward,” said moderator LaSharah Bunting of Knight Foundation, who wrote a  critique of failed newsroom diversity efforts in 2019. Bunting is one of 16 signers of an October open letter titled “Equity First: A Call to Action for Journalism and Journalism Funders.” Other program officers from foundations across the country signed the letter.

Read the full article about journalism and racial reckoning by Jessica Clark at Knight Foundation.