True Equity Requires SACRIFICE - Brief Article

PRINCETON, N.J. -- When you're used to getting what you want 90 percent of the time, equality feels like you're winning 10 percent instead of half the time.

Studies show that elementary school teachers often call on boys more than girls. When teachers who previously favored boys call on girls and boys equally, the boys complained that they were being ignored.

And when organizations aim to employ more than a handful of token minorities, Whites tend to cry discrimination.

In applying for newspaper internships, I've found that some papers I'd like to work for are not interested in me at all. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch's program is only for juniors. The Providence Journal only accepts students from Rhode Island. And The New York Times only wants minorities.

The first two situations made me wince as my chances of getting hired shrunk. But I gladly accepted the third circumstance: I am happy to sacrifice my chances of getting a job if it means that the newsroom of the future will not be an ocean of White faces.

Sure, if the world revolved around me, I would choose to be eligible for a New York Times internship. But the problem is that historically, the world has revolved around privileged, White people like me. And to a large extent, it still does.

According to the Ford Foundation, of 1,500 daily newspapers in the United States, 11 percent of the professional staff are minorities, and 40 percent of those papers have all-White newsrooms.

Those statistics -- which I easily believe after spending last summer at the Charlotte Observer- indicate the situation is so grave that newspapers must seriously consider race when y hire employees.

No organization, and especially no newspaper, can serve a community when the non-White reporters are so few that editors automatically give them `Black issues' and `race relations' beats. It must be awful to stick out so much that your assignments are based on how different you look.

I will concede that technically, when newspapers decide to hire only minorities, they are discriminating in that solitary instance. But the bigger picture clearly shows that after discriminating against minorities for centuries, it is stupid not to let the pendulum swing the other way.

We will never live in a world where White people cannot get jobs, but hopefully there will be a time where race does not matter because the workplace is equitable.

I understand why angry White men are angry, but I do not feel sorry for them. They are just like the boys in the elementary school classroom who benefit from an unfair situation for so long that equity felt like oppression. Though many employers work hard to recruit minorities, organizations are still hiring far fewer minorities than

Whites. It just feels unfair because it isn't what we're used to.

According to St. Petersburg Times Director of Development Nancy Waclawek, the Times' internship program for minorities at the Florida A&M University is the kind of minorities-only program it will take to level the playing field.

"Women were in this situation 25 to 30 years ago. Sometimes you need people with vision and feed money to help people who have not had enough access to positions of power and good standing. Women needed advocates in the '60s and still do," she says. "Everybody needs to start somewhere."

-- Emily Bliss is a senior at Princeton University. This article first appeared in The Daily Princetonian.

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