I have made mistakes as a reporter covering members of my community who are not white.

I have made mistakes though one of my mother’s oft-repeated lessons was that we are all God’s children, that we all bleed the same red blood, and that the truest thing that’s ever been said is “there, but for the grace of God, go I.”

I have made mistakes though I went to very diverse schools and have neared fisticuffs on more than one occasion confronting jerks at parties who tried to tell racist jokes.

I have made mistakes because I am white, and I lack the background to fully grasp the ways even my innocent decisions can contribute to prejudice.

Case in point: Once, when I was writing for the Battle Creek Enquirer a story about city leaders’ efforts to tackle racism, most of those leaders provided me their professional headshots, images of them in suits, smiling. I was unable to get such a photo of the one black man in the group, a high-level executive from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, so I pulled a photo from the Enquirer’s archives. It was a shot of him speaking at a meeting, brow furrowed, finger pointing. It was the best and most current picture we had.

I thought nothing of it, but that executive called me after publication and pointed out that my front-page story showed a handful of smiling white people and one angry-looking black man.

Researchers know such images on TV and in the newspaper — seen over and over again — begin to paint a prejudiced picture of people of color in our subconscious minds. Numerous studies have shown that even very young children — without any coaching from their parents, or even those who have been coached to love all — are likely to have more negative ideas about people of color than about white people (read a good summary of such studies here: https://tinyurl.com/y8yoj2jn).

I didn’t intend to contribute to that problem with the photo I chose of that Kellogg Foundation executive.

I was blind to the potential impact of my decisions.

Years before, I’d written a story about the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi and described one of their traditional songs as “wailing.” Members of the Tribal Council called a meeting with me and my editor to remind us that the word carries a bad connotation of stereotypical Indians from old western movies. I chose the word innocently and adamantly told the council so. My editor (also white) stuck up for me, and the meeting ended on bad terms (I, thankfully, had the chance to apologize years later).

Impact matters at least as much as intent.

All of us have subconscious ideas about race, prejudices of which we’re unaware that have been burrowed into our psyches by countless innocent, unknowing decisions about how black or brown people are portrayed in the media.

We’re all unable to see the potential impact of some of our choices because we are blind to the feelings of people who have lived lives different from our own.

The media can feed those societal weaknesses, as I did when I made my mistakes, or it can provide context and clarity that might help our readers overcome those weaknesses.

But we are ill-equipped to do the latter now.

More than three-fourths of newsroom employees are non-Hispanic whites, according to a 2018 report from the Pew Research Center. And 48% of newsroom workers are non-Hispanic white males, compared to 34% of the entire American workforce (read more here: https://tinyurl.com/wg56z4t).

Around the same time the Pew report came out, the Columbia Journalism Review said “decades of failure” by media managers had kept newsrooms homogenously unrepresentative of the communities they cover (https://tinyurl.com/ybzw6eql). Even in majority-minority cities, the Review reported, newspapers remain overwhelmingly white.

The Los Angeles Times newsroom, for example, was 77% white, while 72% of its city is not.

Newsrooms benefit from a diverse set of ideas and experiences that can generate story ideas of which we may have never thought, seek out perspectives of which we might be unaware, help us fill in our blind spots.

The communities we serve would benefit, too, from that type of newspapering, because it is more accurate, more comprehensive, and a fairer depiction of the history we’re making today.

Now, with the world once again aflame because of our ongoing reckoning with America’s original sin, it’s exceedingly important that newsrooms encourage students of color to consider careers in journalism and that we hire reporters, photographers, and editors who look less like us and more like the world around us.

We might make fewer mistakes if we do.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-358-5686 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.