He says, “I witnessed a troubling scene where police cars were on fire, buildings were on fire, Black men were running, trying to elude the police. He, too, remembers the trauma of covering the McDuffie riots. Cottman, author and award-winning journalist, and Program Editor for the NBCUniversal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Team, similarly struggled with the intersections of his identities as a Black man and as a journalist. I thought I couldn't be my anonymous self, just a regular Black person, when I had that notepad, because I was no longer seen that way.It's really kind of crazy because you're not a part of the other neighborhood, either, you know, with your white peers not in the way that was equitable.” She explains, “I was like, wow, being disliked or not loved by your own, while you are trying to fight for your own, that was very stressful and a complexity that I was not prepared for. Gaines explains that she was happy to present the stories of the Black community, but the community viewed her as the enemy, seeing journalists as people who were not there to tell their stories. Working in Miami, she reported on the riots that followed the not guilty verdict in the McDuffie case in 1980, a case when a Black insurance salesman was beaten to death by four cops and the cops were acquitted of all charges. At the same time, when she was acting as a journalist, she felt she wasn’t accepted by the Black community either.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |