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Commitment to Diversity
In my work
When I was eight years old, I once found an article about Sri Lanka in a Delta in-flight magazine. I was so excited that I ripped the page out, snuck it in my bag, and hung it up on my wall when I got home. I was so excited to be represented. I was so excited to see myself reflected in any form of media, especially journalism. Now, as an 18-year-old and the editor-in-chief of a large student newspaper organization, I have a platform. I once heard Mindy Kaling say, “If you don’t see yourself in stories, write them yourself”. I barely saw Sri Lankan stories in newspapers growing up. So, now I write them. Over the past two years, I have written opinioned stories about colorism, South Asian media representation, and even the pronunciation of my name. I have created articles highlighting South Asians in my own community breaking boundaries, such as MYNA, one of the first Indian R&B singers, and Solomon Rajput, a Pakistani man running for Congress. And, I have photographed and interviewed over 20 survivors of the Sri Lankan War. Reflecting back, I have dedicated my high school journalism career to documenting the South Asian experience, which has been ignored by the mainstream media. For that, I am inexplicably proud and grateful that The Emery gave me the space to do it.
Shown above, my family and I at Thai Pongal, an important holiday for Sri Lankans.
I go to an incredibly diverse school, and we are lucky that our newspaper staff reflects that. However, overall, the stories that get published are overwhelmingly from White and Asian journalists. Coming into the EIC position, I knew we needed to implement new diversity initiatives. Below are some of the considerations and changes we have made.
1. Don't speak for students of color, give them a platform
During the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in June, our editorial team decided to scrap our original draft of our paper to produce an issue spotlighting police brutality. Despite the paper being due in three days, we took the risk because we wanted to make journalism that was important to us and our community. While we all were appalled by George Floyd’s Death, as EIC, I wanted to create a space for Black journalists to cover it. Our main story was an opinion piece titled, “My experience as a Black Man in America”. Any person could have written an opinion piece on it but it’s important, as non-BIPOC, to not take space away from Black journalists. Additionally, we created Student Voices, a column for all students in our school to speak up on issues that matter to them. Student Voices has allowed us to find a diverse array of guest writers and give them a larger platform to discuss issues affecting their community, such as police brutality and poverty.
2. Diversity doesn't end at race
While an important aspect of diversity is race, as leaders, we should not end there. Diversity means gender, sexual orientation, age, physical ability, religion, and ideas. One aspect of diversity that we need to work on is representing both political parties equally. We live in a liberal bubble, so sometimes we forgot to consider the Republican opinion in our work. However, now, we are trying become more unbiased. When reporting on political stories, we always reach out to students on both sides of the aisle to create impartial reporting.
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3. We still need to make progress
While changes will help, I acknowledge that as a publication we need to continue to make our program more equitable and accessible for all students. As we chose leadership for next year, I will focus heavily on promoting staffers that understand the student journalism has not been equitable in the past and moving forward, we need to find solutions to increase diversity in all areas within our publication.
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