Isn't this convenient?

Black women, represent.

I was just talking about how the internet is so relentlessly cis. And that this isn’t an evil conspiracy by cis people, but it does take its toll when you’re reading articles about laws targeting trans people (adults or children) and all the info is about what cis people are doing and how cis people are reacting and what cis people might do next. The centring of cis experience is inevitable given that there are just so many cis folks around. But while it’s inevitable that this is going to happen and while it’s not bad in itself for any one article or piece of writing to focus on cis perspectives, it is not inevitable that ALL the coverage is cis-centric and it IS bad for a relentless stream of articles to focus only on cis perspectives.

I wrote a bit — not too much — about what information reporters might have included when covering Mike DeWine’s veto of the Enact 🤮hio SAFE Act if they were going to be writing an article centring trans perspectives. But IANAJ and so I think it’s also valuable to have an example from professional journalists about how marginalized perspectives can be centred and still be news. And guess what? Reuters to the rescue! Just this morning they’ve got a piece about how Black lives would be affected by a Republican budget-cut proposals.

The article begins with a concrete example as its hook: Charla Plaines, “a 66-year-old grandmother in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,” used a federal program to limit lead poisoning that was harming her granddaughter. Removing legacy lead paint was quite expensive (reportedly $15k), and without assistance removing the lead would inevitably have taken longer, greatly increasing the neurological risks her granddaughter faced.

It later ties Plaines’ story in with more generalizable impacts:

Slightly over half of Harrisburg's 50,000 population is Black; one-quarter is Hispanic or Latino.

"The housing stock is so old, we never fail to find lead hazards," said Dave Olsen, manager of Harrisburg's $5 million Lead Hazard Reduction Demonstration grant.

Lead-based paint was banned in 1978 because of severe neurological problems it causes in young children.

By April, 262 Harrisburg housing units will have been cleansed under the current round of grants, Olsen said.

Federal officials contend that for every dollar it spends on removing lead paint, between $17 to $200 is saved by improved child health.

House Republicans would fund the lead program at $65 million below last year's $410 million. It also would capture $560 million that was to be dispatched over three years.

Representative Rosa DeLauro, the senior House Appropriations Democrat, said that would mean 33,000 fewer low-income families getting homes scrubbed of lead, resulting in about 46,000 children continuing to be exposed.

Stats like that not only show how valuable it is to Black children and the adults who love them, it also puts the lie to the notion that these cuts are about saving money. 46,000 children. Republicans are willing to attack the brains, the minds of 46,000 children to save $1 this year that will show up as a $100 bill in a future year. And this isn’t even as if only Black children will suffer, though that is what this article is about. Lead toxicity limits language, conceptual connectivity, memory, reasoning and other faculties, but it also dramatically lowers inhibitions and prevents the brain from considering or even understanding future consequences. The direct result is more impulse crime committed by those who have been poisoned. The children will suffer, going to hellhole prisons, but those around will also suffer from crimes that need not happen. Caring for Black children is good for all of us, but the GOP doesn’t care so long as they can present the false image of reducing budgetary obligations, all the while knowing that they are incurring future debts through social security and the justice system.

The article further addresses how unreasonable pressure and responsibility are offloaded onto others by politicians:

"Blame the poor. Blame the Blacks and Latinos" for fiscal problems, [Marc Morial, head of the National Urban League] added.

This harkens back to the feminist “third shift” I discussed in the last post, a conceptual model created and elaborated largely by Black feminists. As the article discusses how Black individuals and communities would be affected by the budget cuts, it also provides the information above, obiter dicta, that allows readers to understand that there’s no way that saving $1 to incur $17 to $200 dollars in debt is good for the budget. Careful readers will then connect Morial’s statement about the blame poor people and people of color must unfairly shoulder for the budget decisions made by people who willingly spend extra money to injure Black children’s brains.

Imagine if Republicans were doing this with hammers, spending $17 to $200 (that last must be a really fancy hammer) to attack Black children and then blame them for it. The mere concept is disgusting. The reality is worse. And yet it is in this environment that we as a society ask Black women to build bridges between communities, to defuse tensions that by and large Black women do not cause.

The piece concludes:

While Congress battles over what to cut and what to protect, Charla Plaines sees firsthand the value of government addressing social needs.

Her granddaughter, she explains, has required speech therapy and struggles with reading and math, although "her vocabulary is definitely improved." Doctors cited lead exposure as the cause. She and her family think Loyalty was exposed to high doses of lead from a pacifier she sometimes placed, unknowingly, on a contaminated window sill.

Though there are passing comments on the political blame for the current debt, nowhere does the article explore the political prospects or strategies of the white Republicans who crafted the proposed cuts. It barely bothers to name the committee that produced the bills, and only names specific persons when quoting them. The article spends as much time providing information from the CDC on lead poisoning and racial disparities in risk as it does on information from the Manhattan Institute conservative think-tank and its spokesperson on these budget issues. No politician gets even half of what Reuters devoted to either of those sources.

None of this is to say that Black perspectives are sufficiently represented in political and social discourse. Rather, the point of this post is to show that this type of writing can be done, has been done, and has great merit. While I am not the J-school prof to teach reporters how to cover issues while centring trans voices, it’s not crazy of me to point out that journalists can and should do this — at all for too many publications, but also just plain more even for the publications that have published articles centring Black or trans or other marginalized perspectives on the issues that directly affect us.

And as a reader, I encourage you not merely to read Black authors and women authors and indigenous authors and disabled authors. No, in a world with Harris Faulkner it’s up to you to look for work that centres those perspectives, whether you know anything about the author or not. It’s not merely for your short term interest, either. By expanding our view of whose voices deserve attention, in a world of finite time and finite column inches, that expansion necessarily squeezes out some of the undeserved attention paid to the wealthy and powerful. In the ideal world this would result in more and more people asking why their congressional representative wants to reduce their tax bill by $1 during an election year only to increase it by $17 to $200 after the election is over. We may not reach that ideal world soon, but we can make choices that help us trend towards it.