Earlier this month our Journalism Department conducted the re-writing of its mission statement. In most cases I find this process more painful than … (pick your fear of the most painful medical procedure or torture.) The mission meeting usually involves a sports jacket-clad consultant, reams of butcher block paper and clock-watching faculty members. (Our consultant was a woman sans sport jacket.)

In many cases mission statements at colleges and work places are recorded in the minutes or put on file. This is the equivalent of the kitchen junk drawer which is home to the dried out glue stick and refrigerator warranty. Most folks look at the warranty when the fridge goes on the fritz. They don’t check it periodically to see if the fridge is meeting expectations.

Our faculty members also were asked to list individual goals for students and faculty. Of course, the student mission statement included diversity. I’m fortunate to work at a place where diversity is almost always on the table at every level of school operations.

One of the goals initially read that students should apply diversity in reporting, writing, editing and producing. This seemed reasonable, but after some thought it sounded inadequate. This goal could have been interpreted as: students should include more than one race in their source list. Or, it could be narrowly interpreted to imply that you should not have a story that does not include women. Basically the goal as first written could be interpreted in many ways depending on one’s outlook on and/or definition of diversity.

After thinking about this for a moment, I dropped my cynical snarl and took part in the discussion. Eventually we agreed that diversity should be more than a check-off list. Others, including Sally Lehrman, author of “News in a New America,” have challenged journalists and educators to scratch beneath the surface when discussing diversity.

We changed the goal to: “Graduates of our program should demonstrate an understanding and application of diversity in reporting, writing, editing and producing.” The change added one key word: understanding. But it was an important word. It contained the possibility of moving our students and future journalists beyond the check-off list and into really understanding what it means to include a mix of cultures and viewpoints in our work.

The exercise taught me that sometimes we have to drop our cynicism and get our hands dirty if we are serious about diversity. I learned that I will bear some of the responsibility if the mission statement remains in the kitchen junk drawer a few months from now.

Has anyone had similar experiences involving mission statements and diversity? If so, please chime in.

Curtis Lawrence is a member of the SPJ Diversity Committee and an assistant professor of journalism at Columbia College Chicago.

Currently, there are 29 racial or ethnic designations on the U.S. Census form. I have to ask “Why only 29?” And being from a community excluded from the Census, I have to ask again, “Why even have that designation if you can’t include everyone?”

Here’s the list:

White; Hispanic (listed five different ways) Hispanic, Latino or Spanish Origin, Mexican American, Chicano, (What country does Chicano come from?), Black (listed three different ways) Black, African American, Negro, American Indian or Alaskan Native (they get space to write in their “Tribe”), Asians and listed as Asian, Asian Indian, Japanese, Native Hawaiian, Chinese, Korean, Guamanian or Chamorro, Filipino, Vietnamese, Samoan and “Other Asian” such as Laotian, Thai, Pakistani, and Cambodian. And finally, they have Pacific Islander, Fijian, Tongan.

47 actual words describing ethnicity and race and 313 characters. And they can’t add one more word or 4 more characters to the list.

For the past three decades, American Arabs have been asked by the Federal Government and urged by their leadership (many funded by the U.S. Census through grants and full time jobs) to ignore their exclusion from the list and instead write their name “Arab” on the “Other” line at the bottom of the list.

I think it is wrong. I think diversity loses it’s significance when it is narrowly defined and some ethnicities are excluded for, in my opinion, political reasons.

The whole point of including identities is to encourage individuals to participate and identify themselves. Including their names on the Census form is a form of respect and recognition that encourages their participation. It holds precisely true to then argue that excluding a group from the form discourages that participation. If they are on there, they will participate more. If they are not on there they will, therefore, not participate more.

American Arabs (and Muslims, a religious designation often wrongly interchanged by the mainstream media to designate the larger racial or ethnic group of Arabs), have been center stage in an international drama over war, conflict, terrorism and discrimination. Everyday the issue of Arabs and Muslims is raised and yet society and the mainstream media feel comfortable to argue a dichotomy in conflicting reasoning that 1) Arabs are a potential national threat and therefore should be profiled (counted in a negative manner) and 2) Arabs are “Caucasian” or White and therefore should not be counted in a positive way.

What is a a positive way? Well, counting Arabs officially, would open the door to a vast amount of racial and ethnic protections.

In communities across the country, police departments are required to note the race or ethnicity of motorists that they stop for alleged traffic violations and ticketing. Why? Because communities want to know if certain ethnic groups are being targeted for racial and discriminatory reasons.

Arabs are stopped on a huge scale — American Arab communities suspect — and they are the victims of ongoing discrimination. But not being “recognized” officially by the Federal Government means they are not counted and are blended in to the larger identity of White. The fact is in many communities, racism against Arabs is rampant but we don’t have a way to measure that because the mechanisms for measuring that kind of bigotry by government agencies, including starting with the U.S. Census, does not exist.

American Arab journalists have been lobbying UNITY: Journalists of Color for official recognition, but our requests have been rejected as soundly and as disrespectfully as the White mainstream media has long fought opening the doors of the Fourth Estate to the inclusion of Blacks, Hispanics and Asians.

That needs to change. American Arabs need to stand up and protest and say that the process of excluding an ethnic and racial group from the U.S. Census for the past three decades (at least since 1980 when American Arabs were first pushed to “write in” their race “Arab”) must end. The mainstream media which claims to care about issues of diversity needs to also take a second look at the selfishness of the diversity process so far. Just having “their” representatives at the mainstream news media table is not the proper response for the need for diversity in the media. It is not “true diversity” if the groups represented in UNITY and on the US Census are only certain groups represented and others are excluded. We do not have true diversity.

– Ray Hanania

www.RadioChicagoland.com