Civic Catalyst Newsletter
Fall 1998

In It Together: A Conversation about Race

By Pat Ford
The Pew Center

The Spokesman-Review didn't shy away from reporting the community's "dark side" in its series.

Richard Butler announced the plans for his annual Aryan Nations Youth Congress with a lot of swagger last spring. The leader of the white supremacist group said a hundred of his members would march through Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, for 45 minutes in July.

Once again, Butler was hijacking the discussion of race in the region.

Because that area of Northern Idaho and Eastern Washington known as the Inland Northwest is so predominately white, it seemed the only time racial issues were raised was when some of the local extremist groups staged a high-profile event.

This time, editors at The Spokesman-Review decided it would be different.

In the weeks leading up to the march, The Spokesman-Review decided to take a comprehensive look at the range of the community's conversations about racial issues so that when the paper - the region's largest-circulation daily - reported on the march, it would do so in the context of those conversations.

The resulting series, "In it together: A conversation about race," ran from late May through July 17 - the day before the march. The project included two community forums - one a discussion for teenagers organized by assistant city editor Ken Sands that attracted 700 high school students and the other a panel discussion broadcast on KHQ-TV (NBC). The paper also folded a placard into its 120,000 daily papers for readers to display in home or car windows as a quiet rebuke to the Aryan Nations. It read: "In it together. Too great for hate."

Scott Sines, managing editor for opinion and presentation, says "In it together" accomplished its purpose and had an interesting effect on the Aryan Nations.

"It put them in a reactive mode," says Sines, "which was uncomfortable for them.

"Normally, they do something and we react. But here we are having a discussion on race in schools and in churches and they have to react," he said.

Sines began to understand just how uncomfortable the region's white supremacists were after the paper received a terrifying bomb threat. "We have identified The Spokesman-Review as public enemy number one, ahead of the federal government," the letter said. "A bomb is being constructed to destroy the Review Tower . . . It won't just destroy part of the building as in Oklahoma. It will level the entire block. We thought it would be more interesting for you to speculate on when it might arrive."

The note said the paper should keep organizing assemblies, such as the teen forum, "That way you'll have a good brigade of mourners."

"It had us all a little bit nervous for a while," says Sines. But the paper is hardly backing down. "One of our goals is to continue this discussion into the fall. We already have a request from the schools to go in and do (a forum) again. That tells you how eager people are to talk about it."

A Quick Game Plan

The Spokesman-Review revved up "In it together" very quickly. Since it was pegged to a news event, there were breaking developments as the series was running.

The whole thing was planned in about three weeks and the framework was very simple, according to Sines. "We said, 'Okay, where are the places in the community where people are having conversations about race - in schools, in families, in churches, at work?' Then we went to those places."

The paper found the community was, indeed, having discussions about race that transcended the extremist groups that populate the region.

In churches, the paper found a group of clergy already trying to draft a "Human Rights Covenant" that they hoped would be adopted across congregations. In businesses, it found novel recruitment efforts to diversify many local workforces.

In schools, it found teachers using the examples of local white supremacist groups to teach the danger of racism.

While it reported heartening accounts of people working on tolerance, understanding and unity, the paper also wrote many stories that showed a dark side of the community.

The churches, after a year of work, had been unable to develop much beyond a statement that condemned racism as un-Christian. An interdenominational service to counter the Aryan Nations march was rejected by some conservative churches. The Spokesman-Review, in its story about the service, quoted the Rev. Ron Hunter: "When they say, 'Let's get everyone all together, we're all the same' - it ain't so. That's not what Christianity is all about."

In reporting how schools teach about racism, the paper found concerns that such teaching is biased. A story headlined "Schools vary on subject of racism" reported the views of local pastor Ray Barker that "public schools have given an undeserved black eye to organizations such as the Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan . . . Those groups are legitimately angry because of a corrupt government, Barker said," according to the newspaper's account. "But schools don't encourage students to try to really understand those organizations."

Reporting the Dark Side

The Spokesman-Review never shrank from including all these points of view. "We were looking for all those perspectives," says Sines. "There is a dark side that exists in this community and it is valuable for people to understand that. If you want to help a community define itself, you need those comments. You have to know they're out there."

A member of the paper's own staff revealed prejudices that made his colleagues uncomfortable in writing a column about talking to his child about racism. Steve Massey told how he had to explain racism to his 5-year-old son in a restaurant when Aryan Nations members in uniform walked in and sat down. Although Massey concluded that racial discrimination is wrong, he also wrote, ". . . there is a hidden snare in this push for diversity. Tolerance cannot be an excuse to condone moral wrongdoing.Violence, slander, homosexuality - all can win converts when married to the call for diversity and tolerance."

Interactive editor Doug Floyd says there is still disagreement over whether that passage should have been deleted because of its inflammatory reference to homosexuality.

"I edited the page and didn't hesitate to leave the remark, which I found offensive, in a signed commentary. Seems to me it reveals some of the complexity of the diversity discussion."

The March

On July 18, the day of the march, there were only 70 marchers, including reinforcements from an out-of-state Klan order called in to boost the numbers. They marched for 28 minutes instead of the planned 45.

Efforts of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations might have contributed to the shortened march. The group, profiled in the "In it together" series, convinced some 1,300 people, including the mayors of Spokane and Coeur d'Alene, to pledge money for each minute the Aryan Nations marched. The strategy, called "making lemonade out of lemons," guaranteed that the longer the group marched, the more money would be raised for human rights organizations in the region.

While about 1,000 people watched or protested the march in Coeur d'Alene, another 600 or so gathered at Gonzaga University for a counter-demonstration. Floyd says the paper heard from one reader who picked up the paper while driving home to Canada and decided to stay around to attend the Gonzaga gathering.

There has been a lot of positive community reaction to "In it together," says Sines. "People were glad that we did it and they were pleased that their efforts were recognized in the paper along with the negative news of the march."

And the bomb threats? That was not a new tactic for the newspaper's critics. The Spokesman-Review's Spokane Valley bureau was actually bombed by a white supremacist group in April of 1996. There were no injuries.

Sines says he is more impressed by the words of the Rev. Tom Starr, a fundamentalist preacher whom Sines says is one of the paper's harshest critics. Starr was asked to write a guest column for The Spokesman-Review as part of "In it together." Sines says he was struck by this passage from Starr:
"Being white and part of the majority, I fail to understand what it means to be in the minority. I fail to understand how those in minority communities feel about racism and prejudice. I have, in large measure, ignored the problem. My failure to care enough to find out is a contributing factor in perpetuating racism."
"That had to be a revelation," says Sines. "That had to be a lot of soul-searching. When I read that, I thought, 'Wow, this is having some impact.' "