What the racist murder of a young black teenager can teach us about newsroom diversity (and no I am not talking about Stephen Lawrence)

As a news editor can you be objective? Or do your life experiences, culture and identity make you biased? 

I have worked in and around newsrooms for over twenty years and have come to the conclusion that no single person can escape the subjectivity of their own lived experience irrespective of their ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class or disability.

But I also believe that newsrooms should strive to produce the most impartial objective news possible.

So how do we achieve that?

In a single word: “diversity”

Let me explain with a simple story. 

Most people in the UK have heard of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager who was killed in a racist attack in 1993.

Fewer people have heard of Rolan Adams.

Rolan was killed in a similar racist attack just twenty months previously. He was stabbed to death by a gang of racist thugs in South East London close to where Stephen would later be killed.

In May 1992 to mark the anniversary of Rolan Adams death the BNP (British National Party) decided to hold a march through Woolwich.

I was at university at the time and so I took a train to London and then got in a car with a group of friends to join a counter demonstration. 

As far as I know the two groups never met as the police kept us apart. I briefly saw some Union Jack flags in the distance but that was all I saw of the BNP.

At the end of the day my friends and I then got back in our car and started to drive home. 

It was then that we saw a police van on the other side of a dual carriageway also leaving the area. The police van saw the car full of young black men and did a U-turn and pulled us over.

They ordered us out of the car and we were all separately questioned. I was questioned by the open doors of the police van.

In the middle of them questioning me they decided to take one of my friends down to the police station and bundled him towards the police van. In the confusion they bumped him into me, we all landed on a pile on the ground, and we both ended up going down to the police station.

To cut a very long story short I narrowly escaped the incident having long-term consequences and if things had turned out just slightly differently I could have got a criminal record which would have derailed any future career at the BBC. 

In all honesty the story is not a dramatic miscarriage of justice story. 

The end result is I did not even get a criminal record. 

I believe the police were racist and I saw just how easily my life could have taken a completely different direction through no fault of my own.

Most black British men I talk to have similar stories.

But truth be told it has influenced how I view the criminal justice system, the police and people with criminal records (who might not have been as lucky as me). 

And yet for over twenty years I have never talked about the episode - I have kept it a secret.

It is not something I actively lie about but it is an aspect of my life that I do not talk about for fear that people will look at me differently and stereotype me.

Years later at the BBC I directed programmes about Stephen Lawrence. 

As an executive producer I oversaw three Panorama investigations into police racism. And never once did I tell my production team about the racism I had suffered and my experience with the police. 

I realise now that there were several reasons I kept quiet about it.

First, I was worried my journalism would not be viewed as objective. I had implicitly bought into the idea that the only way I could be objective is if I had not experienced something that disproportionately affects young black men. 

It didn’t occur to me to challenge the idea that my white colleagues’ experience of NOT experiencing police racism was no less objective.

Another reason I did not talk about it was because I was worried about being stereotyped. 

I was concerned that once people knew I had experienced this brush with the law that is all they would see of me. I would not be seen as a journalist who could cover a myriad of different subjects but the “black journalist who covers police racism”. Social researchers have a term for this “social categorization”. 

The truth is our values and the way we see the world are shaped by our experiences.

A newsroom full of black people who had negative experiences with the police would not be a balanced newsroom and I worry about its impartiality.

Conversely a newsroom that was full of white people who never had negative experiences with the police would also be unbalanced and I equally worry about its values and the impartiality of the news it would produce.

If we want truly balanced and impartial journalism we should strive to create diverse newsrooms full of people with a range of experiences. It is the balancing of these different experiences that bring objectivity.

To put it simply - diversity is objectivity. 

But my experience, and my fear of sharing my story, would suggest this alone is not enough. 

We also need to create a culture where people are not worried of being pigeonholed, stereotyped or judged when they do bring their full lived experiences into work. 

Or to put it another way - the best newsroom should be diverse and inclusive.