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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Mellinger, Gwyneth. "Members of the Club: A Genealogy of the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Diversity Initiative," American Studies, University of Kansas, April 2006.
The realignment of public policy related to race and gender during the 1960s produced a sea change in the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ conceptualization of its democratic mission. Although this shift was gradual and subtle, it culminated in 1978 in a progressive move by some of the organization’s leaders to launch a “minority hiring initiative” to end the de facto segregation that had maintained daily newspaper newsrooms as workplaces for white journalists. While the anti-racist activism of these ASNE leaders expanded opportunities for non-white journalists in daily newspaper journalism, their efforts were undercut by resistance from other ASNE members and by institutional structures within the journalism profession, which had erected boundaries against non-white participation. Viewed through the prism of whiteness theory, an extensive collection of primary source materials related to the ASNE and its diversity initiative offers a rich location for examining the role of discourses of white privilege as they structured the ASNE as an elite and all-white professional space from the 1920s through the 1950s. The study then traces the interplay of white privilege with the discourses of social justice that emerged in tandem with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The analysis interrogates the ASNE’s response to the Kerner Commission’s 1968 critique of segregation in the news media and many editors’ unwillingness to see newsroom integration as a democratic imperative. The inquiry concludes with an examination of the founding of the ASNE’s hiring initiative in 1978 and the lackluster progress it made through the end of the 1980s. Throughout the project, the analysis is mindful of the ways in which norms contrived through perceptions of race interacted with gender, class, and other categories of difference to produce a white prerogative in daily journalism and to maintain restrictions on participation by those who did not signify as acceptable journalists.
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