by DeWayne Wickham

At the beginning of this century, W.E.B. DuBois predicted that "the problem of the 20th century will be the problem of the color line."

And now, nearly 100 years later, we know he was right.

The great racial divide that ended Reconstruction and ushered in a tidal wave of black-white conflict tore viciously at America's social fabric from the first decade of this century to the very last. In 1968, the Kerner Commission -- which President Lyndon Johnson created to assess the causes of race riots -- blamed the media in part for its failure "to report adequately on the causes and consequences of civil disorders and the underlying problems of race relations."

Stung by this criticism, news organizations responded with a campaign to increase their employment and coverage of African Americans. What resulted was a lot more motion than movement. Over the past 28 years, black employment in the newspaper industry has risen -- with all deliberate speed -- from 1 to 5 1/2 percent of the newsroom workforce. And while the coverage of African Americans has certainly increased, it has not kept pace with the need for diversity in news gathering and dissemination.

Two examples:

When the Soviet Union collapsed, many news organizations in this country, determined to measure the impact of the fall of communism, sent a small army of reporters hustling off to Eastern Europe. They went to Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. They talked to farmers and factory workers, students and housewives, old communists and new democrats. And the stories they wrote dominated the pages of our newspapers for months.

Lost in this coverage was the fact that the greatest human suffering that resulted from the ideological conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States occurred in Africa, not Europe. It was on the African continent that the ideological conflict which slit Europe erupted into open warfare. Tens of thousands of Africans died in East-West surrogate battles in places like Mozambique, Somalia, Ethiopia, Angola, and Namibia.

The Cold War produced few casualties in Europe. But Angola, where warring factions backed by the United States and the Soviet Union planted 10 million land mines, has the world's highest per capita number of amputees. Yet there were virtually no reporters sent to Africa when the Soviet Union crumbled to gauge the impact of the end of the Cold War on that continent.

Why not?

And then there is this. In the wake of O.J. Simpson's acquittal of the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, this nation was split largely along racial lines over whether the jury had reached a just decision. Whites pointed to the blood and DNA evidence prosecutors said linked Simpson to these horrible crimes as proof that jurors had erred in their decision. Blacks countered by asking cynically why a police investigator had taken a vile of Simpson's blood to the former pro football superstar's home on the day evidence was being collected there? Those who tend to believe that police don't tamper with evidence are convinced of Simpson's guilt. Those who think they do tamper with evidence think there was enough reasonable doubt to set him free.

This schism increased our racial divide and fueled a white riot of emotional reaction. When Simpson was scheduled to appear on NBC's "Dateline" program shortly after his acquittal, outraged white demonstrators protested outside the network's Burbank studio. A year earlier, the same show carried an interview with Jeffrey Dahmer, a white man who was convicted of cannibalizing, lobotomizing, sexually assaulting, and murdering 17 young men and boys of color; and none of the protesters who challenged Simpson's appearance turned out to complain. Worse, media organizations largely failed to note the difference in how these two men were treated.

Why not?

The answers to these questions, I suspect, lie in the way media organizations have gone about answering the Kerner Commission's criticism. Consciously or unconsciously, they have promoted the assimilation, rather than the integration of blacks into the craft of journalism. It's through integration -- the value-free interaction of our thoughts and ideas -- that true newsroom diversity can be achieved. Too often, newsroom managers hire blacks who make them feel comfortable; people who view the world as they do.

That's how Africa got missed in the media's rush to cover the collapse of communism. White editors and reporters thought the story was in Eastern Europe. A lot of black journalists agreed with -- or lacked the courage to challenge -- their beliefs. Either way, newsroom diversity and the promise that it offers to American journalism was the loser.

A lot of white editors and reporters also were blind to the disparate treatment that Jeffrey Dahmer and O.J. Simpson received among whites. And far too many black journalists, failing the diversity test, shied away from drawing the comparison.

If newsroom diversity is to become more than just a catchy phrase, media managers (92 percent of whom are white) must place a higher value on the cultural and ideological differences that naturally exist between the races. They've got to hire more blacks who reflect the mainstream of black consciousness and less who mimic their own thinking. And black journalists, faced with the often conflicting pressures of competing in a white-dominated work environment and trying to bring a black perspective to the newsroom, must find the courage to be different.

To do anything less is to abdicate the important role journalism can play in solving this nation's race problem.

This article first appeared on Poynter Online on February 14, 1996.