"Was I a DEI hire? It's a question that I sometimes toss out in the company of friends who-like me, and maybe like you-have a complicated relationship to their job. I've worked at WIRED as a writer for eight years, and with much success. Eight years is also an eternity in news media, and especially if you are Black. All industries suffer from unique growing pains. Ours just so happens to have laughably high turnover rates, a distaste for racial and gender diversity, and the dubious distinction of being perpetually on the verge of extinction. So on nights when friends and I gather, trading war stories of workplace microaggressions and corporate mismanagement under damp bar lighting, we wonder how we've lasted as long as we have."
"You shape the position, but the position also shapes you. You become the voice, are shoehorned into the race beat, assigned stories to write about the killing of yet another Black person gone too soon. You retrace their last breaths in Minneapolis, in Georgia, in New York, in Every City, USA. You're asked to make your stories more "poetic," to report on the pain of your people, to find meaning in a moment that adds up to the same grim algebra every time: Black life is at best conditional in America"
Long-standing Black staffers at WIRED face precarious job security and isolation despite proven professional success. The newsroom frequently contains very few Black writers, which produces tokenization and pressure to represent race. Black journalists are often shoehorned into covering racial trauma and killings and are asked to render those stories more "poetic" while interpreting collective pain. The industry displays high turnover, resistance to racial and gender diversity, and organizational instability. These dynamics force Black staffers to perform emotional labor, navigate conditional belonging, and sustain a persistent sense of being undervalued and precarious.
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