Day 7: Race Relations in America

As a reporter at The Saginaw News, day by day and week by week and month by month, I listed people who were featured in my articles. This list was based on their respective ethnic groups.

How many Whites? How many Blacks? How many Hispanics?

You may perceive this as extremely biased. After all, newsworthy is newsworthy. A story is a story. What should ethnicity have to do with it?

Well, no, I didn't keep a count like this for all of the articles in a 32-year career. The particular year was 1991. The particular issue was welfare reform. And there was a reason, most definitely a reason, for compiling my race-based list. This latest diary entry explains why, in fact, it would have been biased to do otherwise.

All good people wish we could be racially colorblind. But again, as my previous diary entries illustrate, this is not always proper.

REAGAN-ENGLER-CLINTON REVOLUTION
Welfare cutbacks were adopted in '91 when a new Michigan governor took office. He was John Engler, a Republican and a Reaganite, and he was backed by public sentiment among a majority of people more fortunate. Cuts in aid to the poor were major. This was five full years before Democratic President Bill Clinton, the alleged "liberal," followed the Reagan-Engler path in 1996 and approved similar punitive steps at the national level.

Before Engler, adults with no children in Michigan were receiving about $200 per month to rent a room, along with some food stamps. Engler wiped out all of that. For the AFDC moms (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), he immediately slashed 17 percent from their grants, with more of the machete to come.

My task was to neutrally report not only the facts and figures, but also to tell the human stories of the people affected by these cutbacks. Maybe it was a single fellow who was having a hard time finding handyman work, or a young mother who would lose her children's health care if she accepted a Burger King job. Each person's story was different.

Back to that list. Why in the world did I need that list?