Diversity at Work

Her green eyes are soft and vulnerable. Her blonde hair cascades down to her shoulders. If only I could see her aquiline nose and pouting lips. But I can't discern her full beauty. She has covered her face with a white surgical mask embossed with the headline, "The Truth about SARS." She is my Little SARS Queen, gracing the May 5 cover of Time magazine.

For the past few weeks, I have held on to her photo. Thousands of people have been afflicted by severe acute respiratory syndrome. More than 500 people have died—mostly in Hong Kong, mainland China, and the rest of Asia. Yet my Pretty Young SARS Thing comforts me amid this chaos and uncertainty.

It's as if she is telling me, "I am very scared of this deadly virus. Even though I spend most of my time playing volleyball on the beach, it's still possible that I could become infected. So I am looking to you, you big hunk of man, to protect me."

Someday, I will find her. I will tell her everything is going to be OK. I will offer her some solace ‹ a dozen roses and several white surgical masks. If only I could explain my impulses to my Asian brothers and sisters.


It isn't until I talk with my imaginary friend, the Chinaman, that I begin to think of the racial issues behind the magazine cover. It is late at night, and Chinaman has come over for chow mein and chop suey. He shows me his long, braided ponytail, which he has grown in deference to his ancestral line of laundry men and railroad workers.

"I'm appropriating the ponytail as a symbol," he begins. But then he spots the Time magazine on my table, and the Newsweek magazine that was published the same week. In similar fashion, Newsweek's cover displays a frightened, wide-eyed brunette wearing a surgical mask. Both models are clearly Westerners.

"Why didn't Time or Newsweek put someone like me on its cover?" he asks. "SARS has had its greatest impact on Asians. I mean, thousands of Chinese people have the disease. How many green-eyed blondes have contracted it? How many have died from it?"

"Now, don't go playing the race card here," I warn. "They're trying to sell magazines. They gotta put hotties on the cover."

"OK, but what about using an Asian babe like Lucy Liu, or Michelle Yeoh, or Kelly Hu?" he asks, only half-joking. "What about Photoshopping a surgical mask on Yo-Yo Ma or Yao Ming? The Economist put a surgical mask on Mao. That was cool."

"I can understand your sentiments," I say. "Putting an Asian on the cover would better represent the SARS story. It's about journalistic accuracy: An image of an Asian would reflect the people whose families have been hardest hit, people who are truly staring the disease in its face.

"But," I continue, "don't we risk stigmatizing Asians by associating them with SARS? Time and Newsweek might put the occasional Dr. David Ho, the AIDS researcher, or Michelle Kwan, the ice skater, on their covers. But given that Asians rarely make it out front, why put them on the cover when there's this mysterious killer disease? It would play into people's fears: Watch out for those mysterious, coughing Asians. Wouldn't that be unfair even harmful?"

I pull out a printout I've made of a story by Mike Conklin of The Chicago Tribune. In it, he quotes Jim Kelly, Time's managing editor, explaining why Time chose to put my Little SARS Queen on the cover.

"It was a very conscious decision on our part to pick a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman who looked like she got off the beach at Laguna," Mr. Kelly told the Tribune. (Actually, Mr. Kelly, her eyes look green.) "We wanted to go with a Western woman because we felt the disease was stigmatizing Asians unfairly. A couple of colleagues told me of being on the subway when a Chinese man sneezed and everyone on the car got nervous."

Chinaman reads Mr. Kelly's quote and starts to laugh. "I'm touched that Time's editors genuinely care about the stigmatization of Asians," he says. "I wouldn't want to blow my nose in public and be scarred for life."

He opens the Time magazine. He shows me that, except for a Canadian church volunteer, everyone else in the photo spread for the SARS story is Asian. So why put my Little SARS Queen on the cover?


After Chinaman leaves, I try to think through all of this. I puzzle through how we as reporters and editors decide what kinds of people we select—in the story and in the images—to represent a social or medical issue.

If I were writing about poverty and welfare reform, I would look for a diversity of families. I might even choose a white family to anchor my story and images, while including families of other races in the mix. Why? Because the majority of poor people in this country are white, and I don't want to foster the stereotype of the black or Hispanic family on welfare.

Now, if I were writing about the death penalty, I couldn't avoid the fact that a disproportionate number of black men are on death row. If the story examined the reasons for that racial disparity, I think I would put a black man on my magazine cover or front page. But if I did so, wouldn't I risk stigmatizing or stereotyping black men?

Say I'm writing a story about an array of health conditions that are having a significant impact on black and Hispanic communities—say, asthma, obesity, and diabetes. I think I would anchor the story with black and Hispanic families. If I put an Anglo model on my cover or section front, it would look awfully strange—as if I were ignoring the impact of these health problems on minority families. Even so, would I still be stigmatizing these families?

And then we come to AIDS.

As we all know, AIDS is no longer simply the disease of white gay men. About half the adults now infected with HIV worldwide are women, the World Health Organization and UNAIDS reported last year. Of the 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS, more than 25 million are in sub-Saharan Africa, according to UNAIDS.

If I were writing a story about the global impact of AIDS, wouldn't I want to include someone from sub-Saharan Africa on my cover?

Then again, maybe I'd worry that my readers' eyes would glaze over if they saw a woman from sub-Saharan Africa on the cover. Maybe they would empathize more with a white man or white woman on my cover, and be more interested in reading my story. I could always argue that I didn't want to stigmatize sub-Saharan Africans.


Which is all to say that the case of my Little SARS Queen is not so simple. But for me, the case brings up a few clear lessons:

• Our well-intentioned desire to avoid stigmatizing minorities should never get in the way of seeking and reflecting the truth.

• The more we cover ethnic minorities and represent them on our covers in a balanced and mainstreamed way—in both positive and negative situations—the less we have to fear about stigmatizing or stereotyping them.

• If we truly want to avoid stigmatizing minorities, we need to humanize them in our stories, not hide them away. Let's write the long narrative about a Chinese family that is struggling with SARS, with all the family's hopes, doubts and anxieties. I am thinking, in particular, of a wonderful story that The New York Times did on a doctor who was treating many SARS patients in Hong Kong, and how that was affecting his relationship with his wife and family.

• Let's remember that white is not a neutral color. My guess is that Time and Newsweek used Anglo models for their SARS covers because they thought it was a race-neutral way of reflecting our anxieties about the disease. This reminds me of those occasions when our feature section's illustrators decide to use Anglos in their illustrations, because they don't want race to be a "distracting" issue. They don't want to put a black woman behind the desk in a workplace illustration, because, hey, the story is not about race. But in our increasingly multicultural society, putting a white person behind that desk is not the answer, either.

It's not going to reflect neutrality. And it's not even going to reflect reality.