The Brown & White

Michael Winerip, winner of the Pullitzer Prize, spoke Thursday in Lewis Lab about race relations in America.

Winerip came in conjunction with The New York Times to speak about the series "How Race is Lived in America," a series of articles about race and its role in American society today. This series won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism.

"I don't want to hold my self out as an expert on race," Winerip said. "I've had some experiences that may help shed some light on these issues."

For the series, Winerip said he spent a year in an undercover narcotics unit in Harlem reporting and editing unusual stories on race.

"We spent months looking for the right kind of stories," Winerip said. "We wanted stories that would resonate, issues that you don't normally think of."

Winerip said one of the reporters working on the series came from Cuba. He said the reporter had seen two Cuban men of different ethnicities drifting into separate communities upon their arrival in America. The reporter said she thought it would make an interesting piece.

"Her story was two men from Cuba, one white Cuban, one black, separated into two very different spheres," Winerip said. "The white Cuban went into the white Cuban community, while the black went into the African-American community."

While researching the series, Winerip said he came across interesting pieces that covered many areas in society where unaddressed racial tensions exist.

"Steve Holmes did a piece on the military," Winerip said. "He found tremendous racial tensions underneath the surface."

In one piece, Winerip said one person wrote about the segregation in a pork processing plant in North Carolina. Winerip said the writer found the supervisors were almost all white, the Native Americans had the warehouse jobs and the worst jobs went to the blacks and Mexicans who worked on the lines.

In a second piece, Winerip said a writer covered a story on a plantation where people wanted to make a national park and reenact the times of slavery. They put on the reenactment, but no one was moved because they had watered down injustices of slavery to appease the white audience, Winerip said.

"More than one hundred years after slavery ended, it's still such a sensitive issue," he said.

Winerip said what he really wanted to do was get inside for a story with the New York police. A group went down to City Hall and talked to Rudy Giuliani. They told him they wanted to have full access to a police unit. Shortly thereafter, Winerip said Giuliani handed them over to the police chief.

"They gave me access to everything," Winerip said. "If you immerse yourself in the story, if you show up every day for a year, you'll become a fly on the wall."

Winerip said he had been reporting for about two weeks when he made his first mistake. He took out his notepad and pencil and was taking notes on how a narcotics cop acted, when the cop looked at him and asked if he had said something racially inappropriate.

"They were so nervous and worried about race," Winerip said. "As journalists, we would worry about our year-long pieces and whether it was a racial or not racial issue."

Winerip said race colors everything for undercover narcotics officers because of the unavoidable tension that surrounds the job.

One of the most significant events during Winerip's reporting, the Diallo case, occurred when an upstanding, black citizen was shot 41 times by four police officers who found him alone on the street. He went to reach for his wallet, but the police thought he was reaching for a gun and shot him.

"Even if you forget humanity, even if you forget race, a cop doesn't want to be in a situation like the Diallo case because their career will be over," he said.

Winerip said there is an unspoken tension between police officers of different races that is never addressed.

"Race amplifies the anger on the street when a dark-skinned man is arrested," Winerip said. "Cops don't discuss race because it's too risky and they need to get along."

Winerip, who grew up in Boston and attended Harvard, said he used to do a lot of volunteer work in college. Most of his work was done in Columbia Point, one of Boston's low-income neighborhoods.

"I was a big brother to an African-American kid," he said. "You saw all of the dysfunction around him, all of the dysfunction of Harlem. Almost everyone I saw was African-American."

When he worked for a news organization in the Eastern Kentucky Bureau in Hazard, Ky., Winerip said he saw many of the same problems he encountered in Columbia Point, just on the opposite side of the color spectrum.

"I saw alcoholism, incest and bad parenting," he said. "I saw a lot of the same things I saw in the projects in Boston. I was seeing white and black poverty."

Winerip said he co-coached Little League baseball with a strip-mine inspector and had kids from all income levels. He was assigned the only three black kids in the league because he was one of the outsiders.

"Those kids' parents were the most well-off," Winerip said. "I was seeing poverty and sorting out poverty from race."

Winerip said he believes it is important for people to talk about race in America.

"We have a president who is African-American, as are many of the higher up officials in his cabinet," he said. "As we came into this presidential race, I can't explain it that well, but there were powerful things going on in this country."

Winerip said he is often exhausted from talking about the race issue because it is so tense, but he knows that it is something he and every other person must address.

"I have complained to Gerald Boyd, the No. 2 editor of The New York Times, that I was sick of talking about race," Winerip said.

Boyd, who is black, opened Winerip's eyes with his reply.

"I told him I wanted to think about lighter things, but he just responded, 'Now you know how I feel,'" Winerip said.

Racial tensions and issues are prevalent throughout today's world, Winerip said. Racial problems are universal and the U.S. is no exception.

"There is no magic answer to make white people not nervous when talking about race. It's just about knowing who you're talking with," he said. "I think we will get beyond racial issues, but I think it will take a long, long time. And if you connect on a human level, it makes a difference."

Kofi Appiah-Nkansah, '09, said he feels racism is prevalent in the U.S.

"I am from Ghana where everyone is black," he said. "Coming here and seeing the racial divisions was very hard for me."

Although Meredith Kaiser, '10, said she does not attend many lectures, this one grabbed her attention.

"Even though this is the first talk I've been to, I thought that this discussion pertains to most everyone so everyone who attends would get something out of it," Kaiser said. "It can change perspectives on racial issues."

The lecture was sponsored by Phi Sigma Kappa, Black Students Union, Progressive Students Alliance, the Patriot, the Asian Cultural Society, College Democrats and the office of student auxiliary services.