An image of Under the White Gaze book by Chris Cheung.
'Under the White Gaze' out now!

The following is an excerpt from Under the White Gaze: Solving the Problem of Race and Representation in Canadian Journalism by Christopher Cheung. 

UBC Press, Purich Books
Publication Date: September 16
Find more here: www.ubcpress.ca/under-the-white-gaze
Excerpt: Introduction

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I have a hard time finding the Canada that I know in the news.

Growing up, my teachers taught us that we lived in a multicultural country, but they really didn’t need to because I could see that for myself. Every class I attended from kindergarten on was a miniature United Nations. Our daily attendance was an international roll call: Alam, Cheung, Nardi, Pabla, Raeisi, Tabora, Zhang.

All of Vancouver is diverse, but my neighbourhood of Oakridge was at a special crossroads of class and culture, straddling the posh west side and the blue-collar east side. I was born to a family from Hong Kong, and my classmates had roots from all over: China, India, Iran, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam. We might’ve been considered “minorities,” but we were the majority.

Differences were everywhere. At recess, we shared a global selection of snacks from tangy fruit leather to paper-thin roasted seaweed. When the school bell rang, parents and grandparents showed up to tell my friends to put on their coats in languages from Punjabi to Tagalog. The Cantonese church my family attended, in a building purchased from Mennonites, was just up the hill from a Sikh gurdwara, where the city’s Vaisakhi parade starts every year. On the walls of living rooms in nearby homes were crosses and crocheted Bible verses, but also shrines and portraits of ancestors. Under these same roofs were families of every size and class. I’d visit friends who lived in mansions with their melancholy mothers, supported by fathers who did business overseas, and those who lived humbler lives, spending their evenings at the family restaurant serving hot bowls of phở.

My sense of a shared community only grew as I got older. Every time I walked the streets, took the bus, or visited another neighbourhood, I came to understand more and more how the city I lived in was made up of people of different identities – which is why the local news frustrated me when people of colour were too often missing, misrepresented, and marginalized. 

Their lives revealed insights about society, everything from the cultural transformation of communities to the strength of our social safety nets. But were these stories being told? 

Nope. 

Was it because journalists were unfamiliar with the places in which we lived? Was it because they didn’t speak our many languages? Was it because their lives were so very different from our own?

In time, I began to wonder which was worse: turning on the news and finding people of colour and their experiences absent from the places in which they live, or seeing that journalists were re-cycling the same stories about people of colour over and over again.

For all Canada’s boasting about multiculturalism, its journalism was suffering from obvious omissions and problematic portrayals of people of colour.

If you’re white, the news is giving you a redacted portrait of who you share your community with.

If you’re a person of colour like me, this mismatch between what you experience as reality and what you see on the news feels extra personal when the people you’re familiar with, the places you frequent, the cultures you belong to, and the issues you care about are represented inaccurately. That is, if they’re in the news at all.

Typically, the target audience is imagined as the average Canadian. I wrote many stories before I realized that this so-called average Canadian that I was writing to, this so-called mainstream audience, had a clear racial and ethnocultural identity, and that identity … 

… was white.

Other journalists were doing this targeting, and somehow, I picked it up too. It didn’t matter that I strived to get more people of colour represented in media coverage. I had thought that simply making us visible was a win, but I hadn’t thought about how we were being portrayed.

I began to notice patterns in my stories. Cheer on this [insert identity here] person who did this remarkable thing! Cry about this migrant’s trials and tribulations! Celebrate this ancient cultural practice, which comes with a lot of symbolism and cool costumes! Aside from these narratives, there were also patterns in the way that I overemphasized identity and difference. These realizations led me to a problem that was hard to understand, hard to confront, and hard to fix.

Behind the stories that I wrote to help with representation, I noticed a white gaze.

I took on the white gaze in everything from my language choices to my story frames. I treated white Canadians of European descent as the default viewpoint. They were the baseline. They were the “us” and everyone else was the “other.” When writing about non-Western cultures, I’d go to great lengths to explain them to a white audience, reporting on them with an air of discovery and distance, padding my stories with little encyclopaedia entries.

When we hear reports about how Canadian journalism is “overwhelmingly white,” what exactly does that mean? In 2023, the Canadian Association of Journalists’ newsroom diversity survey found that 75.5 percent of journalists in the country are white. That might sound pretty close to the percentage of white people in the country, but the survey notes that journalists of colour are clustered in a handful of large, national newsrooms. There are, however, two depressing categories where there is a high degree of racial representation: part-time work and internship roles.

As for who’s in charge, white journalists make up an even higher percentage of newsroom leaders. They are the ones who decide who gets hired, which stories about people of colour are important, and how such stories get packaged for audiences.

Lived experience matters when it comes to identifying, researching, and producing stories. Newsrooms will continue to overlook, or struggle to report on, stories that represent to a growing share of their prospective audience if they do not have journalists from different backgrounds in decision-making roles who can bring these stories forward.

I happened to enter the industry around a time of increasing conversations about race and representation in media. I saw news outlets respond to these movements with pledges to diversify their staff and their coverage. 

While I have no doubt such commitments were written with good intentions, I couldn’t help but look at this another way: diversity was hot! You could call it a diversity reckoning, but it was also a diversity rush, with white editors on the hunt for journalists to help diversify their newsrooms and coverage. 

You can see the danger in newsrooms treating diversity like a missing ingredient, making hires or commissioning pieces from journalists of colour, because this puts such work into a silo. I’ve seen newsrooms rely on journalists of colour for the “diversity beat,” sparing white journalists from having to think about diversity, let alone focus on it as if their very jobs depended on their coverage of it.

But we need to include all journalists in the work of diversifying journalism, because there is room for diversity in all areas of reporting.

Representation in journalism is about more than just journalists covering under-represented groups and going, “Look, they exist!” It’s important to ask what kinds of stories are being told about people of colour. How are they portrayed? Whose voices and perspectives are privileged? Whose are left out? Who decides which stories deserve coverage? Is the story of interest to the people of colour being written about?

It’s easy for newsrooms to talk about a happy-sounding thing like diversity, but it’s harder for them to swallow the existence of a negative-sounding thing like racial inequality. Any newsroom that wants to diversify but refuses to confront the dominance of whiteness in the workplace and in their reporting will fail.

Just as we can’t talk about reconciliation without talking about colonization, we can’t talk about diversity in journalism without talking about whiteness. It’s easy for newsrooms to say that they want to diversify, but what exactly are they diversifying from? If diversity is one side of the coin, whiteness is the other. If coverage or a particular perspective is lacking, newsrooms need to admit whose perspectives they have too much of. If journalists of colour are marginalized, newsrooms need to admit who holds the power.

***

Excerpted with permission from Under the White Gaze: Solving the Problem of Race and Representation in Canadian Journalism by Christopher Cheung, 2024, Purich Books, UBC Press, Vancouver, Canada. For more information go to www.ubcpress.ca. 

Christopher Cheung

Christopher Cheung

Christopher Cheung is a staff reporter at The Tyee. He worked previously at Metro and the Vancouver Courier. He is also the author of Under the White Gaze. Blending research with a reporter’s journey...