The White Elephant in the Room

Originally published within "Under the Covers," from Signature Magazine, 2/11/20

How do you show diversity?

It seems like an easy question. The answer is usually something like the photo at the top of this page.

So, let’s run down the list. Good gender balance? Check. African-American representation? Check. Asian? Check. Seniors? Check.

But what about the differently abled? What about other regional backgrounds? What about all the invisible check boxes of society: Sexual orientation? Religion? Neurodiversity?

This was our challenge as we set out to create the cover of this issue: Once we start representing specific groups in an effort to portray a truly diverse population, there are always groups left by the wayside. That’s a functional limitation of publishing, but it’s hardly a satisfying resolution of the problem. What good is a spirit of inclusivity that is inevitably exclusionary?

Signature’s Publisher and Editorial Director Carla Kalogridis, Associate Editor Thomas Marcetti (who authored this issue’s cover story and supporting feature), and I spent hours wrestling with this conundrum. We discussed our own professional experiences with diversity representation and the many pitfalls that seemed to await us with every proposed solution.

As a magazine designer (and, admittedly, a white male), I came to the discussion with a skeptical opinion of the overall value of promoting diversity for its own sake. In working with associations at GLC, our design staff is frequently asked to hit markers of representation in our imagery, which sometimes runs counter to our goals of working with the best imagery to illustrate the subject matter. It never occurred to me to reverse those priorities.

But then, in talking with Carla and Thomas, I fell into what I’ll call the “White Man’s Trap.” I confessed that when reading magazines — or any other media — in my leisure time, I never considered the race or gender of the individuals chosen to illustrate the content. It didn’t seem important; either I was interested, or I wasn’t.

It was at this moment that I found myself neck deep in the White Man’s Trap. Of course, I didn’t consider race and gender. Why would I? Everyone in media already looks like me.

I’m now ashamed to admit that I needed this revelation to approach the subject with a clear appreciation of its value. So how could we get others — and not just white males — to challenge their own assumptions?

For me, Thomas’s second article (“The Signature Problem”) provided the answer: numbers. You can’t argue with data. And the data he collected around Signature’s own track record in diversity representation lays out an articulate case in favor of remedial action.

As our conversation continued (did I mention we spent hours jawing over this?), an image began to form in my mind: a colorless, androgynous face, waiting to have all the shades of identity applied to it. It seemed natural: You see a face and you begin to categorize it, according to your own knowledge and experiences. But how correct are you? How can you know? Maybe it’s the Quantum Theory of Identity: an individual begins in a super­position of exhibiting no specific characteristics and all of them simultaneously, and the face truly has no identity until you apply a single adjective. Or maybe I overthought the whole thing. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I sketched out the concept for our all-white committee of three. While Carla was on board with this approach, Thomas expressed a very legitimate reservation. “With this cover concept, it seemed to me as if we were trying to solve the problem by perpetuating it,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s yet another white face.”

We were up against another immutable law of physics: the absence of color = white. How could we demonstrate, visually, that this white face wasn’t white? We were, essentially, asking the reader, “Who are you going to believe: us or your own eyes?”

Where do we see white faces in advance of color (or other characteristics) being applied, without questioning the identity of that face? Coloring books, of course. But better yet, to refer back to the data that had led us to this compromise, what about paint-by-numbers? We wouldn’t specify what colors the numbers are meant to indicate; that’s up to the reader. I liked the idea of using a photograph, rather than a drawing. It seemed almost poetic to imagine a human being who goes through life as an empty template, waiting for observers to fill in the blanks.

Finally, we three resigned ourselves to some uncomfortable truths: 1) We are who we are. While Carla, Thomas and I may be possessed of qualities that make us stand apart from the majority (whoever that is), as Caucasians in the United States, those other things really don’t affect our day-to-day experiences in meaningful ways. That’s not necessarily our fault, but the very least we can do is to acknowledge our partiality.

And 2) We can’t please everyone. That sounds like a cop out, and perhaps it is on some level, but this statement revis­its our original challenge. Diversity in this medium represents a zero-sum game. Inclusion of one group automati­cally confers exclusion on another. That doesn’t mean we have license to stop trying. On the contrary, it should renew our collective motivation to recognize the differences that help define us and — this is the important part — to tell the stories of those we don’t resemble.