According to SABR (the Society for American Baseball Research), William Edward White was most likely the first African-American to play Major League Baseball when he replaced the injured first baseman for the Providence Grays on June 21, 1879. White played for the baseball team at Brown University, and was the son of a white plantation owner and a Black woman enslaved by that man. Because of his mixed ethnicity and fair skin color, he was able to pass as a white man. And since he listed his race as white in census records, he is not credited with being the first Black player in MLB history.
That brings me to the news story that I chose for this week’s blog assignment: “Multiracial population grew in almost every county in the US. It doesn’t mean racism is over.” Article written by Nicole Chavez, published on CNN.com on August 15, 2021
The article is about the growing number of people across the nation that self-identify as “two or more races” on the United States census forms. The 2000 Census was the first time that people were allowed to mark more than one box for race. In the 2010 Census, there were 9 million people that had multiple ethnic selections. In the 2020 Census, that number jumped to almost 34 million people.
In analyzing this article, I first wanted to know about the reporter. There was a link to Chavez’s bio, and I learned that she has been covering multicultural news and events for CNN since 2017. Before that she worked for a newspaper in Austin, Texas. She has done work in both English and Spanish-language media, and some of her articles have appeared in The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Knowing this info about her allows me to trust that she understands the topic.
Chavez utilizes a cross-section of backgrounds in her interview subjects. The first quote is from Bárbara Abadía-Rexach, a woman that describes herself as a Black Latina and is an ethnic studies professor at San Francisco State University. The reporter also described the childhood experience of Sarah Gaither in detail. Gaither, an assistant professor at Duke University, has a Black father and a white mother. This led to struggles for Gaither when she had to designate her race on application forms.
In addition to quotes from these women, Chavez includes information from a university sociologist as well as a director and senior adviser of race and ethnic research in the population division of the US Census Bureau. I feel that these were credible sources for the foundation of this article.
There were a couple of supporting materials in the article. One was a hyperlink to a 2017 study about interracial marriages by the Pew Research Center. The other was a map of the United States that visualized the census population results.
Overall, if I were grading this article from a media literacy standpoint, I would give the journalist a solid A. The facts are well laid out with supportive graphics and links, and the interview subjects were diverse and relative to the story.
By the way, in case you are interested in learning more about William Edward White:
Photo from Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_1879_Brown_University_Baseball_Team.jpg
