The result is “Volunteer Slavery” (241 pages. Noble Press. $21.95), Nelson’s story of her years in service to the Post-and in search of her “authentic Negro experience.” Apparently born of a need both for catharsis and to settle old scores, Nelson’s memoir is as unsparing of herself as of other Post personalities. It is so unsparing that at points Nelson comes across as a vengeful, self-indulgent, sex-obsessed neurotic. Yet the same brutal honesty that allows her figuratively to strip herself naked also makes her credible.
We see a woman so intent on sexual release that she has sex with her mortician lover on a funeral home’s elevator table next to a Jheri Kurl-wearing corpse. And we see a middle-class guilt so intense that it drives Nelson to seek redemption in classcrossing romances and race-conscious politics. But we also see a serious black professional trying her damnedest to do well in her new job, and failing, partly for reasons peculiar to her, but partly because the Post can be a difficult place to be black.
A troubled launch: Nelson, then 34, was hired by The Washington Post’s Sunday magazine shortly before the first issue came out in 1986. That issue, which Nelson regarded with horror, featured a cover story profiling a thuggish rap artist and a Richard Cohen column commenting approvingly on discrimination against young black men in downtown stores. Black Washingtonians, every bit as horrified as Nelson, marched in protest outside the Post building for several weeks running. The demonstrations ceased after Post executives agreed to go on a black radio station to explain the paper’s policies; but for Nelson, things only got worse. In her time at the magazine, she claims, she was systematically blocked from doing her best work and finally was transferred to the metropolitan reporting staff. Her new bosses assigned her to cover the cocaine-possession and perjury trial of Washington Mayor Marion Barry, during which most of her stories, says Nelson, “either don’t get in the paper, become a graph in someone else’s story, or languish unpublished.” For many blacks, Nelson concluded, the Post was a “weird, journalistic purgatory, a seemingly endless proving ground on which, just when you think you’ve won the game, the rules are changed.” She quit in frustration in 1990.
Nelson’s freelance background (in publications less straitlaced than the Post) would have made her transition difficult under any circumstances. Her problems were compounded by the fact that the magazine’s editor, Jay Lovinger (who has since left the Post), was new to the company, considered an oddball himself and never found his niche. Still, to some blacks at the Post, much of Nelson’s bitter book nonetheless rings true. One manager observed that blacks generally were not seen as complete journalists, but as African-Americans valued for offering a “black point of view.”
Peculiar species: Such complaints can be heard in newsrooms across America. Morale among blacks at The New York Times plunged so low last year that metropolitan editor Gerald Boyd convened a meeting of black staffers and senior management to try to turn things around. Blacks, one of the paper’s African-American reporters recently observed, are seen as “a peculiar species of Times-man.” At the Los Angeles Times, black, Asian-American and Latino staffers bitterly protested being used as “cannon fodder” to cover the 1992 riot while whites controlled coverage. At virtually every major newspaper the laments are similar, centering on a perception that minorities are not full participants in the enterprise. And though many of America’s larger news organizations have programs in place to combat that impression, most are not working very well.
Asked about Nelson’s observations, Post managing editor Robert Kaiser responded, “I think we haven’t done too badly, but we have a long way to go.” He is right on both points. The Post has done a better job than most newspapers of bringing blacks into the fold. Explaining why it-and other corporate advocates of “diversity” has sometimes stumbled is a larger task than Nelson set out to accomplish. That would entail explaining, among other things, why racial issues remain so divisive in the larger society.
Nelson has done something considerably more modest. She has explored one woman’s corporate hell in a way that is sometimes funny and often sad and that reveals and explores a great deal of pain that is not hers alone.
