The Lexington Herald-Leader published this apology last year: ""It has come to the editor's attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission."

So: if we were to do some future-projections and write the mea culpa of race coverage than ran on whatever digital platform (hologram? just kidding, sort of) that's the most popular for news in 2050, what would it be? What are we missing now? And how do we deal with what we missed before?

That's an intriguing question, Farai. You must keep leaning forward to demographic changes and, at same time, improve coverage of year-round coverage from the routine and obligatory. So as we move forward, we must dig deeper into our history at the same time, and work hard to explain things we might take for granted for an under-30 audience that may not know, as Pew recently reported, what Roe v. Wade is about.

Take MLK Day, for example. Why cover a kid reciting 'I have a dream' each year if you could do this -- boston.com .

Or this: washingtonpost.com

Suspect in hingsight we might be apologizing for treating race through a white:non-white prism long after America became much more multicultural and race reporting ought to have become as much about covering "white" issues and not just in relation to non-white "minorities"

By 2050 we will be color blind or not exist as a race.

Humanity will evolve to the point that we create an abundance of food, water, energy, knowledge,...all the things we fight for and that divide society. Along the way, we will have much more time to think--and to evolve. I have little doubt that if we don't blow ourselves up in the next decade or two, we will achieve our potential as a race.

I agree, Raju. Vivek, I don't think we will live in a post-racial world in 2050. The book "The Black Count" is about Alexandre Dumas, a general in the Napoleonic era. He was a military rockstar while attitudes towards black Europeans were good. (He was of French and Haitian ancestry." But there was a massive reversal of the racial climate that cost Dumas General Dumas is the father of the author of The Count of Monti Christo, also Alexandre Dumas. That book is based in part on the father's life, although it ends better for the protagonist than the real man.

Racial attitudes can go up and down, not based on empirical issues but also on emotion, even hysteria. (What was the Holocaust except a homicidal hysteria, a genocide?)

I've been deeply intrigued by the implications of multiracialism on race and, in separate but related context, what has been called "transethnicity." Basically, we're rapidly entering a period in our national history where race and ethnicity no longer fit the boxes we've conventionally assigned them to (if it ever really did, as more than clumsy shorthand). Our first black president is also our first multiracial president, and our first Third Culture Kid president.

He has consciously claimed black identity (and told the story of that process), but he has also at varying times claimed Pacific identity, from his upbringing in Hawaii; Desi identity, from his close friendships with South Asian Americans and perhaps his years in Indonesia, though that doesn't entirely factor; and white, lower middle class descent. What's interesting is that none of these are actually contradictory to his personal narrative.

And we're seeing more and more people for whom that is true. Are we finally seeing, not an erasure of race, but a divorcing of racial identity from racial origin/phenotype? Is an artifact of the ongoing complication of race an abstraction of it? There's been sensational coverage of people who claim transethnic status — individuals who see themselves as having been "born into the wrong race," or having close affinity with a race/ethnicity other than that in which they were raised.

I'm actually using my "day job" status as a market researcher at The Futures Company, running their national study of 5000+ multicultural consumers (black, Hispanic, Asian, non-Hispanic white) to specifically explore these ideas this year. I'm looking forward to seeing the results of this investigation, quantified, and then exploring them qualitatively with interviews and other research.

(Note: I'm not at all comparing the "transethnics" movement or even the multiracial identity movement to civil rights, politically or socially!)

I agree that cultural hybridity is much more common, but it's still varies widely on your race, class, region. Racial phenotypes are still shorthand for profiling. So I think part of the task as reporters is to reward reporters or reporting that can bridge cultures. I think the writing of Andrew Lam does that well. A review of his new fiction collection, Birds of Paradise Lost, says:

“Through his upcoming work...I believe that his talent drafting beautiful, insightful prose is combined with an unleashed creativity that gives readers an opportunity to experience a very different Lam: a writer who can compellingly write non-Vietnamese characters, as skillfully as he can illuminate the Vietnamese.”

diacritics.org

The fact that Andrew is a well-traveled multimedia reporter adds to all of his writing, fiction and nonfiction, in my opinion.

That circles back to your talk about "uratorial/factchecking" role of journalism in a citizen journalist/social journalism age. I agree that's where journalism is headed. But I also like reporters/editors having field experience. Getting first-person, in-person sources changes how you think, or at least it has changed how I think. Made me more flexible, in some ways. Less ideologically rigid, or at least less rigid in my dealings with people I consider opposite of/different from me. I've learned a lot from visiting at least 45 of the fifty states. America can be more of a fiefdom than a Republic.

"curatorial" ;-)

Oh, I certainly agree that there is a need for investigative reporters that is going to be continuous despite the shifting landscape of establishment media. I just think they're likely to be free agents, paid by the project or medium term contract, rather than staffers.

I agree with that.

I like the way Emphas.is often makes collaborators as well as funders out of people who donate. The current featured project, "Pacification," about Olympic building and taking down low-income areas in Brazil, sounds fascinating:

I love Vivek for many reasons--he is at once aspirational and idealistic. And sometimes unrealistic. An in a race-blind 2050.

Raju, according to Ray Kurzweil, if we live another 15 years, we will live forever. Frankly, I am not so optimistic, but regardless of whether you and I are around in 2050 to debate this point, there will be major changes over the next two decades. There have to be. We are already seeing dramatic changes happening in technology and the pace is accelerating. Society is changing its values. When we do solve the basic problems of shortages of food, energy, etc--and I believe we will, humanity will evolve to another, higher, level.

That is all predicated on us not blowing ourselves up or creating killer viruses that wipe out humanity, of course. So let's leave it to people in the future to determine who was right and who was realistic. :)

In 2050 we'll be casting a wide net when apologizing to Latino/a-Americans for sticking to archaic Black-White paradigms when exploring and reporting race. In fact, we won't have enough rope left on earth to create a net wide enough to apologize to Latinos/Hispanics because we'll probably still not know who exactly we are talking about since the largest news networks won't be able to stop cramming us into checkboxes. Perhaps we'll apologize for not recognizing the class, biological, & phenotypical diversity that exists within this group.

By 2050 Latinos, born liminal by definition (mixed-race regardless of phenotype), will have become so used to negotiating being in racial limbo (by American standards/constructs) that we'll likely take over the media. This person will be a woman and my descendant and her name will be Arianita Huffinguez. Seriously though, we need to deconstruct race and in order for it not to "matter" anymore but that takes time and effort and work and inclusion.

I'm with Jeff - the very way we identify race and racial boundaries is changing before our eyes. All the racial constructs are flawed - they are our attempts to make our complicated histories fit somewhere. But reality continually changes - and our understanding of that reality and our identity changes as well. So I would not be surprised to see news outlets in 2050 finally being forced to tackle many of these questions head on as the idea of a "neutral" white default erodes. And this will be good - in many ways, increased racial awareness will force people to confront their own internalized biases about what "Black" consumers, "Latino" consumers, "Asian" consumers want and instead remember that each set has dozens of factions.

I think news consumers in 2050 will be amazed at how little voices of color participated in national conversations, and how limited the perspectives truly were. And I would expert strong, passionate conversations on national identity, as all the different Americas have to converge at some point.

Raquel: The racialization of Hispanics (defying the whole "Hispanics can be of any race" line) is already happening. Multicultural MONITOR's demo question bank, like the Census, asks about Hispanic ethnicity first and then for a racial identification (white, black, Asian, Native American, other). The percentage of respondents to the survey who declare themselves Hispanic and do not claim any (other) race is significant--over 20%--and rising.

So let me steer us back to contemporary coverage. What have you seen that does things well of late?

Washington Post's theroot.com despite lack of commercial success or scale, still continues to do a good job of covering major stories through the prism of race.

We will have missed the nuances of race and ethnicity. When I get together with my Latino friends they talk about how different their individual cultures are: Mexican, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Columbian, Guatemalan not only have different holidays and use the same word to connate different things; they also speak Spanish in different accents. The cities that receive immigrants are creating a melting pot of Latin America that I haven't seen reported at all in mainstream press. Ditto for the immigrant flow from Africa and the West Indies. Further, in the press' binary paradigm, undocumented immigrants are rarely Russian, Eastern European, Canadian, Irish - even though their ranks also fill immigration detention centers.

I continue to be a fan of how NPR's Tell Me More covers race and ethnicity, not just because I'm a fan of Michel Martin (and an occasional guest/contributor to the program). The key is that TMM neither hides/diminishes its focus on race and cultural difference, nor does it exceptionalize it. They cover these issues as if they're relevant to everyone, and should be accessible to everyone, as opposed to simply inside-baseball for P.O.C.s. Given that this happens to be the truth, it's sad that this stands out as "refreshing."

For example: Why is it that stories about the economy invariably center on the white middle class/white working class/white affluent UNLESS they're explicitly stories about the "multicultural economy"? I've literally never seen a generic story about "the middle class" that showcases the story of an African American, Hispanic or Asian American middle class household. Tell Me More flips that script; it covers these topics from an alternate-world default where people of color make up a majority or plurality of the population, e.g., the world we'll all be living in in about two decades.

I write a lot about how race and prejudice play out in media. But I was still shocked during an interview with Shirley Sherrod -- yes THAT "Breitbarted" Shirley Sherrod -- when she told me a high school near her home in Georgia still has segregated proms. Far as the nation has come on racial issues, especially in big cities, there is a still a lot of prejudice and ignorance out there. I have a feeling future news outlets will be apologizing for allowing the level of racial animus toward non-white people which still appears on Fox News Channel, the Drudge Report, the Daily Caller and many areas of conservative media.

I also think future news outlets will be amazed at how all the groups of cultures we define as non-white Hispanics are marginalized in today's media. Although their votes were a big reason Obama stayed in the White house, we only saw questions about Hispanics related to immigration, and during one debate here in Florida, NBC only brought out a Latino anchor from Spanish-language Telemundo to ask immigration questions before he left the stage again. Given that this group will soon dominate the youth demographic so many media outlets court, it seems particularly short-sighted, even in a completely economic context.

I have written in my new book, Race-Baiter, about how race is among these social issues which are covered as an event rather than an ongoing concern. In news media, we hear regularly about the Dow Jones trading average, the activities of City Hall, the latest action by Congress. But we don't often hear about race, outside of special stories which are developed over weeks,. months and sometimes years -- special projects which drop into the news mix, have a brief impact and then are gone. Small wonder then, it is so hard to talk about race in a measured way outside of media; we are so used to talking about race in crisis, any mention of the issue in a news story leads to assumptions there must be a crisis at hand.

Joining in late, but I agree with everyone... I think we actually may be "post race" by then, but we still will write mea culpas on things like homosexuality coverage. Immigration seems like something we'll always debate, blaming actual "aliens" for taking our jobs. I think, outside of these debates, we'll also write a mea culpa about science... global warming, questioning evolution and such.

The equivalent of magazine covers will ask, "What Happened To All The White People?" and it will be an in-depth multi-part report on how whites willingly and involuntarily gave up power over the previous 100 years. Parts of this piece will focus on backlash, resentment, and failure, and it will highlight mass incarceration and persistent segregation as examples of this. But the piece will close on a more hopeful tone, pointing to the efforts of groups like La Raza and NAACP to help counsel White America through this difficult transition. We will ultimately say that young people connected by technology and global culture helped salvage and reinvigorate the American dream. The piece will get a Pulitzer. My granddaughter will be the author.

+1 Baratunde. Though sadly it also means the Pulitzers will remain the way our industry still values its worth with no relationship to audience engagement.

Oh, Baratunde... I love the visions.

Eric, I totally agree about people living different realities on the local level (your example of the segregated proms). When people describe the media as "liberal," I don't buy that... but I do think we are an elite and we can sometimes firmly have our heads up our derrieres if we don't understand the regional complexities of America.

Baratunde: I cosign on all of your post except the bit about salvaging and reinvigroating the American dream, because by 2050 or so, I'm not convinced that the phrase "American" dream will be used in a non-ironic fashion. Certainly not in the way that it has essentially been interpreted today (e.g., a dream rooted in materialist excess and national exceptionalism)....

I had a convo with an older white man last night. He was amazed by the "five different colors" in Obama's family. I thought he meant the shade of magenta, blue, gray - but no: he meant the colors within Obama's family. "I never thought I would see such a thing in a Presidential family," he marveled.

not that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson didn't have technicolor families; but caucasians still question. I am not as sanguine as the rest of you that all the problems of the world will be solved by 2050. We are living in a declining economy. That usually results in Zero Sum Game analysis by the masses, and the mainstream media does little to challenge that paradigm.

apologies for the PDF link, but this is worth looking at. National Intelligence Council does a report on the world in 2030 and some of the charts go out to 2050. We're all gonna be singing "Brown & Yellow, Brown & Yellow, Brown & Yellow!" globaltrends2030.files.wordpress.com

agree on the american dream thing jeff

Jeff: <<The percentage of respondents to the survey who declare themselves Hispanic and do not claim any (other) race is significant--over 20%--and rising.>> From my own reporting on the subject and personal background, I have found that the racial line is left blank in many cases (or, alternatively, I've known people who have checked every racial box off) because Latino immigrants and their children are looking at the question from a different lens than we do here in the States. For the children of immigrants, the choices of which racial box they choose is sometimes based on sociopolitical leanings...I agree with you also on NPR's coverage of race and ethnicity.

Farai: from a Latino-American perspective, I've seen/read sprinkles of great reporting on race/ethnicity in the Christian Science Monitor, WSJ has published some slamming pieces I'm still trying to find to post, When CNN's aired Latino In America they've published interesting online content...I don't know if there is one site that exists that really investigates the Latino/Latino-a-American demo well like, say, a root.com does.

Eric: Totally agree with you post, which begins: "I also think future news outlets will be amazed at how all the groups of cultures we define as non-white Hispanics are marginalized in today's media." Although, because of the biological diversity that exists within, say, any one immediate Hispanic/Latino family, the term "non-white Hispanics" is mostly misleading. Hoping the Census revisits those questions in 2020 and beyond.

Thank you Raquel. Though we're fewer in number, Afro-Latinos tend to fall through the Mexican (majority) and African-American cracks and/or we ride both lines or, simply reject one. I land on way too many sides to keep my take short here (see: my name) but I'll leave you with this question I never thought I'd hear, and from my own, half-European (read: blond with blue-eyes) daughter (6) after a regular visit to her first cousins (black twin girls) in PG County/MD: "Mooooom! Why can't I be BLACK!!"

Amazing times.

I run into this too, Carmen. I have Jewish nieces and nephews who are white - and they love to show off their black Auntie. Whod'a thunk? We in New York often ignore or, worse, disparage the 49% of the country that voted GOP. I often use the Dallas Morning News as a touchstone to that quarter. On the morning after Obama's inauguration they published a cross section of religious leaders responding to the President's second inaugural address. religionblog.dallasnews.com

Lobbing two from the left coast...im giving a talk to an all-white group of alt-newspaper people tomorrow. I want to ask them about the word Diversity. I'm wondering if its time to redefine it or change it? And, I would argue that 2050 is here.

Here's the thing, Doug. I think we can and will change terms from :"diversity," but the issue is not the terminology. There was a great article on how black Americans went through colored/Negro/black/African-American (and unsavory other) terms but as racism persisted the name could not outrun prejudice. So as we talk about a "diverse" society and the need for workplace "diversity," we may change our terminology but the need for a descriptive term will remain. What do you see replacing it?

By the way, this article caught my eye... a politician making racist remarks to a reporter (the fact that he said "back to Kenya" seems to contradict his half-apology saying he didn't know the reporter was black).

How should reporters deal with the question of their race when they interview people who are or might be hostile? (I've had some experience in this, having interviewed Klan and Aryan Nation, f2f and by phone respectively. First obviously knew I was black; second thought my name was South Asian.).

It was just a question I've been asking myself, "is 'diversity' the right word today?" as I do more ambassadorial work in media. I think you're right Farai. I have no other word. I just ask myself these kinds of questions as I continue to creating (effective) pipelines between those who are looking to hire and those looking to get hired. Also, the work we have done with the NewU Entrepreneur program through UNITY Journalists and The Ford Foundation has me thinking on how to get more of journalists of color to become the employer, not just the employee.

Okay folks, we're in the home stretch. I'm really excited about our conversation going into print (edited, of course), in the March/April issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.

I'm posting this same message in all the Branches of this conversation.

Please feel free to offer any additional thoughts through the weekend.

Also: if you could leave a time-capsule recording for a journalist in 2050 on the topic of this Branch, what sort of reflection, warnings, or advice would you offer?