Korean panel

Friday morning I participated in a panel at city hall with a group of Youngstown residents answering questions for a group of Korean journalists as a part of the East West Center's Korea-United States Journalist Exchange.

We primarily discussed issues pertaining to the election and perceptions of race, gender, and class. I thought the most bizarre question was what kind of minority candidate white men in general would prefer: Hispanic, African-American, or Asian. We were perfectly stumped on how to respond to it and fell back on declaring that we were interested only in issues and integrity. But I'm still intrigued that the question was asked and I'm curious what kinds of responses were expected.

The very first question of the session was one I want to comment on primarily. A journalist asked about the Wall Street Journal article that profiled local working-class voters and their preferred candidates.

The men interviewed in the article offer frank appraisals of their view of the candidates, which clearly were making an assessment on an emotional level as to how they related to the candidates they saw on the ticket. The first two men on the panel who responded to the question basically questioned that these men really existed and that they in any case didn't represent any kind of cross section of the region's white males.

I spoke up to emphasize that these people do exist whether we like it or not, and that they're looking at the candidates in search of someone with whom they can identify. We need to find opportunities to bring people of disparate backgrounds together to move beyond prejudice. (I blatantly stole most of those thoughts from Sherry Linkon, by the way. Though, if I misquoted her, then they're my own.)

But what was being suggested, again, was that the media was manufacturing this false working-class representation of our city, when in reality YSU's Center for Working-Class Studies went to great pains to work with the Wall Street Journal to arrange the interviews.

We as a region and as a nation won't start addressing our problems until we drop our cynicism about media misrepresentations and face our weaknesses and hard truths. I'm not suggesting we believe everything we read. But let's be realistic about the challenges we have yet to overcome rather than pretending we're all innocence and roses.