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News > World

#PulitzersSoWhite: Awards Dinner Reveals Media Racial Disparity

  • The 2016 Pulitzer Prize winners pose as they accept their awards at Columbia University.

    The 2016 Pulitzer Prize winners pose as they accept their awards at Columbia University. | Photo: Twitter / @PulitzerPrize

Published 15 October 2016
Opinion

The awards – considered the Oscars of the journalism and literary world – went to four non-white people out of 28.

As the Pulitzer Prize winners sit down for dinner Saturday night to accept their awards, the media industry is reminded of one bleak reality: the #PulitzersSoWhite.

OPINION:
#OscarsSoWhite, Again: A Symptom of Hollywood's Racism

Out of 27 previous winners, 24 of them were white. The others: Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American, won fiction; Mauricio Lima, Brazilian, won breaking news photography; Lin-Manuel Miranda, Puerto Rican, won drama; and Henry Threadgill, African-American, won music. Three teams were also awarded, with largely white staff.

In other words, the awards – considered the Oscars of the journalism and literary world – went to almost all white people for journalism; the rest were honored in the arts.

Responding to the awards, the Columbia Journalism Review did a study when the awards were first announced in April tracking the race and gender of each awardee in its 100-year history.

Both categories were predictable: 84 percent of winners were white, and 84 percent were men. The Pulitzers began in 1917, but it took until 1969 for the jury to award a Black person and until 1971 to award a woman. The level of diversity, reported the CJR, hasn't changed much since its first years of existence.

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