Opinion - CL's diversity meltdown

If you flipped through CL or glanced at our website the week of Sept. 2, you probably noticed something very, very wrong. Actually, I know you did, because you weren't shy about telling us we screwed up.

That week's cover story, "8 Artists to Watch," highlighted a group of artists selected by CL whose work is worth checking out this fall. They all were deserving of inclusion.

The problem is, they all were white.

Your response was swift and fierce and, for the most part, spot-on. As one of you pithily noted, "The cover looks like a flyer for a condo in fucking Alpharetta." The big question, of course, was how did CL fail to represent the diverse breadth of talent in this city?

We made a mistake. As CL arts columnist Cinqué Hicks points out, we should have drawn from a wider pool of artists. We should have looked at the artists suggested by our writers and realized that this was not a cross-section of Atlanta.

For several weeks before the "8 Artists" story, I had been planning to write about the issue of race on CL's cover. It's a topic we often discuss, and one that was raised back in June, when I sat on a panel about "writing across racial lines" at the Auburn Avenue Research Library. One of the men in attendance approached the panel holding a copy of CL. The cover story was about the changing nature of street gangs in Atlanta, and the man was outraged about our portrayal of young black men as criminals.

One of the biggest criticisms I hear about CL's cover is that the only minorities featured are entertainers, politicians and criminals. To see if there's some validity to that complaint, I reviewed the past year's worth of covers to catalog who showed up there, and why. Of the 37 cover subjects, 19 were minorities. Nine of the 19 were entertainers. Two were criminals. One was a crime victim. And one politician — Mayor Kasim Reed — appeared on the cover twice.

So yes, there are a high number of black, Asian and Hispanic rappers, musicians and comedians on CL's cover — and a fewer number of criminals and politicians. The breakdown isn't that different for whites. Of the 18 whites who appeared on the cover, eight were artists (the '8 Artists to Watch'), four were entertainers, one was a politician and one a crime victim.

In my nine months as editor, this is the first time I've tracked race on the cover. Having been employed by Creative Loafing for a decade, I can tell you there are no quotas here. There is no one saying the covers need to have a certain number of people of any race, religion or sexual orientation. The people who end up on the cover land there because of an organic process by which a diverse group of writers — white, black, gay, straight, male, female — pitch ideas to editors. Aside from the "8 Artists" story, that process has naturally delivered a broad mix of people and topics. Is there still room to improve? Yes. And we will strive to do so.

I believe you have a high expectation of Creative Loafing when it comes to reflecting Atlanta's diversity. We want to keep it that way. We want to be the people held to that standard. Please continue to hold us to it.