Hey loyal TSL readers!!! (TSLers? TSLians? TSLuts? Can you guys come up with a fandom name for us? We want to be hip and cool now!)
You have all been telling us we have a diversity issue for a while. We weren’t listening though. But now we want to appeal to more people because staff keep quitting.
Acknowledging you have a problem is the first step.
And for us, it’s also the last.
Please don’t ask us to name examples of the harm we have caused to students of color. It makes us uncomfortable and stressed out and then when we get anxious we make more mistakes so it will be your fault and so actually you can’t hold any of this against us! We hate you all!
Please don’t remind us of the time our photo editors used a picture of random Black students for an article that was supposed to be about a conference uplifting young Black students but honestly that was just so much work and we didn’t really care that much.
Or how often we get people’s names wrong and people quit over it (but that’s their fault! snowflakes!). Who cares about cultures where your full name is important? In our culture, your middle name is either Rose or Catherine if you’re a girl and Alexander or William if you’re a boy and that’s only because your great aunts Elizabeth and Marie said it would look nice on your driver’s license one day when they get you a Mazda CX-5 for your 16th birthday. But like, you never ever use the middle name. It’s just decorative.
Or how we cut the DEI editor position because we kept asking brown people on staff to do it who weren’t interested and we couldn’t fill the role. I know we said that we turned it into a committee (that nobody joined) but that’s because everyone was being mean to us and we felt like we needed to do something performative but we didn’t have enough money in our budget for matcha because we spent it all trying to convince Mudd summer school to keep putting ads on every page.
And don’t you dare say anything about the major racial groups we forgot about in this report. We don’t think they count! Please don’t be mad! And why does it matter what the racial makeup of our staff is anyway? You could all tell just who was writing articles before we made this report.
And you guys should be thanking us, actually. It’s not every day a college paper can target both Jewish and Arab students. What has two thumbs and is whatever the opposite of a 2-state solution would be? THIS PAPER!
Check back in another 3 years for a report on how white we are!