“Let’s Talk About Race,” a photo essay in the May 2017 O, the Oprah Magazine, was awarded an AWC Clarion Award in 2017 for Magazine Feature Article in an External Publication. The thought-provoking, conversation-starting photo essay flipped the script on many common scenes in the United States. Lucy Kaylin, O’s editor in chief, explains what it was like to dive into race following the 2016 Presidential election and how they ended up with the masterpiece published in the May 2017 issue.
We began planning “Let’s Talk About Race” in December 2016, when America was still feeling the aftershocks of the presidential election. We’d long been discussing the possibility of a race-themed package, but in those bitterly divisive days, everybody at O knew the time had come: The topic of race had never felt more urgent, and we wanted to engage our readers in a painful but essential conversation.
As anyone at O can tell you, those meetings always get very personal, very quickly. We talk about everything—love, sex, family, money, faith—but those conversations about race were among the most intimate we’ve ever had. People shared stories about times they’d witnessed racism or experienced it themselves, moments when they’d felt fear, anger, impotence, shame. Many of those stories were from early childhood, about our formative experiences on school playgrounds and at family dinner tables. It had never been more apparent: Though race looms so large in our national consciousness, it’s exceedingly rare for Americans of different ethnic backgrounds to frankly share their experiences and perspectives with each other.
We wanted the package to create the candor, the intimacy, and even the discomfort of those talks, so we asked writers of various backgrounds to reveal their own deeply personal experiences: Haig Chahinian, the gay dad of an adopted biracial daughter, admits his momentary fear when he encounters a lone African-American man on a deserted hiking trail. Monique Truong, whose family emigrated from Vietnam in the 1970s, confesses that her classmates’ relentless bullying informed her decision not to have children of her own. Jesmyn Ward grapples with the dread that comes with mothering a black son. We also wanted to capture the humanity of face-to-face conversation, so we featured black-and-white portraits of African-American, white, Latina, Asian, and Muslim women, sharing the first time they learned about their own ethnicity. We believe there’s nothing more powerful than hearing someone else’s lived experience, and in this era when we’re consumed with the idea of “identity politics,” stories bring us back to our shared identity as human beings.
Because a conversation is a two-way street, we also wanted readers to feel personally engaged, so on our Web site we asked them to submit “Awkward Questions from Well-Intentioned People”—from the serious (“Black or African-American?”) to the seriously bemused (“Why do white people overshare?”)—and answered them in a video series that featured staffers and other friends of O. We also offered a fill-in-the-blank that invites readers to consider the extent of their own social and cultural bubble. Who’s in their circle of friends, their workplace, the shows they watch, the books they read? We didn’t want to be shaming or didactic: We just wanted to encourage honest reflection and dialogue about the elephant in our national living room.
In fact, we put that elephant front and center, on our opening spread. Visually, this package presented a challenge for art director Jill Armus, photo director Christina Weber, and their respective teams. Since the stories here are raw and real, it would have seemed disingenuous to show soft-focus images evoking perfect harmony. Ideally, we wanted the art to be as thought-provoking as the text. That’s how we landed on the concept for Chris Buck’s photos, which flip the script of conventional stereotypes, like the white child in a toy store staring at a wall of black dolls. When a reader ponders those scenarios, she confronts her own assumptions and attitudes. Does she find the photos humorous? Unnerving? Disrespectful? Why? Suddenly she’s not just looking at a two-dimensional image; she’s personally engaged.
After “Let’s Talk About Race” was published in the May 2017 issue, we received a flood of supportive letters from readers, who seemed to be hungry for this kind of dialogue. One wrote, “I … hope Maya Angelou was right when she said, ‘When you know better, you do better. … We can do better.’”
We agree. We just have to keep talking.
About the Author
Lucy Kaylin became the editor in chief of O, The Oprah Magazine in May 2013. She had been deputy editor since September of 2009, helping steer the magazine through a major redesign for which the magazine was also awarded a Clarion Award for Best Overall External Magazine in 2013.
Kaylin is the author of two books, For the Love of God: The Faith and Future of the American Nun (William Morrow, 2000) and The Perfect Stranger: The Truth About Mothers and Nannies (Bloomsbury USA, 2007). She lives in New York City with her husband and son, and has a daughter in college on the West Coast.
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Kaylin ended up valuing the mentorship she received from her male editors over the years. “They told me what I needed to read and see. They gave me books about journalism, film and politics,” shared Kaylin. “They helped me become a well-rounded and well informed cultural critic. It was a great gift.”
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