Just days after his second book—American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress—was released in June, Wesley Lowery embarked on the next chapter of his storied career, joining AU’s Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW) as its new executive editor.
Widely regarded as one of the nation’s leading reporters on issues of race and justice, Lowery succeeds pioneering journalist Charles Lewis, who founded the nonprofit newsroom in the School of Communication in 2008. Lewis, who also founded the Center for Public Integrity, retired from AU earlier this year.
“Wesley Lowery is one of the most consequential journalism innovators and educators of our time,” says SOC interim dean Leena Jayaswal, SOC/BA ’94. “His work follows a long tradition of groundbreaking social justice journalism, and his investigations have reshaped practices in newsrooms across the nation and influenced conversation on the Black Lives Matter movement, civil rights, and race relations.”
Lowery began his career on the political beat, but was sent to Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 to cover the police killing of Michael Brown for the Washington Post. His first book, 2016’s They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement, takes readers inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America.
In his new post, Lowery will train students to tackle the same data-driven enterprise journalism that garnered him a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his work on the Post’s Fatal Force project—a first-of-its-kind, real-time database that tracks fatal shootings by American police officers. Fatal Force, which remains the most trusted source for data on police shootings, also won a Peabody Award and was named among the decade’s top 10 works of journalism.
“For years, IRW has been [pairing] top-flight student journalists with professional newsrooms—partnerships that have aided the most important work of my career,” Lowery says. “I’m excited to expand upon this mission, working with more students, more newsrooms, and more professional journalists to ensure that the workshop remains the country’s premiere training ground for investigative journalism.”
On September 19, Lowery joined WAMU 88.5’s Kojo Nnamdi, host of the weekly Politics Hour, and Jenny Gathright, the station’s criminal justice reporter, to discuss American Whitelash, which explores the rise of White supremacy in the decade following the historic 2008 election of President Barack Obama. The following is an excerpt from their conversation.
Q. What was the impetus for Whitelash?
A. Books very often begin with a thesis, but this one began with a question. I spent most of the Obama administration covering racial violence against Black Americans, the movement that was rising to respond to that, and how the first Black president navigated those issues. When you have a thematic beat, you’re covering different gradations of the same story for years, and as the Obama administration gave way to the Trump administration, I remember thinking, “What’s the next chapter of this story?”
What we began seeing very quickly were instances of White racial violence—an immigrant being attacked on a train, a synagogue being shot up, a mosque being attacked—in which the attackers were explicit about what they were seeking and the fact that politics had encouraged them to behave in this way. I started thinking about how to put those disparate events in conversation with each other. It started very simply: If we are going to be living through an era of heightened racial violence, I wanted to chronicle the stories of some of the people who were victimized.
A lot of books will be written about anti-Semitism, anti-Black violence, Islamophobia, and xenophobia during this era, and I can appreciate the unique histories and contexts of those different types of prejudice. But what is also important is understanding the interplay of all those things.
Q. You write that many of those who have devoted their careers to understanding perpetrators of racial violence can identify the moment they realized their purpose. What was that moment for you?
A. Very few of the researchers [in the book] do just one study on White supremacists; this very often becomes a life’s work for a lot of folks. We like to think that if we peel back the onion, we will get to some [transformative] moment, when in reality . . . the things that spark our interest are often relatively small.
For me, it’s less of a specific moment and more of an understanding—whether from my parents or how I was raised—that race and justice are the key battlegrounds in the United States, and that one of the major unanswered questions in our society is to what extent we will be a democracy for everyone and allow for justice for everyone. Frankly, accepting as a premise that issues of race and identity sit at the core of almost every contemporary issue separates me from more of my [journalism] colleagues than I wish were true. They’re certainly not the only [issues], but they are the frame through which I approach a lot of my work. That has always positioned me to tell stories or to lean into lines of coverage that some of my colleagues didn’t.
Q. How do you find hope amid so much hate?
A. These moments of backlash, these moments of victory, always spark a response. On one hand, it’s a warning. As my mom would say, “Pride comes before the fall.” But that moment also seeds and sparks the clarity, activism, and fervor that leads to the things that reorder and restructure societies for better. In the moment when John Lewis, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr. heard about Emmett Till, they could not imagine the world they would leave behind. They faced a horror and a pain that propelled them to say, “We’re going to do something.”
Now, that doesn’t erase the actual horror of what happened. I can’t charmingly talk the lynching of Emmett Till into a good thing. And yet, in response to [Till’s murder], that horror mobilizes. It makes people say, “No, this isn’t the world I want to live in.” It forces people to demand something better and different.
The book ends with Charlottesville. One of the reasons I ended there is because I thought it exemplified this issue very well. People don’t realize this, but everything that happened in Charlottesville stemmed out of a [teenage] girl writing an essay for her English class. Zy Bryant was asked to write about one thing [she] could do to make [her] community a better place. And she wrote, “Well, as a Black 15-year-old, it’s kind of weird that there are these Confederate [statues] all over the place. Maybe we could take some of those down.” Her English teacher said, “You should send that in as a letter to the editor of the local paper.” And then one of the council members read the letter and said, “We’re a community that listens to our young people, we’ll put together a commission to look at this idea.”
What we see at its core is a 15-year-old girl’s extremely earnest attempt to make [her] neighborhood a better place. In response to that tiny, tiny act of antiracist activism—if you would even call it that, because she didn’t know she was doing it when she did it—White supremacist groups rally in Charlottesville to defend these monuments, and people are killed.
But when you look at that moment, both in Charlottesville and around the country, you then see the response. You see the rise of these localized movements all over the country to debate and grapple with: “Who are we representing? Who do we have in our town squares? Whose names are on our buildings?”
Zy Bryant wasn’t thinking about any of these things when she wrote her English essay—and she certainly wasn’t thinking of these things when she watched, from a safe location, the protests descend into riots. But all of it—the violence, the opposition she received—in turn led to additional activism, beyond what she could have ever imagined.
I don’t write about very many happy things. One of the reasons [why] is that, when we see something that doesn’t make sense or feels like an injustice, we have a desire to do something. And for me, doing journalism, helping other people understand and contextualize [those injustices], is a means of disassociating—of separating myself from it, even as I’m leaning into it. But by leaning into it in that way, it forces me to see how each of these moments gets the wheels moving for the next one.