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the week, we were always long on pages and short on staff. On an average day, each of my other six team members and I edited copy, wrote artlines and headlines and cropped photos for eight or so newspaper pages. Toward the weekend, however, we each did about 13 pages to cover the larger Sunday newspaper.
"You know, if I have to put out the paper with only one other person, I'm glad it's you," my supervisor told me one night when everyone else on our seven-member team had the night off or called in sick.

Imagine my surprise when he asked on that last night whether I had gotten my job because I was a minority. I sighed. Apparently, I never was going to be able to escape a job without someone asking that.
On my last day at the newspaper in Jackson, a co-worker with whom I thought I had a pretty close relationship asked the same thing. That time, I told him I didn't know. The only thing to which I was able to confess was that I got the internship through the "good ol' girls network." A professor of mine at Indiana University-Indianapolis was best friends with the lifestyle editor.
That same professor, however, also was a product of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. She and I disagreed about whether I should take advantage of my minority status. My parents always told me I could compete on merit, and my record had proven that to be true. So if I was hired because I was a minority, that was revealed either by my professor or when the editors saw me during the interview process.
My situation at Elmira, however, was quite different. For starters, I never had to answer Mike. The managing editor was within earshot and told Mike I had been hired sight unseen over the telephone based on the strength of my resume and my references. In short, the editors hired me after a two-hour phone interview.
A decade later, many things had changed. Tiger Woods put a face on the issues of multiracial people by winning the Masters Tournament; Indiana became one of the eight states with a law that mandated a multiracial category when racial information was collected; and Lise Funderburg had written the book Black, White, Other, a collection of essays that started to put the multiracial experience into perspective.
But all that was lost on one college intern at The Indianapolis News/Star. He apparently did not understand with whom he spoke or misspoke when he told me his professor at Butler University told him he'd have a difficult time getting a job because he was a white male.
I told this young man that he had no divine right to a job and that all affirmative action did was attempt to level the playing field by reducing white privilege. All this meant was that instead of having the entire pie to themselves, white men had to learn to share with women and racial minorities. They now would be in a position of having to compete for employment rather than having it handed to them.
We're another decade further, and I'm afraid that the situation, especially in media, is little improved. The only difference is my jaw no longer drops.

Learn more about this author, Rebecca Bibbs.
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