Yamiche Alcindor Wants America to See Its Flaws

The morning I talk to Yamiche Alcindor is like most mornings she’s had since she started covering Donald Trump in 2017—she had her schedule, her schedule was interrupted.

This was several weeks before the election, and we’d had the interview planned well in advance, but then Trump announced he would deliver a speech. It wasn’t even 9 a.m. Alcindor serves as the White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour but came to the role from The New York Times, where she was a political and breaking-news reporter. “It has been a long time since I kept normal business hours,” she explains when we do find time to squeeze in this conversation. So the president’s erratic habits—tweeting at all hours, calling in to Fox News shows to rage, castigating the press and the elected officials who refuse to parrot his lines before some have had their first cup of coffee—don’t faze her.

The proof is in not just her demeanor, which is Mona Lisa calm, but her output. Alcindor appears on NBC News and MSNBC, in addition to her responsibilities with PBS. She has a presence on-air around the clock, from Morning Joe appearances near sunrise to the occasional Late Night With Seth Meyers interview. Her work ethic has earned her accolades, with the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), the National Association of Black Journalists, and the White House Correspondents’ Association all honoring her in just the past several months. The president seems to grasp her talent as well and so treats her as he does the other women who don’t kowtow to him, lashing out at Alcindor at several low points during his administration. In 2018, when she pointed out that some saw his embrace of the term nationalist as a nod to white nationalists, Trump snapped, “That’s such a racist question.” In March, Trump cut her off in the Rose Garden when she pressed him on how the federal government planned to get states medical equipment to combat the coronavirus. “Be nice,” he admonished her. “Don’t be threatening.”

“Though Trump is a blabbermouth, he managed to bundle a sexist and racist jab in the span of five words,” The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple wrote of Trump’s rejoinder.

True, although Yamiche Alcindor—consummate professional—had the last word. “I’m not the first human being, woman, black person or journalist to be told that while doing a job,” she wrote on Twitter after the incident. “My take: Be steady. Stay focused. Remember your purpose. And, always press forward.”

Alcindor decided to become a journalist in high school after reading about the fate of Emmett Till, murdered in 1955 at 14 because a white woman claimed he’d offended her. She learned that Jet Magazine had put the now-infamous photo of Till’s mother grieving over his mutilated remains on its cover and that it had “rocked the conscience” of America, she remembers. At the time it moved civil rights leaders, like Martin Luther King Jr., and spurred a generation to activism. But the work remains unfinished—it is now, and it was then, when Alcindor first came across that issue of Jet. “I find it remarkable,” Alcindor says, “that decades later, I can look at that same image and say, ‘We still have work to do in this country.’”

Later, Alcindor moved to Washington, D.C., majoring in English and government at Georgetown University, intent on making good on her plans to be a reporter. She interned at The Seattle Times and the Miami Herald and met Athelia Knight and the late Gwen Ifill—two legends, both Black women in journalism and obvious role models for Alcindor. (The IWMF award that Alcindor received in September was named for Ifill, who was the cohost of PBS NewsHour until her death in 2016.) The meet-cutes were brokered not with the help of a mentor at school or an illustrious summer job but thanks to Alcindor’s hairdresser. All three women went to the same salon; Alcindor talked about the news so much that her hairdresser offered to introduce her.

It has been well over a decade since then, but Alcindor is as much of a zealot for journalism and what it can do as she was at 18. But with a caveat: “I’m a journalist who has been taught and who has practiced the idea that I’m here to tell the truth, not to just balance both sides, and I don’t believe in false equivalencies.” Alcindor does not present, for example, an either/or on the existence of climate change. (“We know the climate is changing. The question is what should we do now.”) And she is not interested in having debates about whether racism is right or wrong, whether it’s happening or not, whether or not it’s true that Black people are killed at higher rates at the hands of police compared to white people. (It’s true, but her role is, as she puts it, “to ask what to do about that.”)

To be a good journalist, according to Alcindor, is to level with the audience: “Here are the issues. This is how to understand what’s going on in the world.” That’s the work she plans to do for the rest of her career, in whatever form or medium it takes.

Alcindor has found that telling the truth to her viewers means owning her own truths too. “I bring my whole self to reporting—the fact that I’m a Black woman, that I’m Haitian-American, that I’m the child of people who came to America because they believed this country when it said that it treated men and women equally, despite their race and socioeconomic backgrounds. I believe that America should be delivering on that promise,” she says. Her reporting is grounded in her intimate experience of struggle, of having immigrant parents, though she cautions that their stories are not a monolith. “I understand what it means to be stereotyped and criminalized just for how you look,” she says. “I hope that my reporting illuminates some of the flaws that we have in this country, because it comes from a very personal place.”

Alcindor has spent much of the pandemic working on her first book, a memoir titled Don’t Forget. The project has given her time and space that the crush of frenzied breaking news reporting does not tend to accommodate, although the realities of the world outside creep in. “As I cover the pandemic, as I cover politics, I can’t even conceive of those things without also seeing them through a racial prism because we see Black and brown people dying disproportionately from the virus. We’re seeing that police killings of Black people on video continues despite the fact that we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and we’re seeing a political season where fear on the right and on the left is at the forefront.”

Still, the book is a chance to take stock—high highs, low lows, Trump snark and all. But it is not some meditation on what it’s like to go toe-to-toe with a president. Alcindor doesn’t take the bait and hit back—not in the Rose Garden and not when asked about it now. Instead, she thinks: I am here as a representation of all of the vulnerable people who want answers about how to survive here. I have a job to do. I am at work. And then she thinks: I feel privileged each time I walk through the gates of the White House, and I think of all the people who will never walk through the gates of the White House.

That kind of discipline calls to mind a less emotional reporter than Alcindor is proud to be. The pandemic has deepened her commitment to being an empathetic listener, to making people feel heard and seen. “Being emotional can be used against women, but I lean into that because I know the stories that make me cry are the ones that end up on the front page of The New York Times or in the A-block of NewsHour. Those are the stories that move me and that I know will then move other people, whether it’s about people living in cramped apartments, who can’t social distance, or African-American families who have 15 people infected with the coronavirus, or immigrants who have been kidnapped and tortured while waiting in Mexico for asylum in the United States, because of the policy changes by the president. Those are the stories that I think need to be told and deserve to be told and are often the hardest to tell, but are also the most rewarding.”

She shares that commitment with some of her closest friends in the business, people like Abby Phillip and Laura Jarrett on CNN, Trymaine Lee on MSNBC, Nikole Hannah-Jones with The New York Times, and her coworkers at PBS and NBC. The news moves too fast for Alcindor to spend a lot of time thinking about how well she’s done. (“I hardly am sitting back thinking, This was a great day for journalism.”) But she does let herself savor her friends’ achievements, and she hopes that a new generation will see their efforts and come up behind them. “It heartens me that there might be a young man or young woman out there who is seeing my work, who is seeing me pose a question to the president, and is inspired to go into journalism,” she says. “I think journalism is such a mighty service to this country, that I know that there are young people out there who will carry the torch.”

In the meantime, Alcindor is focused on getting through the dwindling weeks of 2020. That’s the goal—survival. But since we’re so close to New Year’s, there’s a resolution too: “To do work that I can be proud of, that I can look back on when I’m an old woman and say, ‘These were the right stories to be telling in the right moment.’”

Mattie Kahn is the culture director of Glamour.

Originally Appeared on Glamour