"You're a pretty girl, but Blacks are hard to light"
Former KGW (Portland) Anchor Sharon Mitchell has shared a conversation that she had years ago when she was told she was losing her anchor job.
Mitchell anchored the Sunrise morning and Noon newscasts. That changed when one day, she said that a station manager told her, “I'm just letting you know that I'm going to replace you as an anchor.”
She says the manager told her, " 'Well, you're a pretty girl, but blacks are hard to light.' And even saying those words, I felt the hairs go up on the back of my neck because I couldn't believe that I was hearing what I was hearing.‘
Mitchell says that the conversation stayed with her for decades and only now is she processing the full impact of it.
“I started looking at the choices that I made, the things that I turned down, not necessarily that were in broadcasting, but were in all other aspects of my life, because I felt like I wasn't good enough to do something.”
She continued, "That is the insidious nature of racism. We are subject to micro-aggressions and we are subject to flat-out blatant acts of racism. And we have a resilience so we tend to shove these things down. And I believe that everyone of color - black, brown, everyone of color -has these wounds and the wounds can be so deep that you don't even know that they're there."
KGW contacted the manager in question by phone, who denied making the offending statement, saying “I am certain I didn’t say that.” No one connected to that management era is currently at KGW, which has had several ownership changes in the past 30 years.
He said that Mitchell’s reassignment was a “subjective talent decision.”