Miami Herald editor-in-chief publicly responded to racist email

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Updated July 26, 2021, 3:24 p.m. ET

Miami Herald editor-in-chief Monica Richardson could have rejected a racist email she received from a reader without hesitation. It was filled with offensive comments, ended with a misogynistic insult, and could have been ignored as one of the many nasty emails journalists send out every day.

But not only did the newspaper’s first black editor read the email without clicking “delete,” she published her response in the newspaper.

The sender had expressed his anger the day after a Miami Herald editorial asked why Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s riot law didn’t appear to apply to a Cuban-American protest that blocked the Palmetto Freeway for many hours. In doing so, the sender used several derogatory terms and phrases targeting Richardson.

Both in his response and in the morning edition of NPR, Richardson called the email “brutal.”

In her public response, she wrote: “Like other times of confrontation with racism, this will stay with me for life.”

Richardson told Morning Edition host A Martnez that she initially wrote two versions of the column, one that was careful to be “very polite” and the other that was written “from the heart.” . The final version did not include the name of the sender. Instead, it opened up a conversation with Miami as a whole.

“It wasn’t about personally attacking that person, it was about responding to the message the reader had,” she told Morning Edition. “It was the subject I wanted to talk about, not the person.”

In the response, Richardson called on Miami to take a civic pledge when frustrated by current events.

“Miami, who are we in times of challenge? Who are we right now? How are you using your voice?” she wrote.

Ultimately, Richardson said she refused to respond to the sender’s words with silence.

“I don’t feel like we should sweep things under the rug and say ‘it’s okay’ anymore. I’ve only been here in Florida in this role since January, and it’s happened a few times where I got something and thought, ‘OK, this is a completely racist email but it calls me racist,’ she said. “People will say, ‘Oh, this is Florida, get used to it.’ And I had a moment after reading that and I thought, ‘This doesn’t have to be Florida. It doesn’t have to be something we get used to. ‘”

Josie Fischels is an intern at the News Desk at NPR.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To learn more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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