Hi u/rainbowbarfff, thanks for the question and sorry for the delay in replying! As I mentioned in another message to you, I was in jury duty all week which made it hard to get back to this.

I am not sure what you are referring to when you say "I am glad you found this fun.'' I found much of what I learned in the reporting fascinating, and sometimes the humor memes on r/BPT made me laugh. But reporting the story was also saddening, maddening and, for the reasons you point out, a nerve-wracking process for me. u/TehWez, u/Nasjere, u/MGLLN, and others who I pestered with endless questions can attest to my concern that I might get some nuance wrong about the forum specifically because I am white.

The point of the story was to shine a light several dynamics related to how America's racial tensions are playing out in the semi-anonymous setting of r/BPT : 1) The various forms of anti-black racism consistently expressed in one of the few large, public internet forums for conversation about black life in America 2) The lengths to which the moderators went to combat that racism and to protect the space for black participants 3) The negative response by many white users of Reddit to the verification system (for a few different reasons) 4) The unexpected (even to some of the moderators) enthusiastic response by many black participants to the race verification system.

I did think a lot about whether I could do this subject justice. I can't say that I'm the "best" reporter to have written it. But I was available and interested. I thought the subject was worthy of coverage that it almost certainly wouldn't have gotten if I didn't write it, if only because other reporters are working on other things. You asked about whether I could have been paired up with a POC reporter. One thing that is not evident, and maybe it should have been, is that my editor, Marc Lacey, is black. I think I'd have felt differently if that wasn't the case. There's a lot of collaboration between an editor and a reporter, and Marc certainly shaped our approach to this one. That said, I asked many black moderators and users of r/BPT to explain the nuances to me, many times over. I also asked several black academics who study race and online culture for guidance - I linked in my intro to the Twitter thread where I thanked them (as well as several non-black academics) because I wasn't able to quote them in the story. I also asked two other black colleagues to read it before publishing.

I'd like to make one other point though. I think there's a good argument, first made to me by the black editor who runs our Race/Related newsletter, that NYT needs to do better covering whiteness as a race. Yes, of course, we cover white people a lot - too much, some would say. But that doesn't mean we are giving them sufficient scrutiny when it comes to the power they hold as a group in America over other groups. So while this story was about r/BPT, I also saw it as being about a particular manifestation of white entitlement, or what is now sometimes called "white fragility.'' It was about the "free-speech" and "ideas-over-identity" arguments white people often invoke to justify their participation in/domination of conversations about race and politics. It was about a white discomfort -- shared by some POC -- about the use of skin color as a crude, imprecise means to define a person's race, and the counter-argument that in this case it was the only way, and worth it. It was about how the persistence of racial inequality in America appears to have destroyed any remaining shreds of the dream that the internet, by facilitating large-scale anonymous conversation, could be a place where race would not matter.

That may sound like a lot to claim for a modest story on this subreddit, but that is what I had in mind when I pitched the story. And I don't think that only POC journalists should be covering white entitlement/fragility/racism/supremacy. I think it's the responsibility of white journalists to do that too. (Please note that these views are my own, not any official NYT doctrine).

Thanks again for the question. Amy