Every time I saw Gwen Ifill on PBS or moderating a debate I was impressed by Gwen Ifill. She seemed to embody the best of journalism – uncowed by power, eyes on the prize of truth, not settling for either the easy questions or brush-off answers.
This is a lovely article about her, drawing connections between her career and young people today who can lack the context of history and the understanding that people are not simply collections of positions and biases.
In particular, the last sentence here is something I aspire to.
Gwen and I both loved clothes, but we loved the armor we wore even before we put on a stitch, the armor we wore as we traversed roads not taken by women who looked like us; Gwen took that moral armor into her work as a professional journalist, just as she took her consciousness of race and racism into whatever newsroom she inhabited, unabashedly but gently providing good information that helped cause hateful words or hateful glances to fall to the ground and dry up.