From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to the Treatment, the Home Edition. I'm Elvis Mitchell.

My guest today is learned about microaggressions the way that most of us do, who

experience them, the hard way through living them. Ava Thompson Greenwald teaches reporting at the

metal school journalism, but she got her start, I would say, as a on-air reporter and learned

where the real power was in TV, which is to say the people who run the newsrooms,

the news directors.

And her book, Ladies' Leading, is a look at really, I think, the history of journalism

or people of color, but specifically on the way women of color have to inhabit and navigate

the world of news and ascending to the position of the news director.

Eva, first of all, thank you so much for being here.

You're welcome. I really appreciate the invitation.

I've got to tell you, I love any book that starts off with a quote from Stokely, Gar-Michael.

Yes, yes.

That quote really said it all in terms of power dynamics, right?

That invisible power is the most important

kind of power. And that's why it makes it so hard to disrupt that kind of power.

You talk in the book about your own experience and this being a kind of a hard one thing.

But I wondered for you how long this book had kind of been bubbling in your mind.

If you were teaching courses on that kind of power and power dynamic and decide, well, this

needs to be chartered in a way that's outside of the walls of academia or what?

So having been a former reporter and experienced some of these things, the first thing that I remembered

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