Black Journalism: Rethinking the Role of the Press in a Hostile Climate

A UK journalist argued this week that Black media must stop defining itself in reaction to white-majority narratives and instead focus on the internal dynamics of the global diaspora.

The speaker, who delivered the Claudia Jones memorial lecture hosted by the UK National Union of Journalists, said the current political climate makes it difficult to speak with certainty. She noted that the sector stands in the shadow of the Black Lives Matter movement and the rise of the far right. The lecture was partly inspired by the response to her newsletter, The Long Wave, which turned two years old this week.

The speaker, a columnist for less than a decade, described the environment for Black journalists in Britain as hostile. She cited a Conservative government that cut public services and a police and Security Service that institutionalized Islamophobic and anti-Black policies. These included the Prevent duty and stop and search practices. She said the political culture refused to acknowledge institutional racism, creating a psychological agony that powered much of her writing.

She described the period following the death of George Floyd in 2020 as a time of coordinated lies. Right-wing media and ministers often ran with stories about special treatment for Black people. One specific example she cited was the BBC shortening its Last Night of the Proms broadcast due to COVID precautions. Right-wing media claimed the song Land of Hope and Glory was cancelled because of the BLM movement. Then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson joined the condemnation.

The speaker said that after 2020, correcting media coverage and right-wing myths became like playing whack-a-mole. She argued that progressives often posted black squares and took the knee when the cost was low, but then retreated to the argument of going high. She said this strategy was disingenuous and failed to address the salience of culture wars to Black people. She experienced this time as one of almost physical savaging.

She said the sector was rapidly boxed in with no room for maneuver. Every objection written or spoken was consumed by the ecosystem it fought. Journalism regarding Black concerns became a matter of instant recruitment into a war rather than reporting or opinion. Her opponents were a disparate bunch but the product of a majority white establishment that did not want to listen to the experiences of Black people. She cited facts about disproportionate policing, racial profiling, and unequal maternal health, unemployment, education, and income.

The speaker said the orientation of Black journalism was often toward white-facing discourse rather than toward each other. She argued that the sector needed to turn away from white-facing discourse and into Black-facing and intra-communal discourse. A step back became necessary to determine what journalism is for. She said the goal is to find space for maneuver and breathing room.

In 2024, she began publishing The Long Wave. She said the main lesson from the past two years is how distinctive the Black experience is. She noted that no other people were enslaved, traded, and removed from their lands in such numbers and over such a long time. The Black diaspora is among the largest and most sprawling, connected by similar histories. These include common linguistic heritage, musical influences, resistance politics, and shared mystical pre-Abrahamic practices.

The speaker said the diaspora is not a people scattered from a homeland, but a homeland that has traveled with the people and remains within them. It makes space for a multifaceted form of Blackness that can incorporate co-existing identities. She said her identities have included being Sudanese, from a certain tribe, and Muslim. She has also found other ways of self-defining, such as African, pan-African, and Black. She said Black can mean belonging to part of something bigger.

She said acknowledging this follows the legacy of Claudia Jones. Jones’s journalistic endeavors at the West Indian Gazette supported anti-racism in the UK and fostered dialogue between West Indians and international freedom movements. In establishing the precursor to Notting Hill Carnival, Jones galvanised a form of Black culture that insists on its endurance on its own terms. The speaker said this process involves divesting from the particular and embracing something more whole. She said journalism is for existing on your own terms.