The Perils of Being a Black Woman Freelancer

Kaila Philo dives into the challenges faced by black women freelance journalists.

On May 2nd, The New Republic published “Down and Out in the Gig Economy,” a piece about the perils of permalancing by tech journalist Jacob Silverman. In it, he details his difficulties maintaining a steady living as a freelance writer; he’s found that, despite ten years in the industry and a book to his name, freelancing remained an unsustainable means for an “intellectually-engaged life.”

One passage in particular stood out for many: “Nor is there much room for career development or mentorship when editors, often operating under page-view or production quotas of their own, are disconnected from their labor force.” This disconnection between editor and writer widens when the writer in question already finds themselves at a distance from media just because of who they are.

Sitting at the intersection of race and gender often provides black women with a unique understanding of socio-political subjects where non-white, male correspondents may have blindspots, but it also means black women tend to get pigeonholed — their writing only called for when (the often white, male) editors of publications need a hot take on a controversy.

While Silverman finds it hard to live on freelance tech journalism—a rather fruitful beat compared to many others—black women freelancers are having trouble breaking and staying in journalism at large. A black woman’s lived experience can serve as fertile soil for a journalistic beat, but without the proper training or mentorship, it can limit her opportunity.

As always, the odds are stacked against us. A Pew Research Center analysis found that newsrooms are more racially homogenous than the overall US workforce: 77 percent of newsroom employees—including editors, photographers, staff writers and videographers—are white, compared to 65 percent of the broader US workforce. And 48 percent of newsroom employees are white men, compared to 34 percent of workers overall.

Though newsrooms today present themselves as supporters of diversity, journalism is still very much a (white) “boy’s club,” where white men are the main arbiters of what’s important, and invite only a select few others to join them. Sometimes this is made obvious, like when Gay Talese questioned Nikole Hannah-Jones about how she got her job at the Times only a year before she won a MacArthur. He also asked if she planned on skipping out on the conference in order to get her nails done. Hannah-Jones, the only black person in the room, didn’t know how to respond without coming off like a stereotype. “It was a hard moment for me to realize that even at this point in my career I could still be silenced,” she told Rewire.

This power imbalance is even more blatant when you look at mastheads. According to a 2018 report from the Women’s Media Center, white men make up 53.65 percent of media leadership, whereas white women make up 32.82 percent and black women account for a whopping 2.16 percent across the industry.

Young black women find it hard to break into journalism simply due to this great dearth in peers who look like them.

Clarissa Brooks, a senior at Spelman College, said that even after taking journalism classes, she ran into challenges when it came to practicing and expanding on the skills she’s already gained.

“I was pretty clear on what I wanted to do,” she told me. “I just didn’t really know how to do it and how to do it well, because I didn’t have a lot of black women journalists around me to let me know, like, ‘Hey, this is the path,’ or ‘These are the skills you need.’”

Unfortunately, journalism isn’t much more welcoming once you’re through the gates. Stephanie Smith, a freelance culture writer, said she was hired by a magazine she wrote for somewhat regularly, only to find herself cornered into covering only black artists.

“I actually listen to every genre, but mostly get commissioned for ‘black’ music features,” she said. She also found herself pushing back on a lot of microaggressions, from tactless editorial decisions to insensitive tweets, in the predominantly white office, quickly becoming what she calls the “is-this-racist checker.”

“I think they hire black people as freelancers so they can have a minimal level of accountability,” she told me. “It’s a way to look progressive without having to actually change internal structures.” Rather than recruiting black editorial leadership, for example, publications have taken to commissioning articles on race every so often to “pay a black freelancer for their lived experience,” she remarked.

Some of the barriers keeping black women at a distance are psychological,though they’re driven by external circumstances.

“It feels like my white peers have a better shot at positions, not because they have better writing, but because their whiteness is the default, so they’re able to write about things even without knowing about it through research,” college student Asha Mohamud told me. “Whereas I feel more confidence that they’d want me … to be writing about the topics related to my identity.”

Identity can provide a special expertise on certain kinds of politics that can lead to the occasional “This is What It’s Like Being Black at _______” clip or, when contextualized and expanded upon, can bolster sky-high careers to the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s.

That isn’t to say that race can’t be a beat—quite the contrary. The “race beat” has been a valuable part of American journalism for generations, especially in times of sociopolitical unrest, like during the Civil Rights Movement. Errin Haines Whack, the Associated Press’s national writer for race and ethnicity, published a piece about how vital this kind of journalism is. “[A]s race is an omnipresent force in American life,” she writes, “race coverage, which requires the same sort of expertise as business or education journalism, is essential to reporting on who we are as a society.”

But as with any beat, writers need the tools to turn this innate expertise outward in order to build a steady, stable career. A lack of mentorship for freelancers coupled with a lack of representation for black journalists culminates in a deadly combination that leaves legions of black freelancers unable to expand. Once you’re cornered in a beat derived from your lived experience, you become dispensable, laid off for one of the other countless freelancers with similar experiences. (And sometimes we forget that not every black writer wants to write about hip-hop, and not every non-white writer wants to cover race.)

When discussing the precarity of media today, critics often fall back on a blanket experience similar to Silverman’s: It’s hard to find a job. But black women have found their journey in the particularly nefarious. The industry tells you that you’re valuable because of your lived experience, before letting you go for someone else’s. The thing that makes you a supposed expert in the eyes of the majority white and male media industry is also what makes you disposable. And while you’re being used for these exploitative means, it’s nearly impossible to accumulate enough clips or experience to become an expert in something else.

Freelancing as a black woman can often feel less like running on a wheel and more like standing on a trap door: You may be standing, but you know that the floor can come right from under you at any moment.

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