Setting Boundaries As A Black Journalist After The George Floyd Uprising

Kui Mwai discusses how frustrating it can be to have editors treat you like a spokesperson.

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In the early summer of 2020, shortly after George Floyd was killed by police, a nonprofit reached out to me to take over their Instagram to do what many were asking Black people to do at the time — take center stage, talk about their hardships, and provide a list of resources on how to best support the Black community. 

It was the last thing I wanted to do. I was just wrapping up a feature on how Black couples were dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was an emotional experience filled with taxing conversations about the hardships of love, life, and Blackness. Tears were shed, many of them my own long after these conversations with sources were over. I was overwhelmed, emotional, and riddled with imposter syndrome.  

I was fairly new to professional writing, and I’d struggled to get the green light on my story ideas for months. Now, editors not only were interested in my ideas, but they were coming to me. It seemed that because I’m Black, they expected me to be an expert in American racism. I struggled with that assumption because it couldn’t be farther from the truth. I didn’t grow up saturated in Black American culture, and every time that I said yes to an opportunity to explain what the Black community was feeling, I felt like a fraud. I don’t deserve this, I thought on more than one occasion.

In the late 1980s, my parents came to the US as a couple of 20-something Kenyan immigrants. They knew it wasn’t going to be easy, and that discrimination would be at every turn, but what surprised them was the animosity they felt from Black Americans who they thought would be their allies, the ones who understood what it felt like to be judged by the color of your skin or where you come from. Instead, they encountered nasty comments and xenophobic animosity. That experience played an integral role in how they raised me. My parents successfully established a colorblind home, where occasional microaggressions were explained away and not unpacked, and a “the world is your oyster” mentality was prioritized over any harsh truth. 

I internalized their way of looking at the world and as such, wasn’t the most socially conscious child. Yes, I knew I was Black, but moments of discrimination often passed me by like a whisper in the wind. We also spent a large chunk of my life living in the UK and Kenya, two places where race relations look very different. 

Growing up in the early 2000s, I rarely saw Blackness represented in the content I consumed. Thumbing through issues of Cosmopolitan or Allure, one or two Black models may have made a cameo in a mid-magazine spread (often in the background), but Black stories and Black voices were deemed niche, and when I lived abroad, Black outlets were inaccessible. 

That’s why years later, when I was choosing a career path, being a writer was the furthest thing from my mind. In early 2020, after several years of uncertainty, with a college degree and a few years of corporate experience under my belt, I decided to pursue a writing career. Thankfully, I saw many people who look like me in journalism. The media landscape seemed to be more diverse. And while that’s still the case, the industry has a long way to go. Recent findings show that mainstream media remains mostly white, and others found that racial diversity is declining rapidly. 

I was just getting my sea legs when the pandemic started and racial justice uprisings kicked off in response to Floyd’s death. During this period, I was experiencing a lot of sadness, for obvious reasons; guilt, for not participating in marches, protests, and social media discourse; and exhaustion, from constantly consuming content about how Black people are under attack around the world. Those mixed emotions led to an identity crisis: I didn’t feel Black enough to partake in efforts to support the community, but I didn’t feel like I belonged with non-Black people who were navigating allyship. I wasn’t sure where that left me. 

Despite this overwhelming sense of isolation, I was thriving professionally. Halfway through 2020, during the height of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, I secured a mentor at Cosmopolitan UK, who opened so many doors for me, and encouraged me to keep writing and being open about my experiences with my race and identity. She was (and is) lovely, but my imposter syndrome was starting to bleed into my professional life. Similar to how I was feeling about my Blackness, I questioned whether I was worthy of her attention and support. As she advocated for me, I couldn’t help but question what pushed her to want to work with me. Was it for my talent or my race? 

My Cosmopolitan mentor was just the first of many editors who began paying more attention to me during this volatile time. Prior to the summer of 2020, I had a lot of difficulty selling editors on my story ideas illuminating a Black or African experience. I pitched a story about an up-and-coming Kenyan comedian Elsa Majimbo who was taking TikTok by storm, but an editor said — and I’m paraphrasing — that they weren’t sure their audience would care about the story. A few weeks later, several major legacy publications published features on her. 

But now, when I pitched those editors at the same publications, I received some of the fastest yeses ever in my career.

It was bliss, but I felt bad for all parties involved: the Black readers who I was convinced could see right through me, and even the editors I started writing for — a lot of them non-Black, though a few were — who I felt like I was conning for my own financial gain. 

Jess Sims, a Black writer who has published pieces in Bustle, Harper’s Bazaar and Health, started freelancing around the same racially charged time. And to my surprise, she felt as frustrated and conflicted as I did. She told me that one of the most frustrating assumptions non-Black editors make about Black writers is that we know everything about every Black experience. 

“There is a profound pressure on several fronts with being a Black writer: one is, of course, being expected to be an arbiter of all things Black culture, which is ridiculous because even within the United States, Black people have different cultures,” she said. 

Sims, who’s from the Bay Area, said that an editor mistakenly assumed she knew the “ins and outs of Black culture in Atlanta.” I’m embarrassed to reveal that initially, I was skeptical of Jess’s perspective. Though I’m well aware of the differences between Black American and African culture, that awareness requires an understanding of Black American culture as homogeneous. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Black culture in New York City is completely different from Black culture in Houston.

Believing Black creatives are experts in all things Black is a mentality that goes far beyond geography. Sports Journalist Mark Wilson told me that back when he covered TV, the editors he worked with constantly pigeon-holed him into only covering shows about Black culture. 

“For some sites, I would be given assignments that would only cover shows like Real Housewives of Atlanta, Love and Hip Hop, and things of that nature because of my skin color,” Wilson, who now writes for Team NBS Media, said. “The editors never asked if I even watched those particular shows. While other writers were getting assignments to cover the more popular shows like Grey’s Anatomy, I was forced to cover what they figured was just for my culture.”

Though I’m critical of them, these editors aren’t totally to blame. Arguably, their mentality is in some ways rooted in the birth of legacy media in the 19th century. Back then, mainstream media refused to report about what was happening in Black communities, leaving Black people to create their own publications to tell their stories. Newspapers like Freedom’s Journal and Frederick Douglass’s The North Star played a pivotal role in informing abolitionist communities, and marked the dawn of Black media.

As Black media continued to grow into and throughout the 20th century, the media landscape started to shift. Most notably during the Civil Rights Movement, and later during the Black Power movement, Blackness was something mainstream media couldn’t ignore anymore. The glass ceiling was nowhere near being broken, but cracks were formed, as magazines like Jet and Ebony became pillars.

We’re long past the birth of legacy papers in the 19th century, and even the renaissance of Black media throughout the latter half of the 20th century. It’s time to adapt, and evolve. Which is happening… to a certain extent. The digital age transformed the media industry and helped diversify it. And as the industry continued to evolve to keep up with new technologies, new outlets that catered to Black readers began popping up. Now, finding Black voices in the media is easier than ever, thanks to publications like The Root and Blavity.

“It’s an amazing time [in the media industry], and this is what our ancestors fought for,” Cynthia Horner, whose work at Right On! Magazine has made her a pillar in Black media. She’s interviewed some of the greatest entertainers of our time, including Michael Jackson, Prince, Queen Latifah, and many more. Horner helped define Black media in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and without her important work, many Black writers (myself included) wouldn’t be in the industry. Horner recalled an era when Alex Hailey, the author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, was one of the only men of color publishing books.  

However, the old mentality that Black writers should know everything about all Black communities across the US and beyond still permeates across some media institutions. 

I encourage editors to ask Black writers what we feel comfortable or knowledgeable enough to explore in stories, and to not assume that every Black writer is well-versed in all Black cultures and experiences. Take a look at our previous work and let that, not our race, speak for itself. 

To Black writers who may feel similar pressures and frustrations, I encourage you to practice setting boundaries. Sims said doing so is what brought her solace. “When I noticed what was happening in terms of ‘DEI/struggle stories only’ for Black writers, I consciously made a decision to step back and only take on stories that I wanted to,” she said. Interacting with editors as a Black writer can become particularly challenging during Black-centered holidays because that’s when editor expectations are at an all-time high. If you want to sit out this Juneteenth, or next Black History Month, because you’re tired of dealing with editors’ and readers’ unrealistic expectations, do it. Now, I try to take it easy when February and June roll around, though the financial opportunity is hard to pass up. I try to remind myself that I can be selfish in this career, even if outside forces try to tell me I can’t. 

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BLOG ROUND UP

Last week, we published blogs about The San Diego Union-Tribune’s sale and a baffling media subplot on And Just Like That. 

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

—Emma Burrows is joining The Associated Press as a Russia & CIS reporter this month.
—Emilia David has joined The Verge, where she will be “reporting on all things AI.”
—Rainier Harris is one of Air Media’s New Voice fellows.
—Meghann Morhardt will be starting as The Messenger’s Sports Breaking News Reporter at the end of August.
—Claire Goforth has been promoted to investigative reporter at The Daily Dot.