Simone Sebastian was exhausted. Working at The Washington Post, one of the most influential newspapers in the United States, she felt that she needed to translate her experiences to an audience that had not had the same experience. She is a black woman in a country that is still living the legacy of slavery.
When he learned that journalists Lauren Williams and Akoto Ofori-Atta were founding an African-American news site, he decided to change jobs. “I’ve spent my entire career thinking about how to explain to white readers the issues that affect black people,” she says. “It’s liberating not having to do this anymore and knowing that my audience understands me.”
Sebastian is now editorial director of Capital B, one of the main American projects for an anti-racist journalism model; Another initiative that has attracted attention is the “resurrection” of the famous abolitionist newspaper Emancipator, originally from 1820.
The US has a long tradition in this type of press aimed at specific groups of the population, especially those of African origin. The recent period, however, is one of special effervescence. One of the catalysts was the death of George Floyd, a black man strangled by a white police officer in May 2020. The murder led to a historic wave of popular protests, reinforcing the Black Lives Matter movement.
“In 2020, I tried to give the dimension of that moment to my editorial colleagues”, says Sebastian. “It’s a challenge to have to explain some things to white people who haven’t gone through the same things we have. White journalists don’t understand what that means because they’ve spent their careers writing for people who look like them.”
Capital B is a donation-funded non-profit organization with around 20 employees. The site has two main teams, in Washington, capital of the country, and Atlanta (Georgia), historic for the struggle of blacks and birthplace of Martin Luther King. The coverage focuses on themes central to the lives of the black population, with clear implications for a system of structural racism: justice, health, education, politics, climate and finance.
One of the goals is to go beyond stories that portray African-Americans only as victims. “When the press addresses this experience, it’s always with the message that it’s hard to be black in the US,” says Sebastian. “We also want to tell you how people of color are helping their communities, how they have been successful despite obstacles, so that their experiences can be replicated. These are things that don’t appear in the mainstream press.”
Journalists like her have chosen vehicles like Capital B not only for the opportunity to tell these stories from that perspective. Some seek companies in which they see real possibilities to grow, without having to deal with the racism of hierarchies that disfavor them. “Black reporters get sidelined and end up stuck in lower positions.”
Similar to Capital B, Emancipator emerged as a result of the 2020 social debates fueled by Floyd’s death. The site is a reinvention of a famous abolitionist newspaper created in 1820 in Tennessee, which circulated for a few months marking the country with its radical anti-slavery approach. The “Resurrection” is a project of The Boston Globe and Boston University under the leadership of Deborah Douglas and Amber Payne.
Payne says that the idea of ​​reviving the newspaper came mainly from conversations with colleagues, who didn’t just want to cover the same news that the big newspapers already followed. “We asked ourselves what would happen if we had an anti-racism writing,” he says.
The term “anti-racism” is key. Douglas states that Emancipator is not a black publication, as the term can be exclusionary. “Everyone is involved. We want to dilute the power of patriarchy and white supremacy, which impacts the whole world. We use this echo of the past, the abolitionist movement, as a gateway to discuss our place of speech, dealing with the racial aspect and also with their intersections.”
In that sense, Payne says the Emancipator goes beyond saying that such and such are racist in the US — which the mainstream press already does. “We want to explain to the reader what that means,” he says. She gives the example of a series of reports on racial income disparity that the site recently debuted with. “Everyone knows that this is a legacy of slavery, but that’s not all. It has to do with property laws, with the concentration of power, with the demarcation of which neighborhoods have access to credit. it’s part of the social fabric, of how the systems were created.”
Emancipator now has four full-time employees. Despite being based in Boston and focusing on that community, the site also publishes national and international news. Countries like Brazil, with racial and social issues similar to those of the US, are on the radar.
Initiatives such as Capital B and Emancipator keep alive an important legacy of the American press in the view of Lynette Clemetson, director of the Wallace House at the University of Michigan – home to the prestigious Knight-Wallace Fellowship for Journalists.
She was one of those responsible for the Root project, the Washington Post’s black journalism initiative. “To have a strong independent press, we need to have a wide variety of types of journalism,” she says.
“If you look at the history of journalism in the US, you will see that it was only in the second half of the 20th century that the consolidation of the big media took place. For the most part, American journalism was a wild and messy collective of different types of voices. , points of view and audiences. We were, more than anything, a cacophony.”
The worrying thing is that the topics discussed by Emancipator today do not seem dated, even two centuries after the creation of the newspaper that inspired it.
“These issues don’t sound like something historical, they sound like something current,” says Clemetson. There has certainly been important progress since the end of Emancipator. “But there are people and forces that want to pull us back. Today, we’re struggling to decide whether the US is going to keep moving forward — or whether we’re going to move backwards.”
