A day of difference for Comment is free
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Version 0 of 1. Notice anything different about the Comment section today? As an editor, I hope the answer’s yes. But part of me also hopes it’s no. Today, the final day of Britain’s Black History Month, we’ve given our section, and our website Comment is free, over to black contributors. Some names you’ll be familiar with; some are working with the Guardian for the first time – as is our cartoonist. Who’s included? For the most part we’ve interpreted black, as the Month itself does, as meaning those of African or Caribbean heritage (Aditya Chakrabortty explains the term’s different political and racial meanings). But we also had another rule: apart from this one article, nothing else should be centred on “race”. The worst thing we could have done today would be to inadvertently feed the idea that black people can only talk about this one subject: that we are all skin-obsessed and have little to add to other debates. In a media landscape where most national newspapers have, between them, a mere handful of minority opinion-formers, we wanted to show that there is expertise and variety that many – and we don’t exclude ourselves here – too often miss out on. And tomorrow and beyond? There’ll be no special edition; but we plan to ensure that our pages and website continue to have added colour: to reflect the world as it is, rather than as the media has traditionally seen it. |