Recently, I read a piece by Ben Okri about what he saw as the narrow field of vision of writers of colour in the West. Minority writers should move beyond issues of racial injustice, slavery and colonialism, he argued, and concentrate instead on something wider: the human condition. My first thought was, Okri really should cast his net more widely. My second was, I know this conversation, because it’s been going on in my head since I started working as a journalist 15 years ago.
The conversation goes like this. I have an idea for a story. It often focuses on some aspect of British black or minority or immigrant life. I wonder whether I really want to go there, especially if it’s a subject that’s close to my own life, or likely to prove controversial. I fear the backlash. I fear the rejection. But I pitch it, because I want to explore it and because I feel it’s my duty.
If it gets commissioned, I get the rush: I’m going to get the chance to explore something important to me and, hopefully, others like me. I get the fear: can I do it justice? I write it. I send it. It gets published. I feel elated, and terrified. Does it represent all I hoped it would? Will it pigeonhole me further? Should I widen my focus?
And there’s the rub. Just because I am a writer of colour doesn’t mean that the only thing I am interested in is race. But it does mean I am aware of things that go on which don’t necessarily get discussed in the mainstream.
If those of us who know about and have some measure of understanding of such things but don’t write about them, who will? So no, I don’t think I should stop writing about deaths in police custody, or life in a gang-infested neighbourhood, or the Black Panthers, or Muslim women’s experiences of work, or death row, or immigrant women in detention centres – or the mixed race experience.
As you will have noticed, however, the list above in no way represents minority life in Britain. It doesn’t begin to touch on our strengths, our everyday successes and failures, our loves, our happiness, our inner lives, our shopping or television viewing habits, even our food preferences. In short, our sheer mind-boggling ordinariness.
Being black or brown does not mean that we have necessarily encountered deep suffering. Yet that is to some extent the narrative required by the negative news values of the mainstream media. If you’re not a black mother grieving for her dead son, a reformed gang member or drug addict, or a successful person in any field who is willing to discuss their experience of racism, you can pretty much forget it.
Of course, the majority of hard news stories about white people are also negative. But whites are not a minority. The nation’s sense of who they are and what they stand for, and even whether they really are British, is not shaped, in the same way, by what is printed about them in the papers, or written about them online.
The same cannot be said of black and minority life. The menacing police mugshots and grainy stills of men in backpacks that newspapers love to print (even the types of “worthy” features that I like to write) drip, drip into the public consciousness, igniting, confirming and cementing prejudices about what we – “they” – are like.
There is of course another way, which is to write our stories for ourselves, unfiltered by the “white gaze”. Outlets like Words of Colour online, and many others, are creating a space for them. But the question of how to write our stories for the mainstream in a way that doesn’t do us a disservice remains, as does the fear (on a personal career level) of constructing a self-imposed “ghetto”.
Despite my own internal battle, though, I don’t see writing about race as a ghetto, as to describe it in that way is to negate the importance of minority experiences. As worthy as it sounds, I went into journalism to try and tell the stories which weren’t being told, and I will not apologise for trying to live up to that ideal.
Before Christmas, I read an academic paper about black women in theatre (thanks, mum). In it, somebody – I wish I could remember who – said: “We write to prove that we exist.” That’s my experience. I write the things that make sense to me and of me; the things that light a fire in my belly. I write the things I would like to have read when I was a little girl, growing up, and seeing myself invisible.
About Laura Smith
Laura is a freelance journalist who has written for The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, The Independent, The Observer, Marie Claire and Positive News, among other publications. She has worked as a news reporter at the Evening Standard and The Guardian, as a columnist for Comment Is Free and mydaily.co.uk, and a news editor at marieclaire.co.uk. She is also the co-author of two reports on Islamophobia in Britain. Her interests include childbirth and childhood, bringing up children and “women’s work”, criminal justice and deaths in custody and “race” and mixedness.
Website: laurasmith.org
Twitter: @LauraOHSmith
Email: [email protected]