Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and professor of sociology at the University of Manchester in Britain. Formerly a columnist and an editor-at-large at the Guardian, he is an editorial board member of the Nation magazine and a Type Media fellow. He is the author of five books, including Another Day in the Death of America, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, GQ, Granta, and beyond.

From the Introduction

This book draws on my journalism from or about the African diaspora, including the Caribbean, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and Europe, as well as Britain and the US. This is a path that, from the very outset, I was warned not to take. To become too identified with issues of race and racism(Black people, basically) would, some said, find me pigeon-holed. This advice, which came from older white journalists (pretty much the only older journalists available when I started out), was rarely malicious. They thought they were looking out for me. A fear of being ‘pigeon-holed’ is one of the most common crippling anxieties of any minority in any profession. Being seen only as the thing that makes you different through the lens of those with the power to make that difference matter really is limiting.

Then there were other, older, white editors who wanted me to write only about race. One of the first columns I wrote for the Guardian, about the NATO bombing of Bosnia, was spiked because the comment editor at the time thought I should stick to subjects closer to home. ‘We have people who can write about Bosnia,’ he said. ‘Can you add an ethnic sensibility to this?’

The problem with both of these requests is that they didn’t take into account the fact that I might want to write about the things I was interested in and knew about. Race in particular, and Black people in general, were a couple of the subjects I wanted to focus on.They weren’t dealt with particularly well or at all comprehensively at the time, so there was lots to write about and improve on. In almost three decades of reporting, no Black person has ever approached me and asked me to write about them less, even if they weren’t always in agreement with what I wrote.

But Black people and race were never the only things I was interested in. (Looking back, they are covered in fewer than half of my articles.) My advice to young Black journalists has always been to write about the things they are interested in and passionate about because that’s what they’ll write about best. If it’s race, great. If it’s fashion, finance or travel, that’s great, too. They’ll still be Black. In his 1926 essay ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’,Langston Hughes writes about a young Black poet who insisted he wanted to be known as a poet, ‘not a Negro poet’. ‘And I was sorry the young man said that,’ reflected Hughes, ‘for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself.’ Or as the artist Chris Ofili told me, when I asked him during an interview how he responded to the threat of pigeon-holing: ‘Well, pigeons can fly.’

I have no problem being regarded as a Black writer. It’s an adjective, not an epithet. It’s not the only adjective available, and I have no interest in being confined by it. But I’m not in flight from it either. In the words of the late Toni Morrison, when asked if she found it limiting to be described as a Black woman writer: ‘I’m already discredited. I’m already politicized, before I get out of the gate. I can accept the labels because being a Black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination, it expands it.’

Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and professor of sociology at the University of Manchester in Britain. Formerly a columnist and an editor-at-large at the Guardian, he is an editorial board member of the Nation magazine and a Type Media fellow. He is the author of five books, including Another Day in the Death of America, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, GQ, Granta, and beyond.

From the Introduction

This book draws on my journalism from or about the African diaspora, including the Caribbean, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and Europe, as well as Britain and the US. This is a path that, from the very outset, I was warned not to take. To become too identified with issues of race and racism(Black people, basically) would, some said, find me pigeon-holed. This advice, which came from older white journalists (pretty much the only older journalists available when I started out), was rarely malicious. They thought they were looking out for me. A fear of being ‘pigeon-holed’ is one of the most common crippling anxieties of any minority in any profession. Being seen only as the thing that makes you different through the lens of those with the power to make that difference matter really is limiting.

Then there were other, older, white editors who wanted me to write only about race. One of the first columns I wrote for the Guardian, about the NATO bombing of Bosnia, was spiked because the comment editor at the time thought I should stick to subjects closer to home. ‘We have people who can write about Bosnia,’ he said. ‘Can you add an ethnic sensibility to this?’

The problem with both of these requests is that they didn’t take into account the fact that I might want to write about the things I was interested in and knew about. Race in particular, and Black people in general, were a couple of the subjects I wanted to focus on.They weren’t dealt with particularly well or at all comprehensively at the time, so there was lots to write about and improve on. In almost three decades of reporting, no Black person has ever approached me and asked me to write about them less, even if they weren’t always in agreement with what I wrote.

But Black people and race were never the only things I was interested in. (Looking back, they are covered in fewer than half of my articles.) My advice to young Black journalists has always been to write about the things they are interested in and passionate about because that’s what they’ll write about best. If it’s race, great. If it’s fashion, finance or travel, that’s great, too. They’ll still be Black. In his 1926 essay ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’,Langston Hughes writes about a young Black poet who insisted he wanted to be known as a poet, ‘not a Negro poet’. ‘And I was sorry the young man said that,’ reflected Hughes, ‘for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself.’ Or as the artist Chris Ofili told me, when I asked him during an interview how he responded to the threat of pigeon-holing: ‘Well, pigeons can fly.’

I have no problem being regarded as a Black writer. It’s an adjective, not an epithet. It’s not the only adjective available, and I have no interest in being confined by it. But I’m not in flight from it either. In the words of the late Toni Morrison, when asked if she found it limiting to be described as a Black woman writer: ‘I’m already discredited. I’m already politicized, before I get out of the gate. I can accept the labels because being a Black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination, it expands it.’