Trigger warning: This post contains information about sexual assault that some readers may find disturbing.
On the morning that I was sexually assaulted, just over a year ago, I stared up at the curve of blue sky through the window above the bed — a mere fractal of an expanse that for me had once yielded such boundless promise.
Nearly 25 years earlier, during my self-declared “No Fear Year,” I had leaped into that same blue sky, tethered to a skydiving instructor with just a flimsy sheath of nylon supporting us.
The wild wind whipped past. Earth and sky inverted over and over again.
When the chaotic tumbling finally ceased. The parachute billowed open. The world slowed and I was light, free, and buoyed by potential.
Arms spread wide, I was unlimited.
As a younger woman, my aspirations for my burgeoning journalism career were no less spectacular. Growing up in the South in a family with a rich legacy of resistance had imbued me with a sense of ancestral purpose. I was firm in my belief that if I did my work with the same fearlessness and conviction as when I jumped from the plane, I would be unstoppable. What darkness of societal ills could stand up to the intense cleansing light of truth? The newsroom was where I would help build a more perfect union.
A journey into darkness
At 18, I began my career as a cub reporter at the Birmingham World, a lauded Civil Rights-era Black press paper, and news assistant at the Pulitzer Prize-winning Birmingham News —two publications that were historically pivotal to race coverage in my home state and formative to my identity as a journalist who remains dedicated to giving voice to impacted communities at the intersection of people, policies, and politics.
During the next 30 years, I went on to cover and, later, help lead news teams reporting on the White House, Congress, the Justice Department, federal agencies, and national politics at several of the nation’s most prominent news organizations in Washington, D.C. It is work that spanned four presidential campaign cycles and numerous historic events with race and equity throughlines.
I’m a Black woman who grew up as a hijab-wearing Muslim in Alabama. As such, I am intimately familiar with how racism looks, smells, sounds, feels, and tastes. However, it was the racism within the very newsrooms where I had hoped to do transformative and impactful work that was perhaps most unexpected and unsettling.
Over the course of my career, I bore witness to multiple major news organizations’ overt aversion to and paralytic discomfort in directly calling out and confronting racism in the topics and subjects we report on. To say nothing of how racism festered within our own ranks.
Our mission as journalists includes holding the highest levels of government accountable, but from my vantage point, many who lead this charge fail to even hold themselves accountable.
My vociferous objections fell on deaf ears as multiple news leaders sacrificed my well-being as well as that of a seemingly endless series of journalists of color all in the service of ratings, clicks, and preserving the status quo. This took a heavy emotional toll.
Late last year, after yet another confrontation over the egregious treatment of staffers of color — whose complaints of racism within its ranks were routinely met with hostility and denial — I turned my back on my coveted high-profile position at a major network. I couldn’t shine a light on anything in such darkness, and it was eating me alive.
A week later, when I was already at my lowest, a friend sexually assaulted me. He was someone who, I later learned, was a serial predator.
These two betrayals, though completely separate and unrelated, are inextricably linked.
Despite the unspeakable harms that were done to me, both events are exceedingly difficult to litigate and restoratively redress. It is because they are both rooted in permitted abuses of power and structural inequities.
They were also both the catalyst for my yearlong quest to reclaim my power and make sense of what it means to do the right thing even when it costs you everything.
No good deed goes unpunished
For weeks, after both betrayals, I pantomimed normalcy. I would cheerily send my children off to school. They thought I was headed into the office. Instead, I remained in my pajamas, laid down on the sofa in my darkened den, lit only by the television’s eerie glow, and sobbed in frustration.
I was contractually gagged by my former employer and could only give vague responses when former colleagues reached out to ask why I’d left my previous role.
Meanwhile, the man who hurt me was on dating apps, despite me repeatedly flagging him as dangerous.
At the time, I thought all I could do was avoid tuning into my former network out of principle and obsessively check and recheck for any movement within the court filings against my attacker.
Usually in the afternoons I would throw on respectable clothes, and send out some resumes. I booked job interviews and had to smile through pointed questions about why I left certain news organizations. At one point, a newsroom managerial position was within my reach, only to be privately told that my record of confronting newsroom racism scared off the potential future employer.
I hit the same brick walls over and over again.
Like many newsroom leaders of color, I advocated for equitable resources and inclusive coverage while facing myriad micro- and macroaggressions daily. We are choked into public silence over racism out of fear of professional backlash and by legal agreements that throttle our ability to call out the organizations by name under threat of being blacklisted in the industry or losing the means of feeding our families.
It was a truth so suffocatingly heavy that I couldn’t breathe.
In a pivotal election year and on the cusp of a second Trump presidency, some major news organizations lack a person of color on their political and government coverage teams. Yet, in at least one newsroom where I worked, highly qualified applicants of color were ignored by hiring teams for purportedly lacking “the right cultural fit.”
Job candidates of color were routinely required to respond to additional interview questions or prove themselves in exceptional ways beyond that of less-qualified White applicants in processes that felt reminiscent of the Jim Crow-era “poll tax” questions required of Black people to vote.
For the few hired and those, like myself, who rise to leadership ranks in newsrooms, we are often faced with a news organization culture that is at best, tone-deaf and racially isolating and, at worst, maliciously racist.
A number of mainstream news reporting teams dedicated to covering race and ethnicity have been gutted in the years since the media’s so-called “racial reckoning” with disingenuous promises to consistently incorporate those perspectives and voices into larger editorial strategy.
A few years ago, after explaining concerns about the lack of diversity on a mostly White, male investigative reporting team and the toxic behavior of its leader, an executive leader told me that it was hard to give weight to my voice because I was too “smooth jazz” and needed to be “more hip-hop.” This came with a demonstration of what it would look like if I sounded more “street” and references to Black female reality television stars.
At one network where I worked, female news executives and leaders who advocated for equity and staffers of color, or complained of poor treatment, were routinely reassigned to offices in labyrinthine hallways away from the hub and hum of news activity and ultimately offered payoffs to leave quietly in an act known colloquially as being “disappeared.”
And my personal favorite moment of racial irony seems ripe for the pages of a Colson Whitehead novel. A news organization I repeatedly took to task internally for racism in coverage and against staff, removed my byline — from an in-depth explanatory piece delving into the various levels, types, and definitions of racism.
While I wrestled with corporate racism, my bank account dwindled. I had once reported on the congressional fight over the Affordable Care Act. Now I needed to use it.
Several family members told me the ancestors would be proud, but also begged me to please, for the sake of my finances and career: stop speaking out about workplace racism.
I couldn’t. I can’t. Nor would I accept that a woman who once leaped into an unknown expanse must now quietly accept a role as a footnote to newsroom racism or a notch on an abuser’s belt.
No, I vowed. This would not bring me down.
Courtesy of Halimah Abdullah
‘Defying gravity’
So, weeks later, I picked up the phone and made two important phone calls. The first was to a rape crisis hotline for emotional guidance and support in how to navigate in a way that would protect my identity and keep my family safe.
Next, I called the state attorney general’s division dedicated to sex crimes to let them know what I’d learned, using my reporting skills, about the man they had in custody for domestic assault against a partner. I walked the attorney I spoke with through the #MeToo style social media postings of the women who he’d allegedly hurt in the hopes it would help their case. And, when he eventually was released and contacted me, I let him know exactly what he did, how it impacted my life, and to never contact me again.
On the professional front, I chose to continue my path as a newsroom leader through my media consultancy firm, which helps small news organizations thrive and deepened even further my dedication to mentoring the next generation of journalists of color. I reached out to my own mentors and colleagues in the industry — many of them fellow veteran journalists of color — who affirmed that I am a woman with a very particular set of skills, hard-won, well-earned, and much needed in the times to come.
Just as I resolved to find a way to fight, to have my voice heard, and prayed for a way and a place to align my journalism passion with my values, the Black press called me home. Whether it was by default or design, the Black women leading antiracist news organizations threw me a lifeline.
I took firm hold and pulled. All of a sudden, I was back, on my own terms, my North Star firmly fixed. With each phrase written, each interview turned, each fact uncovered, I was rediscovering the joy, the connection to prose, and my passion for storytelling that holds the privileged accountable and amplifies the voices and issues of those most often forced into the margins.
Rewriting the narrative resurrected me.
I recently took my daughter to see “Wicked,” which reimagines the story of the Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz.”
I wanted to give her a glimpse of the power and self-possession she must, too, learn to wield as she navigates the world as a Black woman.
As I sat in a darkened theater, bathed in the technicolor glow, I watched a young green woman confront a cruel and corrupt world as every societal force bends her toward cowed compliance. At the film’s climax, she rejects the offer of tainted power, and leaps from a precipice, only to take triumphant flight as her cape billows.
Tears of immense gratitude streamed down my cheeks as I watched the witch, Elphaba, indomitable and powerful beyond measure, singing as she soared. Watching her dark skin framed against the wide blue sky, I remembered the sensation of flight and unconquerable freedom all those years ago when I took my own leap.
My daughter looked quizzically over at me and asked, “Mom, are you crying? Are you OK?”
I laughed a little, tears still flowing.
“Yes, I am. I’m just over here defying gravity.”
If you or someone you know needs support for sexual assault call the Rape, Abuse & Incest Network: 1-800.656.HOPE (4673)
If you are a job applicant or employee and believe you have been discriminated against due to race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information contact theU.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
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My antiracist journalism journey: How I lost my wings, then reclaimed my sky
by Halimah Abdullah, The Emancipator December 21, 2024
Halimah Abdullah is an award winning veteran national political journalist with more than 20 years of experience covering politics and government at the local, state, and federal level. She has edited and helped manage Washington coverage for such organizations as PolitiFact, Newsela, NPR, ABC News and NBC News — networks where she also wrote. Her work has also appeared in Newsweek, Capital B, CNN.com, Newsday, McClatchy newspapers, MSNBC.com, thegrio.com, TODAY.com, and The New York Times, among...
More by Halimah Abdullah
My antiracist journalism journey: How I lost my wings, then reclaimed my sky
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Trigger warning: This post contains information about sexual assault that some readers may find disturbing.
On the morning that I was sexually assaulted, just over a year ago, I stared up at the curve of blue sky through the window above the bed — a mere fractal of an expanse that for me had once yielded such boundless promise.
Nearly 25 years earlier, during my self-declared “No Fear Year,” I had leaped into that same blue sky, tethered to a skydiving instructor with just a flimsy sheath of nylon supporting us.
The wild wind whipped past. Earth and sky inverted over and over again.
When the chaotic tumbling finally ceased. The parachute billowed open. The world slowed and I was light, free, and buoyed by potential.
Arms spread wide, I was unlimited.
As a younger woman, my aspirations for my burgeoning journalism career were no less spectacular. Growing up in the South in a family with a rich legacy of resistance had imbued me with a sense of ancestral purpose. I was firm in my belief that if I did my work with the same fearlessness and conviction as when I jumped from the plane, I would be unstoppable. What darkness of societal ills could stand up to the intense cleansing light of truth? The newsroom was where I would help build a more perfect union.
A journey into darkness
At 18, I began my career as a cub reporter at the Birmingham World, a lauded Civil Rights-era Black press paper, and news assistant at the Pulitzer Prize-winning Birmingham News — two publications that were historically pivotal to race coverage in my home state and formative to my identity as a journalist who remains dedicated to giving voice to impacted communities at the intersection of people, policies, and politics.
During the next 30 years, I went on to cover and, later, help lead news teams reporting on the White House, Congress, the Justice Department, federal agencies, and national politics at several of the nation’s most prominent news organizations in Washington, D.C. It is work that spanned four presidential campaign cycles and numerous historic events with race and equity throughlines.
I’m a Black woman who grew up as a hijab-wearing Muslim in Alabama. As such, I am intimately familiar with how racism looks, smells, sounds, feels, and tastes. However, it was the racism within the very newsrooms where I had hoped to do transformative and impactful work that was perhaps most unexpected and unsettling.
Over the course of my career, I bore witness to multiple major news organizations’ overt aversion to and paralytic discomfort in directly calling out and confronting racism in the topics and subjects we report on. To say nothing of how racism festered within our own ranks.
Our mission as journalists includes holding the highest levels of government accountable, but from my vantage point, many who lead this charge fail to even hold themselves accountable.
My vociferous objections fell on deaf ears as multiple news leaders sacrificed my well-being as well as that of a seemingly endless series of journalists of color all in the service of ratings, clicks, and preserving the status quo. This took a heavy emotional toll.
Late last year, after yet another confrontation over the egregious treatment of staffers of color — whose complaints of racism within its ranks were routinely met with hostility and denial — I turned my back on my coveted high-profile position at a major network. I couldn’t shine a light on anything in such darkness, and it was eating me alive.
A week later, when I was already at my lowest, a friend sexually assaulted me. He was someone who, I later learned, was a serial predator.
These two betrayals, though completely separate and unrelated, are inextricably linked.
Despite the unspeakable harms that were done to me, both events are exceedingly difficult to litigate and restoratively redress. It is because they are both rooted in permitted abuses of power and structural inequities.
They were also both the catalyst for my yearlong quest to reclaim my power and make sense of what it means to do the right thing even when it costs you everything.
No good deed goes unpunished
For weeks, after both betrayals, I pantomimed normalcy. I would cheerily send my children off to school. They thought I was headed into the office. Instead, I remained in my pajamas, laid down on the sofa in my darkened den, lit only by the television’s eerie glow, and sobbed in frustration.
I was contractually gagged by my former employer and could only give vague responses when former colleagues reached out to ask why I’d left my previous role.
Meanwhile, the man who hurt me was on dating apps, despite me repeatedly flagging him as dangerous.
At the time, I thought all I could do was avoid tuning into my former network out of principle and obsessively check and recheck for any movement within the court filings against my attacker.
Usually in the afternoons I would throw on respectable clothes, and send out some resumes. I booked job interviews and had to smile through pointed questions about why I left certain news organizations. At one point, a newsroom managerial position was within my reach, only to be privately told that my record of confronting newsroom racism scared off the potential future employer.
I hit the same brick walls over and over again.
Like many newsroom leaders of color, I advocated for equitable resources and inclusive coverage while facing myriad micro- and macroaggressions daily. We are choked into public silence over racism out of fear of professional backlash and by legal agreements that throttle our ability to call out the organizations by name under threat of being blacklisted in the industry or losing the means of feeding our families.
It was a truth so suffocatingly heavy that I couldn’t breathe.
In a pivotal election year and on the cusp of a second Trump presidency, some major news organizations lack a person of color on their political and government coverage teams. Yet, in at least one newsroom where I worked, highly qualified applicants of color were ignored by hiring teams for purportedly lacking “the right cultural fit.”
Job candidates of color were routinely required to respond to additional interview questions or prove themselves in exceptional ways beyond that of less-qualified White applicants in processes that felt reminiscent of the Jim Crow-era “poll tax” questions required of Black people to vote.
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For the few hired and those, like myself, who rise to leadership ranks in newsrooms, we are often faced with a news organization culture that is at best, tone-deaf and racially isolating and, at worst, maliciously racist.
A number of mainstream news reporting teams dedicated to covering race and ethnicity have been gutted in the years since the media’s so-called “racial reckoning” with disingenuous promises to consistently incorporate those perspectives and voices into larger editorial strategy.
A few years ago, after explaining concerns about the lack of diversity on a mostly White, male investigative reporting team and the toxic behavior of its leader, an executive leader told me that it was hard to give weight to my voice because I was too “smooth jazz” and needed to be “more hip-hop.” This came with a demonstration of what it would look like if I sounded more “street” and references to Black female reality television stars.
At one network where I worked, female news executives and leaders who advocated for equity and staffers of color, or complained of poor treatment, were routinely reassigned to offices in labyrinthine hallways away from the hub and hum of news activity and ultimately offered payoffs to leave quietly in an act known colloquially as being “disappeared.”
And my personal favorite moment of racial irony seems ripe for the pages of a Colson Whitehead novel. A news organization I repeatedly took to task internally for racism in coverage and against staff, removed my byline — from an in-depth explanatory piece delving into the various levels, types, and definitions of racism.
While I wrestled with corporate racism, my bank account dwindled. I had once reported on the congressional fight over the Affordable Care Act. Now I needed to use it.
Several family members told me the ancestors would be proud, but also begged me to please, for the sake of my finances and career: stop speaking out about workplace racism.
I couldn’t. I can’t. Nor would I accept that a woman who once leaped into an unknown expanse must now quietly accept a role as a footnote to newsroom racism or a notch on an abuser’s belt.
No, I vowed. This would not bring me down.
‘Defying gravity’
So, weeks later, I picked up the phone and made two important phone calls. The first was to a rape crisis hotline for emotional guidance and support in how to navigate in a way that would protect my identity and keep my family safe.
Next, I called the state attorney general’s division dedicated to sex crimes to let them know what I’d learned, using my reporting skills, about the man they had in custody for domestic assault against a partner. I walked the attorney I spoke with through the #MeToo style social media postings of the women who he’d allegedly hurt in the hopes it would help their case. And, when he eventually was released and contacted me, I let him know exactly what he did, how it impacted my life, and to never contact me again.
On the professional front, I chose to continue my path as a newsroom leader through my media consultancy firm, which helps small news organizations thrive and deepened even further my dedication to mentoring the next generation of journalists of color. I reached out to my own mentors and colleagues in the industry — many of them fellow veteran journalists of color — who affirmed that I am a woman with a very particular set of skills, hard-won, well-earned, and much needed in the times to come.
Just as I resolved to find a way to fight, to have my voice heard, and prayed for a way and a place to align my journalism passion with my values, the Black press called me home. Whether it was by default or design, the Black women leading antiracist news organizations threw me a lifeline.
I took firm hold and pulled. All of a sudden, I was back, on my own terms, my North Star firmly fixed. With each phrase written, each interview turned, each fact uncovered, I was rediscovering the joy, the connection to prose, and my passion for storytelling that holds the privileged accountable and amplifies the voices and issues of those most often forced into the margins.
Rewriting the narrative resurrected me.
I recently took my daughter to see “Wicked,” which reimagines the story of the Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz.”
I wanted to give her a glimpse of the power and self-possession she must, too, learn to wield as she navigates the world as a Black woman.
As I sat in a darkened theater, bathed in the technicolor glow, I watched a young green woman confront a cruel and corrupt world as every societal force bends her toward cowed compliance. At the film’s climax, she rejects the offer of tainted power, and leaps from a precipice, only to take triumphant flight as her cape billows.
Tears of immense gratitude streamed down my cheeks as I watched the witch, Elphaba, indomitable and powerful beyond measure, singing as she soared. Watching her dark skin framed against the wide blue sky, I remembered the sensation of flight and unconquerable freedom all those years ago when I took my own leap.
My daughter looked quizzically over at me and asked, “Mom, are you crying? Are you OK?”
I laughed a little, tears still flowing.
“Yes, I am. I’m just over here defying gravity.”
If you or someone you know needs support for sexual assault call the Rape, Abuse & Incest Network: 1-800.656.HOPE (4673)
If you are a job applicant or employee and believe you have been discriminated against due to race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information contact the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Halimah AbdullahContributing Managing Editor
Halimah Abdullah is an award winning veteran national political journalist with more than 20 years of experience covering politics and government at the local, state, and federal level. She has edited and helped manage Washington coverage for such organizations as PolitiFact, Newsela, NPR, ABC News and NBC News — networks where she also wrote. Her work has also appeared in Newsweek, Capital B, CNN.com, Newsday, McClatchy newspapers, MSNBC.com, thegrio.com, TODAY.com, and The New York Times, among... More by Halimah Abdullah