It is impossible to watch, read, or otherwise consume the news of our day without recognizing that racism is in everything. Whether the coverage be about politics, the economy, sports, food, or (most certainly) civil rights, we simply must understand the individual bigotries, historical precedents, and structural discrimination that shape our lives as Americans and as citizens of the world.

When I wrote last year about the increasingly explicit need for antiracist journalism, I thought much the same — and that was well before Donald Trump’s second inauguration as president of the United States, and the hell he’s unleashed ever since. 

I turn 50 later this year, and racism is more conspicuous in American life than at any other moment in my lifetime. The latest example, of course, is playing out before our eyes: a violent, militarized, and autocratic response to people protesting ICE’s kidnapping of their immigrant family members, neighbors, and colleagues, targeting Democratic-led states and communities in particular.

This president and his followers make it all too plain what racism looks, sounds, and feels like. Disproportionate numbers of Americans who are not White still encounter and must navigate through its horrors on a daily basis. When we apply for a job, loan, or lease on a home. When we drive a car. When we attempt to merely exist. 

Yet despite this, too much press coverage of racism and other bigotries remains objectively lacking. That may be stating it too lightly, actually. Too many journalists and media outlets continue to treat the horror of systemic and individual racism as if it were still somehow uncanny, a mysterious and ethereal force that cannot be properly quantified or described — let alone properly covered. 

If we are to maintain that one of journalism’s tenets is to hold the powerful accountable, it is imperative that this change, and quickly.

Granted, we’ve all suffered various forms of mis- and under-education about racism, systematic and otherwise. However, there is no time for anyone to play catch-up. Too many of us, media and consumers alike, must not only improve this coverage, but follow the lead of publications such as The Emancipator. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t say at this point why I’m reflecting upon all this ahead of The Emancipator’s transition to Howard University. I will no longer be editor-in-chief of this publication as of the end of this month. As a signoff of sorts, I spoke with a few people who have helped make this site what it is through their contributions — whether as freelance writers, as interview subjects, or both — about why, and how, journalism must do a better job of covering racism.

Those I spoke to include:

Renee Bracey Sherman, a reproductive justice advocate and co-author of “Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve.” I interviewed her last year about a draconian anti-abortion law in Arizona.

Cornell William Brooks, the former NAACP president and CEO, ordained minister, and public leadership and social-justice professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. The Emancipator interviewed Brooks several times, including during our podcast episode co-produced with GBH News last June.

Caleb Gayle, a Northeastern University journalism professor and author of the forthcoming book, “Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State.” Gayle contributed coverage last year in advance of the Black Wall Street reparations trial in his native Tulsa.

Jonathan Feingold, a professor at Boston University School of Law whose work “explores the relationship between race, law, and the mind sciences.” As such, he offered legal commentary in The Emancipator about the conservative campaign against civil rights, including Florida’s war on education and the current Supreme Court’s endangerment of civil rights.

Kellie Carter Jackson, an Africana Studies professor at Wellesley College and author of, most recently, “We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance.” She was one of our most impactful contributors, writing essays about Lincoln and enslavement, the American revolution, and how she spoke to her children about Vice President Kamala Harris’ election loss.

Tasmiha Khan, an independent journalist whose work for The Emancipator focused upon indignities and injustices Muslim women face in the United States.

Victor Ray, a sociology and criminology professor at the University of Iowa and, most recently, a fellow at Harvard’s Institute for a Global Society. His contributions included analysis of voter suppression, book reviews, and an essay about the current segregationist attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Their quotes below have been edited for length and context.

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Jamil Smith: Racism isn’t a topic that mainstream media traditionally covers as it would the economy, the climate, or popular culture. Why is it necessary for us to do so, in your view?

Caleb Gayle: It always appeared to me that the news meant all of the news. I know that sounds a little silly, but all of the news.

It’s really hard for me to kind of look at the American project and not see the hand of both racecraft, as Barbara and Karen Fields would put it, and also then see the hand of racism in all of the small and big ways in which this country operates. And if we are in the business of news, then we are likewise in the business of all of the news. And to me at least, it doesn’t seem like it’s nearly as herculean of an effort to dedicate time and resources and feel like it’s an enormous kind of financial commitment on the margins. 

Kellie Carter Jackson: Racism is constant. In America and certainly around the globe, there is rarely a story where race is not a factor or feature of an issue. It impacts everything. I don’t think you can be a responsible media outlet and not cover how racism influences or drives the economy, health, education, politics, the environment, or popular culture.

Jonathan Feingold: One important note is that this siloing that places “racism” over here and “the economy” over there isn’t race-neutral. It draws on a particular racial ideology (we call it “colorblindness”) that tends to deny, obscure or otherwise ignore all of the ways in which race and racism are embedded everywhere. And when the media consistently segregates racism from the economy, we internalize an alluring but empirically fraught “common sense” that racial inequality — to the extent it exists — is the product of something other than racism. This sort of thinking gives us collective permission to accept a status quo that never even tried to repair the centuries of white supremacist racial terror that fueled the American empire.

Cornell William Brooks: The whole debate around birthright citizenship is a 14th Amendment debate that was settled at its passage. You can’t write about equal justice under the law and not have a literacy with respect to race. You can’t discuss disparities in medicine not only between, say Black and White people — but between men and women, rural communities and urban communities — with illiteracy with respect to race. How so? The very categories that we have in medicine, in law, and in policy are driven by the way in which we understand disparities and differences.

It is literally impossible and insufficient if we don’t cover race. It’s hard to understand global movements without understanding race and racism in this country. 

Why do you think such misunderstanding endures? What’s wrong with how journalistic media currently covers race and racism?

Renee Bracey Sherman: You can’t just look at something as simple as, oh, why are buildings being built in this neighborhood and not this one? Or when they add new bus lines, why are they in this neighborhood and not others, without looking at how race and class and anti-Blackness fit into all that. It’s about all those decisions of who gets what information, who gets what services. And when it comes to reproductive health, the lack of preventative healthcare for Black and Brown people — and who is left out of strategic policy decisions, race and class — is so clear. Racism is so deeply intertwined with every single political decision there is. 

So to talk about any of these issues without race is to do a disservice and to not tell the full story. 

Tasmiha Khan: When newsrooms, nonprofit organizations, and student publications fail to rigorously cover racist incidents, policies, and systems, they become complicit in normalizing White supremacist ideologies that threaten the safety and dignity of marginalized communities.

Media coverage must name White supremacy explicitly rather than using euphemisms like “racial tensions” or “concerning incidents.” This direct language is essential because audiences form their understanding of reality through media consumption, and sanitized coverage obscures the true nature of the threat.

Victor Ray: I teach a class called “Critical Race Theory,” and the last time I taught that class, I had students who were like, “I only took this class because there’s so much controversy around this that I wanted to hear what it was about.” And I thought that’s interesting, because this actually isn’t all that controversial at all to those of us who teach it. Some of it, it’s a longstanding empirical fact.

Many of the people who are pundits or public debaters could learn a lot about learning and finding consensus from the students that I teach who have big disagreements in class, but then go hang out. They are interested in figuring out what’s going on. They’re interested in understanding the world. They’re not interested in scoring political points or appearing smarter than their classmates. They’re really like, “this stuff is important. I want to understand why people do these things to each other.” 

The United States was a Jim Crow regime whose segregation still has impacts today. Mass incarceration is a huge social problem that disproportionately impacts people of color. That’s not controversial stuff. No, no, not at all.

Carter Jackson: I think we still get the history of the Civil War wrong. The Lost Cause ideology of the South has done a lot of damage in circulating racist ideas about the reasons for war. I also think while White Southerners want to paint a picture that makes them the victim, White northerners want a picture that makes them the moral hero. By only pushing Lincoln and White abolitionists as heroes we miss out on many of the critical contributions that brought about freedom for enslaved people — mainly, we miss out on Black people as their own rescuers.  

Brooks: I’m honestly not sure why the mainstream media failed so miserably to help readers understand the predictable backlash and manufactured “culture war” that followed the summer of 2020. 

During the past five years, we have witnessed multiple effective right-wing communications campaigns designed to discredit antiracism as the new racism. The mainstream media has consistently enabled these campaigns. If we had a responsible mainstream media, the reporting would have helped the public understand why right-wing officials became obsessed with “critical race theory” overnight — even as they couldn’t tell you what it is. But instead we had all of this coverage asking, “What is CRT?” or “Is it racist?” or  “Should it be in our schools?” In effect, mainstream outlets acquiesced to a right-wing frame that transformed what is actual racism.

What must outlets and individual journalists start doing now in order to better understand and cover racism? Where are the holes in coverage?

Feingold: Honestly, I think the first thing is for journalistic outlets to prioritize hiring journalists who possess the personal experience and formal training that enables them to responsibly cover racism. Beyond that, thoughtfully covering racism means, at a minimum, avoiding “individualized” narratives that locate racism — if anywhere — in an interpersonal interaction or the mind of some perpetrator. 

Brooks: In some ways I think journalists are at a moment of market differentiation, expansion and innovation. And here’s what I mean. Here’s what I mean. So it’s like market innovation in the sense that we have ever expanding, shifting, changing technology platforms. Differentiation in terms of these platforms often appeal to different audiences in terms of segmentation, but also generation. TikTok is not Facebook.

So this is a moment in which I think journalists have to look for ways to innovate and distinguish what they do. And a lot of this has to do with just as you lifted up a certain kind of market sensitivity, understanding what people want. But because I would argue journalists are the truth tellers of democracy, storytellers of democracy. You have a responsibility to not merely inform, but also teach, also inspire, I would argue, inspire people to learn more.

Carter Jackson: Some of the biggest barriers I see in effective media coverage is complete honesty. Journalists can be so timid about calling out racism even when it’s blatant. Many people refused to see Donald Trump or others as a racist unless they had footage of them saying the N-word. It’s utterly ridiculous to think the totality of racism is saying the N-word. Racist behavior is rampant, and it often is diluted by language that won’t be specific and clear.  

We still desperately need diverse journalists, more women, more people of color. We particularly need more people behind the scenes. We need more Black executives, editors, producers, and copy editors. We need more of us at the table and calling the shots.

Khan: All organizations — whether legacy newsrooms, nonprofits, or school papers — must move beyond tokenism to genuine power-sharing. This means placing people of color, particularly those from communities most affected by White supremacy, in decision-making roles and actually trusting their expertise.  

For example, when a Muslim woman in a director role requests per diem for a conference that’s already providing meals, because she needs to observe halal dietary standards that mainstream conferences rarely accommodate, trust her judgment instead of assuming she’s trying to mislead you. Similarly, if a Black reporter pushes for deeper investigation into police violence, these aren’t “diversity requests” — they’re professional insights rooted in lived experience that improve coverage.

How can journalists, policy experts, and outlets respect what readers already know while also compensating for our society’s overall under-education and mis-education about race and racism?

Ray: So sometimes academics will say, “how do you write for the public?” First of all, our students are the public, but secondly, you just respect their intelligence. The same way I write for academics. I respect their intelligence, I respect that they can handle a structural based argument. And yeah, I take that seriously.

The other thing is moving from individual analysis to structural analysis. Lots of times folks are like, I mean, you know this, but we don’t know what’s in what they intended. And I’m like, you don’t need to know what’s in their hearts. You don’t need to know, or the racist bones in their bodies. I’m not an orthopedist. All you need to see is the outcome of the policy.

Bracey Sherman: If you want to be a thoughtful journalistic outlet, you have to get to the there there. Often looking at how anti-Blackness and racism function will get you there. I think one, journalists always need to look into their own biases and what they know, what they think they know and what they don’t know they don’t know, and interrogate how race functions.

I find myself continuing to grow as I continue to ask questions for myself as a writer, how does anti-Blackness impact this? How does racism or anti-Palestinian sentiment or anti-immigrant sentiment impact whatever this issue is? 

We live in times when racism is increasingly conspicuous, whether due to the ubiquity of news and information — or simply because the current president and his movement openly espouse that racism. What else can and must we do as journalists to help audiences better navigate this moment?

Gayle: The current environment, I think, is one in which we’re flattening a lot of important critical policies, initiatives, and efforts. We’re filtering them through the lens of how this will help us explain this administration and what this administration is doing to us for us, so on and so forth — and I think that that sadly misses a lot of nuances that could intrigue people who are admittedly very tired of the constant churn of what’s happening in the administration and not necessarily seeing themselves in the subjects that are being covered. Not every subject fits perfectly within the boundaries. That [is the] sort of relentless coverage the administration has forced us into.

There’s just a lot for people to wade through, and it hasn’t been aided by this administration. It’s been pumping out an executive order, it seems, every other second. So there’s just too much, I don’t think there are enough guides that are trusted that people can then go to or rely on to help them understand what’s actually happening in the world. And I think that the downstream effects of that on those who are covering race just makes it harder to break through and connect with readers, listeners, and viewers.

Carter Jackson: In authoritarian regimes, one of the first targets is widespread accurate information. Journalists, academics, writers, and even artists are facing tremendous pushback from powerful people and systems that want to silence dissenters. The Trump administration does not want accountability. They don’t want record-keeping. They don’t want someone who will be honest about the harm they are causing. 

We have to be even more committed to doing our work and doing it well. The moment we give in to the pressures of authority, we are no longer serving the public and the people who are most vulnerable to violence, marginalization, and oppression.

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