I'm reading "stokely speaks." the book is full of bars, but I've been thinking about it in regards to my being a journalist.

so, this short thread will not be a thread of thoughts about the book—of those I have many—but instead musings about my responsibility as a journalist.

as journalists, we decide who we interview &, in doing so, we decide whose voices/concerns are widely viewed as legitimate & whose are not. we decide what questions to ask. we decide which parts of the interview to include in the final story. we decide what context to give.

we decide how to phrase things. we decide to call things "riots" vs. "uprisings" or "officer involved shooting" vs. "officer shot xxx" or "racially charged" vs. "racist" or "mother" vs. "woman" or "17 year old boy" vs. "man." we (sometimes editors) make those decisions.

and it's important, imo, to name that decision making process! unpack why you're using a certain verbiage or why a phrase/word makes you uncomfortable. as journalists, we have an active, key role in shaping how history is preserved.

I don’t take my responsibility as a journalist lightly. it’s not hyperbole to say that our reporting impacts communities, impacts people for lifetimes. the verbiage we use, the images we use all shape how people are viewed.
when/how we choose to report on ppl is important too.

we should always be cognizant of this. who are we missing? who are we serving? what is our reporting *doing*? why are we deciding that this is newsworthy while that isn’t? what stories are we telling & what stories are we leaving out?

I'll close with this:

thee ida b. wells-barnet, mississippian, begins her autobiography by remembering an encounter in which a young woman asks her “won’t you please tell me what it was you did, so... I can give an intelligent answer?”

she writes that the young woman was ignorant not only bc the events unfolded before she was born, but also because “there was no record from which she could inform herself.” ida b wells-barnett was documenting lynchings, documenting southern stories--but who was documenting her?

later, she writes, "it is therefore for the young ppl who have so little of our race’s history recorded that I am for the first time in my life writing about myself. +

"i am all the more constrained to do this because there is such a lack of authentic race history of Reconstruction times written by the Negro himself."

there's no real record of reconstruction written by newly freed Black people. wells-barnett drives this point home.

“the history of this entire period which reflected glory on the race should be known. +

"most of it is buried in oblivion & only the southern white man’s misrepresentations are in the public libraries & college textbooks... the black men who made the history of that day... did not realize the importance of the written word to their posterity.”

journalists, we should always consider this:

whose histories, whose legacies, whose stories are we burying in oblivion or misrepresenting?