Former Guardian columnist Gary Younge reflects on his three decades working at the newspaper.
When I started at the Guardian on staff, there were only a handful of Black journalists there. After about six months of shift work, I was offered a staff job on the Foreign Desk as the assistant foreign editor. Staff vacancies there are rare and coveted, so turnover is quite low.
By that time, I’d had some experience covering the South African elections in 1994 having been introduced to the Guardian initially through a bursary scheme aimed at racial minorities and those who are otherwise underrepresented in journalism and would benefit from assistance. Nobody had me down for that job, and when it was announced there were a few gasps in the office.
It was a surprising choice in many ways but primarily because I was only twenty-five, which is quite young to be calling correspondents and saying ‘How’s that intro coming on?’ So given my inexperience, it demanded a certain amount of humility. There were a handful of colleagues who resisted taking instruction from me and I had to work really hard to earn their respect.
Race was an important factor. Why wouldn’t it be? There’s a lot of racism in British society and it would be strange if the Guardian was immune. Generally speaking, it was very convivial: people were very pleasant and I was allowed to do quite a lot of stuff. But there was a moment where, in 1995, I edited a series on ‘Black Britain’, which didn’t endear me to some of my other Black colleagues who felt, not unreasonably, that they had been overlooked. The Guardian is actually quite a culturally conservative institution – people are there for a long time, and if someone comes in, then you’re expected to wait your turn.
But when I was doing that series, I had some conversations with white colleagues and was shocked by what they had to say about their Black colleagues. Many assumed that they were all affirmative action hires and that none of them were any good, which was not true. They had effectively discounted them being there for any other reason than that they were Black. I was actually shocked that they thought it and I was even more shocked that they said it to me.
There was a particular moment that crystallised some of these issues. It was just before the publication of the Macpherson Report in 1999, the result of the inquiry into institutional racism following the murder of the Black teenager Stephen Lawrence, by which time I’d been at the Guardian for a few years.
An Asian colleague, Vivek Chaudhary, had been racially abused in the bar that was seen as the ‘Guardian pub’. If we won an award, our management would put a couple of grand behind the bar and everyone would head down the pub. The publican had spoken to a white friend of Vivek’s about ‘Pakis’ moving in and Vivek had gone up and challenged him and the landlord had basically repeated it. Vivek saw in this all the things that the paper was writing about in terms of Macpherson: canteen culture, racist language and stereotyped assumptions.
Vivek raised this at a union meeting. I was travelling for work at the time but from all accounts, his contribution was met with a considerable amount of scepticism and a degree of vilification. He called for the chapel [the NUJ branch] to boycott the pub.
The motion was passed but not without resistance and people saying, ‘Well, how do we know that what you’re saying is true? The publican has a disabled daughter and we’re middle-class journalists so why are we beating up on him? We should set up a commission of inquiry to find whether this is true or not.’ It felt as if Vivek, and not racism, was in the dock.
The motion was narrowly passed, but when I got back from my trip abroad, Seumas Milne turned to me and said: ‘Look, we need you to intervene here.’ I appreciated his intervention and was keen to show solidarity but initially bristled at the notion that I had to clear up a racist mess that I had nothing to do with. My initial response was: ‘This isn’t my responsibility. I’ll boycott the pub, but why is it down to me?’ But I did get involved and it was incredibly exhausting and distressing. We had this fight on our hands and it was very weird and ugly. Various colleagues would take me aside and talk in very opaque terms about their own views: ‘I don’t want to get into my private life, but you should know that I couldn’t possibly be racist’, and then it would turn out they had a Black wife or they had Black kids by someone who left them. It was as if it was my personal responsibility to fix this thing. And it was very rancorous, because lots of people were not observing the boycott.
Anyway, the Black journalists ended up putting a note up on the wall – a letter to our colleagues within the building – saying that ‘our understanding of the Union is that you stand up for each other and it’s disheartening to see people not showing solidarity. We just want you to know how really disappointed we are in you and we will not be going to that pub.’
The idea was that if you want to go to a segregated pub, you go to a segregated pub, but we won’t be there. This ended with the Union officers opposing the boycott and a big Union meeting, one of the biggest I’d ever been to, where the chapel voted to reaffirm its commitment to the boycott which led to the resignation of all the chapel’s officers. I actually proposed the motion, which was seconded by Katharine Viner, that we reaffirm the boycott. Overall it was a particularly noxious episode.
Once I started in the newsroom after my stint on the Foreign Desk, I was advised (sometimes by the same people) either to write a particular story because it was about Black people and I had special knowledge, or to stop writing about Black people because otherwise people would think that was all you could do.
The latter suggestion, I think, often came from a genuinely supportive and even nurturing place. But it was wrong-headed all the same. ‘You will become pigeon-holed’ I was told – always in a passive voice, not realising that they were telling me not to write about something I knew a lot about, cared a lot about and could write well about.
This was a constant source of tension. The first column I ever wrote, which was about the Bosnian war, was returned to me with the question: ‘Can you add an ethnic sensibility to this?’ It was made clear by the then comment editor that my role was to write about ‘Black stuff ’. So, it was a struggle for a few years to make it clear that while I did want to write about race, I also wanted to write about other things.
Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. There really was the danger that someone would pigeonhole you, and it took a while to navigate the situation. Of course, I always thought that race is important and interesting and I wanted to write about it: I wanted to write about the American Black Skiers’ Association going to a fascist part of Austria, or about rap classes, or whatever.
But I also wanted to write about Ireland and about strikes and about a range of things. So, there was always this assumption of a kind of expertise that was drawn through melanin, for which there was no office and no resources. It’s not like it was established as a specialism, but nevertheless you were expected to produce endless copy about it when required, and to keep it to yourself at other times.
We never had a race correspondent as a specialist, which I lobbied for constantly, but there was always at least one Black person in the office they would constantly go to for stories about race. They just never enjoyed the status or the salary of a specialist correspondent.
I do remember there was one article about a report that featured these spurious arguments about how Black people have an Irish future, how Asian people have a Jewish future, and stupid bullshit like that. I was asked ‘maybe you know some people that we can interview.’ And I remember thinking that I’m not actually paid to know Black people, or at least I shouldn’t be. That happened a couple of times: ‘we’re doing a series on men of a certain age, but it turns out they’re all white, so do you know any Black ones we could interview?’ That kind of thing.
In general, however, there wasn’t an awful lot of casual racism at the Guardian that was aimed at me. But there was one time when somebody used the phrase ‘nigger in a woodpile’ in our daily ten o’clock conference, and nobody said anything. So, I wrote to a senior member of staff pointing out that ‘we write leaders saying that if somebody uses language like that they should be fired.’ Now, I wasn’t suggesting for a second that the person who said that should be fired, but they should be talked to. ‘If it’s only me who is offended, forget it. But if you were offended or thought, in retrospect, that it was offensive, then you should talk to him. It shouldn’t come from me but from you.’ I was quite explicit about it: this stops here if I’m the only person offended; otherwise, it has to come from their superior.
Two minutes later, I get a call from this person who made the comment. ‘Oh, I’m such a cunt – I’m so sorry.’ And it then became my issue and my problem, because ‘Gary has complained’. For me, that was a completely reprehensible piece of management. So, while the Guardian is almost certainly more honest than most mainstream British newspapers, in terms of what is necessary, it’s nowhere near honest enough.
The Guardian is an expression of a particular patrician form of British liberalism, and, as such, the racism one experienced there was mostly benign. It only occasionally came overtly to the surface when directly challenged or pointed out, regardless of how gently or strategically you did it. Those were the moments when you felt like a mask slipped and you were really being tolerated to a certain point. That didn’t happen often, but then it didn’t really have to. Whenever it did take place, it was both shocking and unsurprising.
I didn’t know a Black journalist there who didn’t have to navigate tricky situations. But you also had to put it in context. Would you really be better off somewhere else that didn’t even publicly aspire to equal opportunities and continually wrote reprehensible things about Black people? You can resign from a job, but you can’t resign from racism. It’s out there. As I’ve already said, the Guardian isn’t immune. Where would you go? The Telegraph or The Times? The Guardian had its problems, but compared to what? Which other mainstream newspaper was going to publish work by Black, left-wing writers? Ultimately, I had a successful career there for 27 or so years, so whatever problems I did experience there were navigable. But not everyone was so fortunate: some people found it really hard and at some moments it got quite unpleasant. On occasion it could be really draining.
Any criticism had to be coupled with a genuine desire to change the complexion of the paper. That was an aspiration that was embraced from the top, but was shaped, in no small part, by pressure from below. Joseph Harker was absolutely central to this work. Joseph thought that the Macpherson Report provided an opportunity, a moment, in which to address underlying problems of racism. He convened the Black journalists and secured a meeting with the editor, Alan Rusbridger, who was very receptive to the idea.
We talked about making sure that all posts should be advertised, because up to that point, an awful lot of recruitment was run in a very cliquey way – ‘I met this guy’ (and it was usually a guy), ‘I was on this trip’, or ‘so and so is a good guy and gets a pint in’. These practices continue to mitigate against Black and Asian journalists, against women, particularly those with kids, or Muslims – there were all sorts of things that were very wrong.
So, it was important to establish some transparency in hiring practices, and to look at what we were publishing and to ask ourselves why, if we’re organising panels, there are no Black people on them. So, some of it was about how there needed to be broader editorial responsibility and some of it was around newsroom culture. You could complain about the shortcomings of this approach, and of particular meetings, but at least they happened, and they probably wouldn’t have happened in most other newsrooms.
Katharine Viner built on that and, in terms of recruitment, ramped it up. Sure enough, as the years went on, the number of Black journalists grew and became better organised. I found the younger generation more politically sophisticated, conscious and militant than my own, which was great to see.
So, for the longest time, the discussion was mostly about hiring and then things like internships, where traditionally people would give their niece, or their godchild, or their friend’s friend, some type of work experience. The Black journalists got a work experience scheme together that saw some quite impressive people, like Reni Eddo-Lodge and Bim Adewunmi, come through it, and others who are doing very well. And then there was also the bursary scheme that I set up, which continues to be a conduit for a lot of talent, including Randeep Ramesh, who is a chief leader writer, Tania Branigan, who is on the leader writing team, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, who was head of editorial at gal-dem, and Hannah Azieb Pool, artistic director and CEO of the Bernie Grant Centre.
Gary Younge is a journalist, author, broadcaster and Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. This is an extract from Capitalism's Conscience: 200 Years of The Guardian, edited by Des Freedman, on Pluto Press.