DISCOVER JOURNALISM OF COLOR

Journalism of Color is a resilient, transformative, community-based journalism methodology and form of resistance writing that is framed by the values, narratives, and historical contexts of historically-marginalized communities.

It emphasizes the following:

• Disrupting traditional narratives about historically-marginalized communities

• Writing for and by historically-marginalized communities

• Creating journalism, journalism spaces, and journalism tools that are easily accessed by these communities and practiced by these communities

• Developing localized journalism structures and processes and community-based journalism and journalistic literacy

• Building and translating knowledge of justice and how it comes to be whilst decoding and deconstructing oppression, presenting counter ideologies, and challenging existing ideologies

• Constructing authentic community connections through responsiveness, adaptability, accessibility, critical reflection, cooperation, the prioritization of community voices, the articulation of beauty, and mutual trust

• Linking trust with analyses of justice and power, while centering community vision and values

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Journalism of Color puts the power of journalism into the hands of people who systematically have difficulty accessing journalism, as well as journalism tools and spaces. This idea organizes and builds on the work of the Black and Brown Press, narrative-building practices, theories of power and cooperation, as well as independent journalism, in order to confront and deconstruct hegemony. Journalism of Color seeks to create connections between what is happening within social movements and what is happening outside of them, analyze social movements construction and social justice development, and contextualize movement work and the need for justice.

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Journalism of Color is rhizomatic not only in its structure, but also in how it creates connections and seeks understanding. It prioritizes community-based education through both the content it creates and the structure it builds. It flops the journalistic script and the social movement script and attempts to understand both through the lens of the other.

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Journalism of Color is focused on communities engaged in low-intensity movement work in order to build power by reframing oppressive narratives, by providing equity-centered news, and by teaching journalism and journalistic literacy so that these communities have greater capacity to engage in both news production and news consumption in such a way that sustainability and equity are centered.

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Journalism of Color is guided by four counter-hegemonic principles:

1. Racism is ideological, systemic, structural, and individual. Its real and lived impacts on historically-marginalized communities cannot be dismissed;

2. White hegemony is real. Its impacts are real. It is our responsibility to deconstruct that reality, recognizing that this hegemony exists at every level and in every DNA strand of this nation;

3. Journalism is a necessary tool for resistance and one way in which we deconstruct the strands of white hegemony, but it is only effective when practiced in concert with other tools of resistance; and

4. Solidarity is an intentional act and oppression ties together historically marginalized communities.

© Cirien Issa Saadeh