Black Lives Matter has brought the conversation about the colonial history of Western countries to the forefront. In the United States and Europe, “protesters have dethroned, decapitated, defaced or otherwise targeted public representations of some of the most venerable members (deceased) of the Great White Canon of Conquest”, as Russell Rickford writes in Toppling Statues as a Decolonial Ethic for opinion and analysis site Africa is a Country.
The toppling of statues and the call for decolonisation is often perceived as a call for destroying the current situation. In contrast, it is about reviving what has been erased in colonial times. As Rickford writes:
“Good history, like a good historian, is never inert. It is dynamic. Restive. Social upheaval is its author, not its adversary. (…) The blitz on monuments signifies not the abandonment of history, but rather the rejection of a narrative of modernity.”
Colonial history is complex and has been incomplete to Western audiences for a long time. How to create stories that do service to the descendants of enslavement and the people facing the consequences of colonialism until this day? Pan-European newsroom Are We Europe took on the challenge of dedicating a whole issue of their magazine to stories about the colonial past. After reading Amanda Ripley’s article Complicating the Narrative, the journalists decided to adapt the method to the controversial issue of colonisation in Unsilencing: The Colonial Issue. “Europe is intricately interwoven with colonialism, but the issue is seldom found in public discourse”, write Are We Europe editors Priyanka Shankar and Inbar Preiss for IJnet.org.
Positionality of journalists
The editorial team of Are We Europe felt that too often the burden of the difficult conversations is left to the victims of colonialism. They also gave a platform to Europeans to openly discuss their continent’s colonial past, rather than run away from it. Priyanka:
“Through it all, CTN helped writers unpack their white saviour complex, write about the impact of colonial rule on their identities and report on how Europe could commemorate its darker moments in history.”
It is one of the steps of CTN: countering confirmation bias. It means that journalists will need to think about their positionality to a story. Journalists tend to place themselves in a neutral or objective position, something Wesley Lowery wrote an important opinion piece about right after the first Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists. He writes:
“The views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral. No journalistic process is objective. (…) And no individual journalist is objective, because no human being is.”
Lowery thinks it’s better to instead “focus on being fair and telling the truth, as best as one can, based on the given context and available facts”.
In Unsilencing: The Colonial Issue journalists write a few lines about their motivation to make the story. South African journalist Ray Mwareya wrote A Personal History of Land Grabbing and his motivation is:
“I grew up in the cool highlands of eastern Zimbabwe where lush pine trees dominate the hills. My father, in his frail years, revealed the ugly history of camouflaged, flowery Scottish timber estate names. This story is an ode to his memory, Mr. Joshua Mwareya, a British colonially trained teacher whose mind lived in a vanishing world and struggled to accept the new.”
Half-Irish journalist Teresa O’Connell contributed a story about Irish Language Survival and shares how adapting the step of ‘embracing complexity’ helped her to be conscious of her bias which took her story in unexpected directions.
It doesn’t mean that every newsroom needs to do that. But an exercise in positioning is valuable for each journalist, whether you decide to publish it together with the story or not. Understanding that journalists are also positioned along the lines of race, class, gender, education, and all the other intersectional categories is important. Journalists are part of society, not objects outside of society. Within CTN, countering confirmation bias refers also to confronting (gently) the protagonists in a story with their biases and prejudices to create more understanding of opposite opinions.
What worked well?
The journalists didn’t realize at first how complex the topic was, says Priyanka in a YouTube video for the Solutions Journalism Network.
“It (colonialism,red.) was looking like a very two-sided issue for me. Like, oh yeah, they colonized them and they suffered. Then we started talking about it and Indra said, I think CTN would work well in this. We were lost and confused and talking to a lot of academics who were like, “Yes you’re on the right path”. The ones who suffer from colonialism need to be the ones telling the story. We were realizing there are so many aspects of it. None of us had covered conflict before.”
What worked well for Are We Europe was using CTN for:
In-depth interviews with one or several people;
Uncovering the depth and details of someone’s personal story to the issue;
Exploring the nuance and varied perspectives of the topic;
Fact-checking;
Having an extra layer of awareness and attention to where the authors are coming from and whether or not they should reflect on that within the article, embracing positionality.
An interesting comment from Priyanka and Indra is about applying Solutions Journalism. Complicating the Narrative creates fertile ground for solutions thinking, according to the journalists. The decision of when to make a CTN story fits between investigative journalism and Solutions Journalism:
For Are We Europe the other lessons learned are:
CTN tools are skills that need to be practised;
There’s no ‘cookie-cutter’ CTN story model;
Not every story told from a CTN lens will use all four steps;
CTN will click for some journalists, but not everyone;
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