00:01My name is Jamil Smith. I'm a senior writer with Rolling Stone magazine and
00:05I'm here to talk about being an intersectional journalist. An
00:08intersectional journalist is someone who understands how different identities
00:13impact and infringe upon systems of oppression. It gets its name from
00:18intersectionality, of course, the concept that law professor Kimberly Crenshaw
00:22came up with in 1989, essentially asserting that various different
00:27identities and modes of society impact how people are oppressed. When I go into
00:34my work as a journalist, I try to understand how different identities play
00:39upon each other in positive and negative ways, and so that we understand how life
00:44is different for black men versus black women, black gay men versus black gay women,
00:51black trans men from Ohio versus black gay women from Seattle. I mean, all of
00:59these different things, including our geography, plays into who we are. All of
01:03those identities impact how we see the world and how the world sees us, and we're
01:10talking about reporting the news and offering opinions on the news. That's a vital
01:14lens to have. I make a very strong point to separate activism from journalism in my
01:21own personal life. I feel like it's important that I am not out there leading
01:25protests, that I'm out there to cover them, that I'm out there to tell the story of
01:29people who are doing the work on the ground, not to attempt to, you know, wage my way
01:34into the story. That said, I think that in some ways journalism is activism.
01:39Journalism can predominantly, of course, provoke activism, certainly inspire people to get
01:44more invested in what's going on in their communities. Here's how I check for blind spots.
01:48I asked my colleagues, I asked my friends, I asked my wife, I asked all these people who
01:54either are invested in my product or invested in me to essentially tell me the truth about myself.
02:00You have to have people in your life who are willing to give you the honest facts about your own
02:06perspective and see and tell you where you're coming up short. While, yes, I think it's important
02:10that Spike Lee, for instance, directed Malcolm X. I think it's important that you had Ryan Coogler
02:17directed Black Panther. There's a certain perspective that they're taking, you know,
02:22they're putting into their work that helps make that work a little bit richer. But that doesn't
02:27necessarily apply to every work of art nor every piece of journalism. And I think that people cannot
02:33afford to sit and be afraid to tell stories because we're going to shortchange a lot of
02:39communities that are underrepresented in media because they feel like no one's in the room to tell
02:44that story. When I consider whether or not a story is worth covering, I try to make sure that
02:49if I'm approaching a story, I have a particular perspective that would be useful to the public,
02:55useful to our readers. So that's number one. Number two is I try to make sure that
03:02I'm the right person to tell it. Maybe there's someone else on our staff who can do a better job
03:07of
03:07that. And frequently, I find myself telling my editors, hey, this may be not the one for me,
03:12perhaps assigned to this other writer, to this other colleague, so on and so forth.
03:16Understand that you're not the right writer or producer or talent for every story.
03:23And number three, I would say, in considering what stories to tell, I say that I try to look for
03:30the underrepresented. Try to look for the stories that aren't being told. Everyone in the world can
03:36now access news at the tip of their fingers. Do something different. Do something that's going
03:42to stand out. Do something that's going to move the conversation forward.
