19-05-2025
Gary Younge on being pigeonholed as a black journalist
'We have people who can write about this,' the journalist Gary Younge remembers an editor once telling him about a column he had written on Bosnia. 'Can you add an ethnic sensibility to this?'
For Younge, being one of the few black columnists in the British press has not been easy; rather, it has been a constant struggle, he explains, to avoid being pigeonholed as a journalist only ever interested in race. A struggle, he tells Helen Pidd, that would have been easier if he hadn't also been very interested in race as well.
Reflecting on a 30-year career in journalism – including nearly 27 at The Guardian – Younge has just published Pigeonholed: Creative Freedom as an Act of Resistance, a book exploring the pressures on writers from under-represented groups.
