This is The Black Urbanist Weekly, an email newsletter that highlights Kristen Jeffers’s Black Queer Feminist Urbanist commentary on one key issue every week. This week, I’m going to tell you the story of how I came to accept that I am a Black queer press and embrace my storytelling gifts and ability to own and manage this platform. Speaking of being a press, like many other media platforms, you can now advertise on this newsletter by going to www.theblackurbanist.com/advertise. Now, let’s get started.
(“The Black press matters, and it, along with the media and press of all the marginalized, will be our saving grace going forward.” – You can read more of my words from my 2022 Nieman Lab Prediction for Journalism on their site, https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/12/a-press-where-black-labors-are-not-in-vain/)
We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created. – Audre Lorde, from her book Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Which is on my Black Queer Feminist Urbanist Resource List)
One summer day in the mid-1990s, I was at a family cookout in my uncle’s Black near suburban Greensboro yard with my Dad, Mom and my Dad’s siblings and their spouses, children, grandchildren and various family friends of all shapes and sizes.
During this era these gatherings were epic to my elementary-aged mind, with lots of food and occasionally a bouncy house or something else fun for all the kids to do. It was a twin gathering of our Thanksgiving gatherings, which were equally epic with lots of food and all the generations splitting off and bonding.
Often us kids would end up playing a lot of hide and seek and its various variations. One day, I suggested a different kind of game.
It was seeded in the nights my parents would make sure the TV moved from Sesame Street to the WFMY News 2 6 p.m. (and later the five pm) newscast, with a sprinkling of the Andy Griffith Show between the newscasts at 5:30, and the co-anchoring on the newscasts of Black woman newscasting legend Sandra Hughes.
It was seeded with friend-of-the-platform and another Black woman local newscasting legend Carol Andrews on various other local news channels.
It was seeded at 4 pm on those days I was at my maternal grandparents house and the TV stayed on Channel 2, and Oprah, a woman we all agree is a Black woman broadcasting legend, made herself right at home on her side of the TV, but who could have very well come through the TV and be right at home in that Black rural North Carolina setting of my grandparents.
And so back to that hot summer afternoon with all my cousins and the scowls on their faces, not just from the heat, but from the idea that we would be playing “news”.
“Eww, that’s wack,” they all said in unison and they moved on.
I, however, went home and started recording my own detective show, called “The Snooper”. I even made a theme song for it – “hey I’m the Snooper, ready to snoop around…”
My mom had this tape recorder the size of a paperback book she would often take to church to record sermons and choir anniversary concerts and rehearsals. She also recorded one of my elementary school class concerts. You know, the ones where the each grade level became a chorus or dance troupe and we all performed for our parents. Ok, maybe that was just the schools in Greensboro I went to, but definitely let me know if your elementary school had these assemblies too.
The same year as the Snooper, we learned a song called Down to the Bone. I kept the class recording. I recorded over my solo rendition of the song, which made me cringe. Yes, even more than the nasality I incorporated into my Snooper voice.
While TV broadcasting seemed elusive for someone who didn’t want to succumb to the grind of being on camera in weird, isolated (especially for person like me) places, and radio broadcasting was something my uncle did once upon a time and moved on from, print media did not and was not.
I’d already won those writing awards for my children’s books featuring urbanists jars of strawberry jam, grape jelly and apricot preserves as an elementary student. However I wasn’t especially encouraged by my writing again until I casually joined the newspaper staff my senior year at my high school and wrote a music review of Alicia Keys’s second album that became my first journalistic byline in any kind of newspaper.
Some of my mom’s middle school students wanted to start a newspaper club at the middle school while I was doing this at the high school. I stepped in my senior year to co-advise them and I stayed tangentially involved throughout college. One of my advisees does national social media and comms for the ACLU and several others are doing equally awesome work in all kinds of fields.
Still, my communication degree in undergrad was my second choice behind graphic design and before civil engineering. I was headed to law school, until my LSAT scores told me otherwise. I tried to retroactively do more PR internships and work, but I ended up doing internal communications for two campus departments, and getting an early taste of writing news for the web and arranging print newsletters on InDesign.
I was determined to leave my graduate program as an urban planner, but you’re reading the real product of my grad school experience. Even when I do planning work, it’s on the public engagement and affairs side of the construction process. Or it’s on the stage at some of your favorite conferences or in one of my many podcasting attempts, like this one. Once those nonprofits I needed to do a summer internship with to graduate saw that I could do social media and InDesign and work with websites, that’s what stuck. And of course all the reports and proposals that were successful at the design firm that would end up firing me. And doing so much of the comms work you saw come out of BikeWalkKC in 2015-2016.
A recent Twitter thread from a fellow Black journalist, Terrell Jermaine Starr and the article on a recently fallen, but once well-regarded Black news outlet The Root spelled out how important it is to own your work. That even if the world hasn’t caught up to its value or if you think it’s not important, and especially when corporations think they have control over it and people attempt to kill you for running your presses of Black liberation.
And yes, even when we have to demand amongst ourselves that being paid fairly and not being subject to misogynoir should be the rule, not the exception.
For those of you who are still reading/listening, know that this is exactly why I’m taking a step back to make sure that I continue to write the best Black Queer Feminist Urbanist newlsetter I know how to write. So that I can be a part of the vision that I set forth in my Nieman Lab journalism prediction for 2022 of a strong Black press. So I can thrive.
Before You Go
– I have a surprise for you. I’m actually not going on total newsletter sabbatical. I’m going to be revisiting four posts I think most speak to my own history and the collective Black history we celebrate in pursuit to Black history month. So, be sure to come back to your inboxes next week to learn what I still see as The Common Man’s Legacy in a City. When I do come back and a little bit before, we will be ad supported and I’m taking ad inquiries on my website at www.theblackubanist.com/advertise. If you support this work on Patreon, your newsletter will be ad-free, save me shouting out the advertisers on this version.
– There were times that I considered erasing my Southern accent. I’m glad I held on to it, unlike the journalist Becca Andrews, who talks about her struggle getting hers back in a recent article. And of course, I think of this in light of the recent passing of Andre Leon Talley and really loving the recent conversation between Black queer men about his legacy and the things he felt like he had to do to fit in on the latest episode of It’s Been a Minute with Sam Saunders.
– And I include this article on the finances of Black Lives Matter, only because it highlights that our work – whether social movement, journalistic platform, or just making sure communities can thrive with the basics and heal from injustices, need to be done with the spirit of mutual aid and art/culture creation. In other words, pay Black folks for our many labors and pay us when we must step away for our grief and our birthright of rest and healing.
Until next time,