We need to talk about race

The insidious reality of everyday racism in journalism

by Daniela Toporek

Journalist Vivek Chaudhary has been waiting almost 30 years for an apology.

A reporter for The Guardian in the 1990s and early 2000s, he was one of a small number of journalists of colour at the time. Although Chaudhary is of Indian descent, he is a Londoner through and through.

One night in the mid-1990s, Chaudhary met his Guardian colleagues at their regular pub, when the owner spewed hateful comments, calling him a p***. None of Chaudhary’s colleagues came to his defence.

When he complained, asking to boycott the pub, only a few agreed. The majority responded with heavy scepticism, he says.

At the same time, The Guardian was reporting on the Macpherson Inquiry, which exposed racism within the Metropolitan Police.

“I went to a union meeting then and I basically said: ‘You’re all a bunch of hypocrites,’” he recalls.

The Guardian, stating how hurt he was by his former colleagues and editors.

It took 15 months for the publication to respond with a formal apology in January.

On City University’s MA Magazine course this year, there are 38 students and only nine of them are people of colour. I am the only Hispanic. There are no Black students; and according to a survey of the labour force published by the Offce of National Statistics, 92 per cent of journalists in the UK are white.

So, will I experience something similar to Chaudhary when I’m actually on the job? Will I be isolated and ‘othered’ by my future white colleagues? The answer is… possibly.

“It’s never going to be said to your face,” says Nimra Shahid, a fnance reporter at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. “It shows up on a more structural level in people’s behaviours and actions.”

It shows, for example, when colleagues confuse people of colour in the workplace. Sophie Huskisson, a political correspondent at the Daily Mirror, says that white journalists often confuse her with other black female journalists. “You’d think it wouldn’t happen a lot because there’s not that many of us,” she says. “We’ve had to take it on the chin and fnd it quite hilarious because we look completely different. It’s because we’re the non-white ones.” but they didn’t act on them.”

While Chaudhary does think the industry has improved since his incident, he still believes there’s work to be done.

Journalist and communications consultant Genelle Aldred agrees. “When we think of a board, they say that it’ll take time to change it. No one wants it to change before they’re ready to give up their spot,” she says. “That’s because we imagine the future as a version of the past. Why not add people? Instead of a board with 10 people, for instance, why not have 12? Why does it have to be how it always was?”

“‘You’re sitting here reporting all this great stuff as a liberal publication, talking about institutional racism. Why don’t you look at your own bloody canteen culture? You know what happened to me, and none of you have supported me. You’ve been happy to carry on going to this pub.’”

While Chaudhary moved on from both the incident and The Guardian - continuing his successful career elsewhere, he never really considered the toll it took on his psychological well-being.

“I never spoke about the personal hurt,” he says. “I wouldn’t say that it drove me out of The Guardian, but it shaped the way my career went.”

In 2022, Chaudhary decided to address the issue with a personal statement to the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and

“The obvious one is recruitment — just having more people from diverse backgrounds and races,” he says. “Another thing about the media, unfortunately, is that it revolves around networking. People mostly bring in who they already know. We must break away from that,” he adds. “If there’s a more inclusive recruitment policy and you’re looking wider than your networks, that would be a really good thing.”

Another problem is that the higher up the media ladder you go, the more it becomes exclusively white and male. A factsheet published by Reuters this year reports that only six per cent of journalists in top editorial positions in the UK are people of colour.

“Those are the people that affect change and make policies happen,” says Chaudhary. “If these organisations instil diversity policies, they need to actually enforce them. With my incident, I know The Guardian had anti-racism policies,