By Donnovan Bennett

There is no manual that explains how to break into the world of sports journalism as a minority. The usual route through university and internships is there, and I took it. But as I learned the craft and looked for a foothold in the industry, there were very few minorities I had access to that I could ask for guidance. This series, presented in four parts over the course of Black History Month, is an attempt to address that. I reached out to seven established black journalists to get their perspective on the complexities of being a minority journalist. I also offered some thoughts of my own. The panelists were told they could pass on questions and their responses could be as short or long as they desired.

David Amber has been an anchor and reporter for NBA TV Canada, ESPN and CBC. One of the best sideline reporters in the business, he can currently be seen on Hockey Night in Canada.

Morgan Campbell is a sports and business writer for the Toronto Star and a co-host of Fight Network’s Boxing Weekly.

Rosey Edeh made a name for herself working for CNN, MSNBC and NBC’s Early Today. Before her broadcasting career, she represented Canada in the hurdles at three straight Olympics. She’s now back home working for Global.

Jay Harris is an award-winning host for ESPN who has appeared on Sportscenter, Outside The Lines, NFL Live, Baseball Tonight, First Take and Friday Night Fights. Canadian viewers maybe most familiar with his work hosting ESPN Sports Saturday on ABC.

Eric Thomas spent time doing sportscasts for TSN 690 and working as the sports anchor for CTV Montreal. He’s now an anchor on Sportsnet Central.

Perdita Felicien is a retired world champion and Canadian record-holding hurdler. Her broadcasting career began with CHCH and now includes work on CBC’s Pan Am and Olympic Games coverage.

Jason Whitlock has written for ESPN, The Kansas City Star, AOL Sports and Foxsports.com. The award-winning columnist is currently an on-air personality for Fox Sports 1 and blogger for J.School.

Part one of there responses ran last week. Here is part two.

Do you feel an obligation or pressure to represent black viewers and viewpoints through your work?

Rosey Edeh Yes.

Perdita Felicien I feel an obligation to be my authentic self, and that means speaking honestly about the way I see the world and my experiences in it—good, bad or otherwise. When people see me on television, they are going to see all the wonderful things that I am, which include being a black woman. Growing up, I don’t recall seeing many women in media who looked like me, and who happened to be from my own backyard. When my mother told me Tonya Lee Williams, an actress on the soap opera The Young and the Restless, was from Oshawa, Ont., I was amazed. A black television star grew up that close to us? It made me think I had a chance to do something out of the ordinary with my life. Today, it is never lost on me that a little girl may be watching from her living room, and beginning to imagine herself in my role—or something greater—as a result.

Eric Thomas When it comes to how and by whom my work is perceived, I only feel an obligation to speak for myself and in my own words. That’s all I personally have the ability to do. I can’t put myself in someone else’s shoes, just like I can’t (and shouldn’t) serve to represent an entire race as one individual. There’s also a slippery slope there on an individual level. Maybe someone sees me in a particular professional setting, talking about a specific subject, and thinks I carry myself like that all the time or that I carry the same viewpoints across the board, based solely on my race or my personality in that moment, which is a dangerous assumption to make. I can only be (and represent) myself, and even that can be misconstrued in a small sample size.

Jason Whitlock 100 percent. I feel pressure to remain authentic. Authenticity isn’t a political ideology.

Donnovan Bennett It’s a weird phenomenon when you are judged as a group. I vividly remember newscasts as a kid where the anchor would start describing a criminal suspect and my grandparents would say, “Please don’t let him be black.” You understand at an early age that the perception of blacks as a whole supersedes your individual reality. When you are judged by the worst behaviour of your entire race, you are cognizant of trying to change that perception. I feel like everything I do is a representation of black people—and more specifically black men. However, it is important to point out that I don’t want my viewpoints to be taken as automatically representative of the thoughts and beliefs of every black person.

Jay Harris I feel an obligation to be excellent, period. And to be me. That’s the best way I can represent anyone. Black viewers, people from my hometown, my high school and college—you name it. There are many folks who claim you in this business.

David Amber No, not really. I’m a sports broadcaster, and the scope of what I do isn’t generally focused on race. If I was covering the Ferguson riots or even Donald Trump’s racially charged presidential campaign, I would absolutely feel it was my duty to make sure black voices were heard.

Morgan Campbell I embrace the opportunity to centre black thought. For example, late January and early February saw a flood of stories about the racial dimensions of Cam Newton’s fame, and whether or not the animosity toward him stemmed from the fact that he’s black. Cool. But at the same time, Newton spent the season winning over black fans and few media outlets discussed that. Just about everything I read about Newton dealt with how he makes white people feel. Now, white people’s thoughts and feelings are important, but they’re not the only ones that matter. So when I started reporting my story on Cam Newton, I knew I wanted to focus on how black football fans receive him, and how he has gained this following among African-American fans in an era when black quarterbacks are no longer a novelty. It’s amazing, but not at all surprising, that a sports media industrial complex that’s so eager to talk about and at and around black folks never bothered to talk to them during all the months of Cam Newton hysteria. So I capitalized on the chance to shift the focus of this particular story.

More broadly, sports and social issues are a hotter topic than they’ve ever been. There’s no avoiding it, and every major outlet has people exploring the issue, whether they have the tools to do it or not. Consequently we wind up with a lot of hot takes on race, which can drive traffic to your website but don’t necessarily enhance your audience’s understanding of an important and complex topic. Now, being black doesn’t automatically equip you to write skillfully on race any more than having knees qualifies you to perform ACL surgery. But when I look around the Canadian sports media landscape, I don’t see a lot of writers who minored in African-American studies like I did, or who actively seek out smart people who can sharpen their knowledge of a topic they already know very well. So when race and sports intersect, I’m comfortable writing about it and confident in what I say because I know I bring an intellectual and cultural capital to those stories that a lot of other sports media folks don’t.

Do black viewers and fans react to you differently than other audiences?

Thomas That’s a tough thing to gauge, especially when you’re interacting with the public. You don’t always know the individual you might be dealing with, or where their viewpoint is coming from. But my hope is that the answer would be twofold. I want people to see me and my work and say, “That’s a good anchor/reporter/host,” without mentioning my race. That’s my hope. But, in the back of my mind, I’ve also thought about that young, black kid who might be watching a sportscast and thinking, “He looks like me, and if he can do it, then so can I.” That’s because I used to be that kid, and I know that sentiment well.

But, when it comes down to it, I want to be the best journalist I can be. Not the best black journalist, not the best young journalist, not even the best sports journalist—simply, the best journalist I am capable of being. My mindset is that if I keep striving to reach my own personal potential, I can let the rest take care of itself. There’s only so much you can control.

Harris Yes, to a degree. There’s a measure of pride and kinship that’s different from black viewers.

Amber I definitely feel there is a sense of community between black broadcasters and black viewers. I just know from my personal experience that many black viewers are pleased and somewhat relieved that television networks are starting to better reflect the communities they are covering.

Felicien I do feel there is a great sense of pride whenever I am spotted in public by someone who is West Indian. My mom is from St. Lucia but I’ve had Haitians, Jamaicans and a few other islands “claim me” on the streets of Toronto. It’s always fun and I embrace it. We are tight knit as a community and recognize that it’s important to celebrate each other.

Bennett The vast majority of people who recognize me in person are black. I think part of it is they take notice when someone like them is in the media. I’m sure another part of it is they feel emboldened to come up and talk to me because they feel a certain claim to me as their representative. It is humbling and a reminder that black viewers not only want to see their athletes’ stories told, they want members of their community to be part of the conversation.

Whitlock When I meet people, what I hear is a lot of pride and support. From white fans, I feel like I get fascination. Now, social media is whole different story. I don’t view social media as a general public.

In what ways (if at all) is it easier to cover black athletes or subjects?

Edeh It’s not easier. Athletes on the whole are easier for me to interview because there’s a mutual interest, a deeper understanding of the pursuit of excellence. This goes beyond race.

Bennett From a cultural standpoint, there are things I may pick up on or relate to that others may not. There can be an affinity and a trust from black athletes. When they don’t see someone that looks like you come around the locker room often, they take notice when you do.

Amber Anytime there’s familiarity it can help. When I come across athletes with Jamaican backgrounds, like Donovan Bailey or PK Subban, I will mention my mother was born and raised in Jamaica. An athlete’s race never changes how you cover them, but sometimes having some familiarity can help.

Harris There’s an obvious potential familiarity with certain subjects or athletes, but I wouldn’t say that makes it easier or more difficult to cover. You’re still a journalist first—no matter the color of the subject you’re covering.

Campbell The challenge is always to write a story that makes sense both to the general audience and to the subset of people with a keen interest in the specific topic of the story. Happens all the time in our profession because we often have to cover niche sports with passionate fans but little mainstream following. So when I wrote a story about a Canadian rugby player signing with a top-flight team in France, I asked extra questions in my interviews to learn the broader importance of this transaction, and the context in which it happened. When I finished the story, I ran it by some folks at Rugby Canada to make sure it made sense to people who really understand the sport. I didn’t want to be the guy writing about how many touchdowns a running back scored in a rugby match—fastest way to lose credibility.

The bigger point is, we’re always writing about something—sometimes it’s a new topic and sometimes its familiar. Spend your career visiting various subcultures and telling stories about them and eventually you lose any hang-ups you might have had about doing it. So for me the rules don’t change whether I’m writing about a black guy or a white guy or an Asian woman. The goal is to tell stories that are honest and authentic. Sometimes you already have the cultural capital to do that, like when I write about Cam Newton or Yasiel Puig. Other times you have to ask extra questions and consult experts, like when I write about rugby or figure skating.

Thomas I hope that when I walk into the locker room or practice facility, people don’t assume certain things about me simply because of what they see. But, that’s a sentiment that I have to respect on their side as well. We might have at least one thing in common, but it’s not safe to assume they’ll feel the same way I do about anything. You can’t approach life, much less work, like that. Just because I’m a black journalist shouldn’t mean I’m going to get a certain answer someone else might not. It also doesn’t mean that they’ll relate to me any differently than any other writer or reporter. If you’re not careful, it can be a bit of a precarious position. But, the way I look at it, this is my job, and I’m expected to carry myself with a certain professional composure. My job is not to make friends or try to make myself more relatable to my subjects in exchange for (or at the expense of) the story. My job is the story.

Whitlock Shared experience gives me a perspective that some writers might not be able to tap into. But shared race may also put unreasonable expectations into the relationship. I’m a journalist who believes it’s my responsibility to be objective whenever possible and transparent at all times. Not every subject wants objectivity.

Is there anything that bothers you about the coverage of black athletes?

Whitlock Too many cliche, predictable narratives. We’re too often framed as victims.

Edeh The adjectives used to describe black athletes are usually associated with physicality alone and not intellect.

Bennett The double standard bothers me. Cam Newton doing the dab dance is apparently arrogant. Aaron Rodgers doing the discount double check is fun. Julian Edelman as a slot receiver is “savvy.” Doug Baldwin is “shifty.” The code words and hidden language have a powerful effect.

Amber I think the media as a whole sometimes mischaracterizes black athletes. Much of it is thinly veiled in the language we use. Black athletes are generally described as fast, quick, strong, athletic, etc., whereas white athletes are often complimented for being smart, hard working or gritty. The hardest working basketball player I’ve ever seen is Ray Allen. He wasn’t just some naturally gifted freak; he made himself the greatest shooter in the game through his work ethic. Similarly, I’d like to see black quarterbacks like Russell Wilson and Cam Newton get consideration for their mental preparation and leadership abilities like Peyton Manning and Tom Brady do.