Award-winning Black journalist Jemele Hill has always held a certain philosophy close throughout her whole life: Black truth.
“This concept is something that is near and dear to me,” Hill said on Feb. 27, when she spoke to University of Oregon students as part of Black History Month. “Especially throughout the course of my career, even when I didn’t realize I was doing it, I was living in my black truth.”
Hill’s most pivotal example of this philosophy was when she joined a company that many would consider the apex of sports journalism: ESPN. On ESPN, Hill covered college football and appeared on network programs SportsCenter, First Take and Around the Horn. The nationally known sports journalist created an indelible mark on the industry.
However, she quickly realized the flaws of the company and how her new position accompanied more public scrutiny.
Her difficulties first began when Hill started to struggle with relentless competition, the drive for power, and an obsession with ratings, three of the ideological undercurrents and aspects that accompany market-driven journalism and corporate media
“ESPN is a very different kind of place,” Hill said. “It’s corporate media at its finest, for sure. And everybody in here is constantly fighting for real estate.”
Her troubled feelings were then accentuated when Hill’s identity as a black woman caused the constant questioning of her talent and work ethic. She was called a “diversity hire,” by many, she said.
A boiling point arose in September 2017 when Hill posted a thread of tweets that mentioned the former president’s identity as a white supremacist and emphasized his looming threat to democracy. Critics reacted and labeled her statements as an example of “ESPN’s liberal bias,” and The White House personally reached out to ESPN to fire her.
Much to Hill’s surprise, ESPN did not protect its sports journalist and wasted no time by issuing a public apology.
“When it happened, ESPN’s reaction was the one that disappointed me the most,” Hill explained. “I cared about the fact that the company I worked for 12 years did not have my back. The most disappointing thing for me was when Donald Trump attacked me personally and they didn’t say anything. When that didn’t happen, that’s when I knew my relationship with ESPN was over.”
Hill officially left the company in October 2018. After that moment, Hill decided that she would never place herself in a position to “let someone have that kind of control over her career again.” Thus, she entered her “season of ownership” and became “unbothered.”
Subsequently, in 2019, she debuted her award-winning podcast on Spotify titled “Jemele Hill is Unbothered,” which featured guests such as Vice President Kamala Harris, Spike Lee, Chelsea Clinton, Dan Rather, Stephen Colbert, Common and Ice Cube.
Hill’s ability to remain grounded in dignity in the face of a dominant journalism company was inspirational and served as a mark of how far her journey of truth originated.
Not only did Hill pursue her truth in the ESPN situation, but that mindset was present in many different instances throughout her life thus far: As a child with her mother, as a student journalist in high school and in one of her first stories which was about former Michigan basketball star Chris Webber.
It started when Hill first found a passion for writing.
“For me to live in that black truth, I had to first start by finding my own voice,” Hill said.
Although Hill’s journey of self-discovery originated from the flickers of pain that radiated throughout her childhood, it was also the site of her nascent journalistic skill and budding voice. In an upbringing that featured drug addiction, poverty and sexual abuse in the reeling of the 1980s crack epidemic in Detroit, Hill’s respite was reading and journaling.
“I spent most of my childhood living in fear and terror,” Hill said. “In many ways, my childhood was stolen from me. All of these very adult things were happening around me and the only way I knew how to cope and live with these nightmare scenarios was through journal writing.”
Hill quickly discovered that in her journaling she was able to affirm the discordant sounds of “frustrations, anger, pain, crushes, highs and lows of being a young adult in Detroit.” She could live “her own truth” in her journal.
However, it was not until young adolescence that Hill would realize the full potential of truth outside of herself.
When Hill was 13 years old, she arrived home from school to the precarious sight of her mother reading her journal. She felt the sharp rise of clamorous thoughts and the stirring of fear upon her mother’s glance at her arrival.
The incident altered their relationship and Hill’s emerging confidence indefinitely.
“At the time, I think it was very heartbreaking to find out the truth from your own child,” Hill said. “However, after that incident, my mother never stopped supporting me as a writer. She said, ‘Listen, it’s your story. It’s your truth. You have a right to whatever feelings you have.’ Eventually, she had to come around to that and it was not at the moment. But, she was the first person to encourage me to live in a certain truth and be okay with that, regardless of what people thought about it, even my own mother.”
The pieces then started to align for Hill’s journalism career. In 10th grade, she took a newspaper class in which she was granted the privilege to print her stories in official newsroom offices such as The Detroit Free Press. The first time Hill walked into the professional newsroom she was exhilarated by the diversity of rapid opinions and discussion that bounced around the room with aerobatic agility.
In this experience, Hill’s aches and groans subsided: this is where she wanted to be.
“I remember they were discussing things and yelling at each other,” Hill said. “It was the energy of that newsroom that really sucked me in.”
In addition, Hill loved that the role of a journalist meant one had a platform to tell their own individual truth. In other words, “show a different component or facet to people’s lives that others do not often get to see in the first big story,” she said.
The first example in which Hill saw this manifested was her story on Chris Webber’s infamous timeout moment of the 1993 NCAA basketball championship. Hill maximized the possibilities at hand when she realized Webber’s mother taught at her high school.
“You know, he was ridiculed a lot in sports media after that,” Hill said.”It was a very harrowing time for them and I thought it would be interesting to hear his mother’s perspective on this story.”
Hill was curious about the lack of media coverage of his mother. Although Webber’s mistake was the biggest news of the year, there weren’t any reports on his family’s perspective.
When she finally sat down to interview her, Webber’s mother opened up about what it was like for her as his mother to see her son going through a very dramatic event on national TV. To this day, Hill considers her coverage of Webber’s mother one of the most significant moments of her journalism career.
As Hill finished up the story, her words reverberated throughout the Ford Alumni Center as young Black students and student journalists sat on her echoing insights. Hill’s life is inspiring for Black students in regard to her navigation in the many challenges that Black people experience in the workplace: respectability politics, tone policing and assimilation. Her experience reinforces the need for centering Blackness in many industries and calibrating internalized power asymmetries.
However, Hill is also an exemplar for all young non-black sports journalists beginning to enter the field as well; her mental fortitude in the face of power-owning institutions, her unwavering adherence to her own code of ethics despite the ideological scaffolding of her environment and her ability to elevate undercovered stories is a guide for young sports journalists.
Hill also stresses the importance of the gradual separation from being hyper-focused on prestige or “name brand” companies. Instead, she urges consciousness in the companies that young journalists choose in their careers. Seeing the way ESPN treated her, she decided to slowly step away from the reporter role and assign her energy more to cultural commentary in The Atlantic. In her new memoir titled Uphill, she discusses more about this organic transformation
Most importantly, Hill’s core tenet of truth resembles one of the central pillars of journalism and encourages a more effective mode of reporting in the era of market-driven sports media.
