Editor’s note: This will be Howard French’s final weekly column for World Politics Review. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Howard for the keen insights—born of his rich experience, creative intelligence and interdisciplinary thinking—that he has shared with WPR’s readers for the past three years. We wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors.
When I began writing a weekly global affairs column for World Politics Review nearly three years ago, things settled into an almost organic rhythm surprisingly quickly.
Some of what goes into writing columns, in fact, I didn’t need to change at all. I have been an information hound for most of my life. A late grandmother used to tease me, saying that I was the only person she knew who could read, watch television, listen to the radio and stay abreast of active conversations going on around me, all at the same time. And that, of course, was long before the advent of the internet.
For WPR, work on the next column has always begun almost immediately after sending in the present week’s piece, and sometimes even before. But as such things go, what I am describing scarcely resembles any other form of labor I know. That is to say that much of my process has always been passive, involving the association of ideas that come to me in the ordinary course of events. This starts with the first waking moments of my day, which typically begins with listening to National Public Radio for a few minutes in bed, before savoring with delight that first cup of coffee while reading a variety of newspapers. The next stage comes over a simple breakfast, as I dip into Twitter, which can be remarkably fertile if one knows how to use it, all the while listening to the BBC Newshour radio program. Hours later, my day ends with another constant—book reading, which is even more important than current events.
Most of my column ideas come together not so much through deliberate efforts at framing them as in letting bits of information, news, analysis and history collide and coalesce in the background of my conscious mind as I perform mundane tasks, like taking a shower, cleaning the kitchen and walking to work. Oftentimes, in fact, this results in several writing possibilities in a given week. I say none of this to suggest anything magical, or to make it sound like there is no labor involved. There is, of course, with the hardest part usually coming in the writing itself.
The purpose of this windup is to help establish how difficult producing this particular column is for me. That is because it is my final one for WPR, at the end of a run of just under 100 columns. Suddenly now, with a need to sum up, rather than to mull the events of the week, or to project recent developments forward, none of my normal processes apply, leaving me to hope that the reader won’t feel abused by the personal reflections that follow.
A more realistic expectation for a weekly columnist than lasting relevance is to offer readers of the future an understanding of how the world made sense of itself at any given moment in the present.
My first order of business here is to express my gratitude to the entire team at WPR for the spirit of collaboration that they have maintained throughout this shared experience. WPR reached out to me more or less out of the blue in the form of a series of emails from editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein, who I would discover in time is as smart and good-humored as they come, asking me if I would consider writing for them. Right away I was curious about the opportunity this represented for a lifetime journalist and writer like myself, but at the time I was still wrestling with the completion of the 500-page manuscript that ultimately became “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World.” There was no way I could subordinate a project of such scope to any other kind of writing, but Judah reassured me that this wouldn’t be necessary. He said that I could write at whatever frequency I wished until the book was completed, and we eventually agreed to begin at a bimonthly pace.
From the very start, my experience with the editors at WPR was among the best I’ve had. A lesson I learned early in my career as a journalist starting the hard way, as a freelancer in Africa whose work was rarely a priority for the newspapers I contributed to, is that that there is no such thing as even passably good writing without talented editing. Frederick Deknatel, and then Judah himself, provided me ample leeway with my ideas and interpretations of events, but beyond the inevitable cleaning up of things here and there, they consistently raised questions that helped me sharpen my work. Anyone who wants to write for a living would do well to view the editor as your No. 1 supporter. This isn’t always completely obvious to the newcomer to work like this, who can sometimes lapse into the mistaken feeling that the editor’s questions are a form of existential challenge. But the editor is on your side, and his or her questions are usually ones that a smart reader might ask. Better to resolve them in the editing process than leave the reader wondering later.
Beyond these nuts and bolts, I was blessed at WPR by the support I received from its publisher, Hampton Stephens. In an act of great kindness, he even went so far as to help promote my book on WPR’s website and by sponsoring a talk. There is much more to be said about Hampton, though. With global media increasingly dominated by a small bunch of omnipresent giants, independent outlets like his creation, WPR, have become all the more important. It is smaller publishers like these that preserve us from a much more monotonous world of commentary and analysis.
For all of this, I didn’t get my start writing columns at WPR. I began this kind of work while living in Japan at the turn of the century, where I was a bureau chief for The New York Times. Around that time, a wonderful but sadly defunct newspaper, The International Herald Tribune, which was jointly owned by the Times and the Washington Post, asked me to write a weekly column about Asia. Later, this assignment followed me when I moved to Shanghai to become bureau chief there in 2003.
It was there and then that I learned that, to be effective, a column has to be far more than a mere roundup of the week’s events, with a couple of editorial opinions thrown in as a frame. To be most effective, a column has to have a strong point of view, and hopefully not one terribly akin to what the active and curious reader is likely to come across anywhere else. To help accomplish this, I have often leaned on my perspective as an African American, acutely aware that in the Western media in general, the prerogative of global analysis has almost always been bestowed upon people who come from European and European-descended backgrounds rooted in the North Atlantic, and usually male, at that.
Here, I am reminded of a passage about patriarchy from “On Juneteenth,” by Annette Gordon-Reed:
Being a White man, entitled to deference, with the right to vote, and hold office – entitled to hold on to power – to be the kind of person who could walk into a courtroom, shoot a Black man in front of dozens of spectators, and get away with it, placed him above Black people, whether he had money or not. Most important of all, it placed him above Black men. Patriarchy, which is not only about the subjugation of women but about competition between males, is so central to this story. White males had, since the days of slavery, arrogated to themselves the right to have access to all types of women in society, while strictly prohibiting Black males’ access to White women, on many occasions becoming murderous about that stricture.
With Western commentary on world affairs, it has long been much the same, insofar as it has so traditionally been written from a perspective of unquestioned dominance.
In addition to my identity, I have also drawn freely on my unusual reporting career, which over the decades has sent me to Africa twice; to the Caribbean basin, including parts of Latin America; and then to Japan, the Koreas and finally China. Conspicuously missing here from the traditional perspective of this industry has been any length of time spent working as a correspondent in a Western country. I have tried to overcome this by making connections based on my own rather different experience, by making connections that others who have not dwelled as long or as widely in worlds inhabited by people of color are unable to.
There is a final challenge, though, and it is one that no columnist ever completely overcomes: lasting relevance. We hope that our work will speak to readers in interesting and hopefully fruitfully provocative ways for a week or two, or less commonly, a bit longer. By its very nature, though, column writing is mostly rather ephemeral. It is the rare piece that can be read many years later and still seem like a full understanding of how human affairs were heading over the long or even the medium term.
A more humble and realistic expectation for what endures might be a robust understanding for readers of the future of how the world made sense of itself at any given moment in the present; of our folly and incomplete wisdom; and of what the zeitgeist of any given time was.
For readers who have enjoyed reading me as I attempt to work through these challenges, stay tuned. There is more news ahead.
Howard W. French is a career foreign correspondent and global affairs writer, and the author of five books, including the recently published “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World.” You can follow him on Twitter at @hofrench. His weekly WPR column has appeared since June 2019.