Charlie Brinkhurst Cuff
Whenever there's a race controversy surrounding a celebrity, politician or other notable person, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff's inbox dings. It's an email she's tired of receiving but is mercifully getting less frequently. "[That's] because I bitched about it enough online," she says while sitting at her home in Peckham. An accomplished freelance journalist, author and deputy editor of gal-dem—a print and online publication written by women and non-binary people of color—Brinkhurst-Cuff is often asked to comment or write about incidents like these.
| Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff Writer and Editor | Deputy Editor of gal-dem Author of Mother Country: Real Stories of the Windrush Children |
| Web: charliebrinkhurstcuff.com gal-dem.com | Social Media: |
It's a commonly reported issue among journalists of color, being contacted to write about or comment on race-related stories, regardless of whether they have demonstrated any interest in the subject in the first place. It's a practice that manages to tokenize writers as a symbol of diversity without any real effort to diversify news coverage as a whole, while also shoehorning them into writing about race to make a living, regardless of whether they'd prefer to cover anything else.
"I have been getting more unusual commissions sent my way," says Brinkhurst-Cuff, as she talks about her recent work. Her adopted stray cat, Michael, nuzzles her hip and toys with her purple sweater as she sits behind at the coffee table of her weathered stone row share house in London. "I don't know why she liked us," she says, chuckling with a wide smile and a laidback presence that sparks immediate feelings of ease and familiarity—one could offer a guess.
Brinkhurst-Cuff is passionate about black identity and topics but when she chooses to write about them, it's increasingly on her own terms and often in her own publication. Covering everything from women's football and politics to celebrity profiles and the whiteness of punk music in her freelance work, Brinkhurst-Cuff's growing portfolio includes features for The Guardian, Dazed & Confused, Vice Magazine and iPaper, among others. She intersects themes of class, race, gender and identity in her writing, rounding out her subjects to create nuanced portraits of complicated issues. But it's gal-dem, Brinkhurst-Cuff's passion project, that gets most of her attention these days. "Usually when I should be doing something else, I was doing gal-dem," she says, describing the split between her work on different projects.
Brinkhurst-Cuff’s done a lot of interviews lately, which is expected when you write a book. Her 2016 piece on the women of the Windrush generation for gal-dem's first print issue caught the attention of Headline Publishing Group, who commissioned her first book. There are talks, pop-ups, and signings to be done. But, she says, it has been a bit strange. "You just never know how someone's going to take your words and change them. I'm very aware of how easily that can be done."
Published in October 2018, Mother Country: Real Stories of the Windrush Children was written in three months, a feat Brinkhurst-Cuff didn't know was possible when she accepted the commission. On vacation with her boyfriend's family in Greece, she received the offer to write about the Windrush generation with what was initially a two-month deadline attached. Despite their congratulations, she didn't feel confident. "I just said to my boyfriend, 'I'm going to say I'm going to do it but I'm not going to end up being able to do it.'"
Windrush colloquially refers to both the HMT Empire Windrush—a former troop ship that took 1,207 Caribbean migrants to Britain in the late 1940s—and the subsequent generation that followed. For the first of the Windrush generation to make the journey, Britain was 'the mother country', according to Brinkhurst-Cuff, a term of affection that would tragically not be reciprocated. The UK government's acceptance of these migrants was far from altruistic, rather the devastation of the Second World War had left the country in need of cheap labor, which they looked to the colonies to provide. Expecting a warm welcome, migrants instead found themselves struggling against virulent racism in almost every aspect of their lives.
Staring down a long list of phone calls and emails to draft the book, Brinkhurst-Cuff brought on a researcher. Together, they worked through 50 people, gathering the 22 personal stories that became Mother Country. Conducting these interviews meant traveling around England, as well as Saint Kitts and Nevis, a former British colony. Brinkhurst-Cuff missed the initial deadline—basically a rite of passage among authors—but remarkably completed the 300-page volume in three months.
Mother Country sits on the table, its black cover is inscribed with the yellow and red names of interviewees, each separated from the next by a deep green dot. "Identity isn't important to everyone," Brinkhurst-Cuff writes in its pages. "But it's always been important to me." Among those who arrived in the 1950s was George Cuff, the man who ties her not only to Jamaica but—as revealed by the posthumous discovery of a second passport—to Cuba as well.
Brinkhurst-Cuff was born in London to a second-generation Caribbean-British mother and British father, who came from a long line of Kentish laborers. The family relocated to Edinburgh at the cusp of her ninth birthday, which she describes in Vice Magazine as "beautiful, cold and 98.1 percent white". The transition from the predominantly black and Asian community of Hackney to the stark sameness of the Scottish capital stirred an identity crisis in the preteen. "I fought against being called black for so many years because it seemed to hold more damning connotations than being mixed-race", Brinkhurst-Cuff writes. Relief came when she relocated to London to attend Goldsmiths University in 2011 and was again surrounded by other people who looked like her.
Although Brinkhurst-Cuff always had a passion for journalistic writing, it wasn't until her university studies that she considered it as a career. Not knowing any journalists, the path felt unclear. In spite of a foggy way forward, Brinkhurst-Cuff sought out opportunities, completing an NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists) course and receiving various grants and internships. She eventually landed at The Guardian under The Scott Trust Bursary, which gave awardees a six-week placement and paid for their Master's degrees. After finishing, she became a regular freelancer for the newspaper. The only thing was, Brinkhurst-Cuff didn't just want to participate in the media world. She wanted to change it.
In 2015, Brinkhurst-Cuff started working on gal-dem alongside CEO Liv Little. The online and annual print publication written by women and non-binary people of color, would make space for writers to address topics of race, gender and culture on their own terms, giving them, and its photographers and illustrators—who had historically been shut out of traditional media—an outlet.
gal-dem links the struggles women and non-binary people of color face to broader histories of oppression, while contextualizing reader's understandings of current events. From the predatory practices of the wellness industry to surfing's exceedingly white public image, the London-based publication highlights how the stories around us are often rooted in problematic histories. It's a focus Brinkhurst-Cuff hopes to expand on this year by being less reactive and instead digging further into the systemic injustice people of color face in the UK and elsewhere.
Now entering its fourth year, the gal-dem team has built the digital and annual print publication into a profitable company—a huge accomplishment in a struggling media climate. In August 2018, they did a takeover of The Guardian's weekend magazine, which Brinkhurst-Cuff points to as her proudest moment of the year. "It was a true representation of who we are and what we can achieve as women of color, and non-binary people of color." Brand partnerships allow gal-dem to produce content and have made it so that entering as of April 2019, the publication is Brinkhurst-Cuff's full-time job.
That said, the tricky relationship between brands and editorial isn't lost on her. "There's also no getting away from the fact that we're a magazine that is written and produced by women of color, and non-binary people of color but some of these brands directly contribute to the subjugation of women of color in a more global sense," Brinkhurst-Cuff says. However, she believes that careful curation of who they choose to work with will allow these media partnerships to continue without compromising gal-dem's principles.
Between working on the magazine and doing her own writing, Brinkhurst-Cuff has learned how she works best. She's not big on patterns, there is no ritual to get her in the 'writing zone' and she isn't rigid in her approach. For her, it's important to tackle the easiest thing first. When she writes a piece, she uses a two-document system (three if there's a transcript): one for writing the article, and one for her notes and thoughts. She doesn't re-edit her work. This approach ensures she gets it right the first time around.
Despite all of her accomplishments, Brinkhurst-Cuff doesn't view herself as ambitious—a presumption that those around her challenge. It's not zeal that she attributes her success to, it's decisiveness. "I can see how long it takes for people to decide to do or not do things. I think on this spectrum, I tend to be quicker." Coupled with a fearless approach to writing ("I have never been afraid of writing. I've never been really afraid of what people will think of my writing"), it's clear that Brinkhurst-Cuff's strengths lie in her ability get things done.
As the sun sets through the cloudy London sky, Brinkhurst-Cuff talks about how long it takes to get pieces out, noting that, for her, an interview feature could take anywhere from a day to a month to produce. "They're the ones I care about the most." At her core, she's a storyteller. It's the personal element of journalism Brinkhurst-Cuff connects to, which is something she notes when talking about her Mother Country in particular: "It was pure, unadulterated storytelling. People were just opening up their life story to me and it was very simple." Whether it's through her own writing or enabling other writers to share their narratives through growing gal-dem, it's clear that this is just the beginning.
Written By Emma Murray
