I have confronted racism head-on for the past 25 years. Beating around the bush simply doesn’t work. Racism is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of American life that I have found the average white person doesn’t even notice it on most days. Newsweek is no different.

In 1933, it was founded by white men, for white men, and hardly hired anybody other than white men as reporters for generations.

In 1970, the young civil rights attorney Eleanor Holmes Norton (now the long-serving congresswoman from the District of Columbia), sued Newsweek on behalf of dozens of the magazine’s women workers because it had a de facto policy barring women from being reporters.

They won the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit, but Newsweek still refused to make the change. Yet another discrimination lawsuit a few years later finally opened the door for women, but the culture of the magazine and organization remained deeply resistant to change.

It maintained a white, male perspective—and it did so in ways that caused great harm.

We struggle to admit it in America, but all news has a political point of view because it’s conceived and written by human beings and we are all cultural creatures way more than we tend to understand.

When I told my editor that I wanted to confront the role of Newsweek in promoting the dangerous anti-Black trope of “superpredators” in the 1990s, it was immediately clear to me that she sincerely wasn’t aware the magazine played a foundational role in this. It did.

On January 21, 1996, when Newsweek had an enormous and influential subscriber base, in a featured article the magazine sadly became the first national news outlet in the country to feature the racist and dehumanizing “superpredator” trope. And it was awful.

Horrifically entitled, “Superpredators Arrive: Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?” the article spoke of Black boys like they were vicious animals. It was soon followed by similar pieces in the other three national magazines with articles also written by authors from Newsweek.

In 2020, the brilliant Carol Bogert and Lynnell Hancock assembled the most important visual-documentary history ever authored on the subject, entitled “SUPERPREDATOR: The Media Myth That Demonized a Generation of Black Youth.” And right there near the very top of the timeline is Newsweek, which was a trendsetting publication of the day.

What’s wild is that both Carol and Lynell worked at Newsweek in the 1990s and said in their project how deeply they regretted not protesting the egregious use of the superpredator term at the time.

Beyond being offensive and racist, which, to be clear, is enough to confront all by itself, the concept of the superpredator, pioneered by junk science predicting an explosion of ravenous Black children roaming America’s cities raping and killing whoever they could, was an academic lie never backed up by crime statistics.

As the economy boomed, all youth crime plummeted, but the term resonated so deeply anyway that politicians from local city councils to the federal government set draconian policies to hammer Black children harder than at any point in modern American history.

The facts, science, and racism of the matter were all ignored because the meme of superpredators was a convenient cover for dangerous bigotry in journalism and politics.

Hiring me, of course, is not atonement for the harm that Newsweek caused back then, but giving me space here to call it out is a start.

This is familiar territory for me. Seven years ago when I was first hired as the senior justice writer for the New York Daily News, people on the city’s streets would regularly stop me, wanting me to know that they couldn’t believe “the Daily News was allowing me to confront racism and white supremacy and police brutality in the paper.”

Being from the Deep South, I had no idea what they meant, until I soon realized that the Daily News also had an embarrassing history on the issues of race and racism in the city.

I’m grateful to have this space and pledge to push the boundaries the best I can to not only help Newsweek but also, hopefully, help our readers confront hard topics and grow from them.