A response from Shola Adenekan, editor of the New Black Magazine.

(1) What do you think of “The Root”? Is it interesting and relevant?

Dr Gates is that rare breed in academia – a business-savvy celebrity. The Root could be very relevant in pushing the black perspectives onto the mainstream. And with Barack Obama confounding pundit expectations about the legitimacy of his candidacy and the perceived capacity for non-blacks to support his campaign, there’s a need for highly articulate black men and women, who are actually armed with some quantitative and qualitative data to express the opinions of the community. This is not new of course, there are black publications already doing a very good job as per this, they include www.seeingblack.com, www.blackamericaweb.com, www.thenewblackmagazine.com etc.

But the big question is; will Black folks, even educated ones like yours sincerely, feel comfortable with a project financed and promoted by the Washington Post? What happens when the editorial content contradict the Post’s own policies? I think the quest should not be for us to create a Black Slate but Black publications that seek to tackle issues facing today’s Black folks, such as homophobia within the black community, the death of affirmative action, the widening chasm between middle class blacks and our poorer kinsmen etc.

(2) Are Gates’ own business interests in genealogy undermining the site?

Blatant marketing alongside editorial are tricky minefields. I think Dr Gates needs to decide what he wants to sell to his readers. A thought-provoking publication or genealogy website? I remember his other project launched about a decade ago, Africana.com, of which I was a contributor. At the time the site was essentially an online vehicle to promote Gates’s Encarta Africana. Africana.com soon became part of a necessary intervention into public discourse during the early years of the Bush II presidency. He soon sold the publication to AOL Time Warner. One can only hope that The Root is not one of Dr Gates’ vanity projects in his self-assumed position as the gatekeeper of the African Diaspora history.

(3) What are the advantages of magazines that explicitly target black readers? Can they deal with other issues that are often ignored in the mainstream media?

I know that we keep hearing from our liberal friends that in these days of Obama’s one America, we should not be thinking in term of race, but race still determines a lot of things in America and Britain; getting a job, where you hang out, your life expectancy etc. So, black publications are still relevant in telling their readers how make the most of the opportunities available to them, as well as how to navigate the system to their advantage. Will the New York Times run a good story about booming business in Africa for example, instead of war and HIV AIDS. Will the Washington Post deal with the fact that you rarely see black faces on mainstream female magazine covers or the aspiration of the Hip-Hop generation? These are just some of the issues we deal with in addition to various bread and butter issues that the average reader, black or white, is concerned about.