Back in 2018, a National Geographic headline caught my attention: “For decades, our coverage was racist. To rise above our past, we must acknowledge it.” The subhead explained that a historian had investigated their coverage of people of colour in the United States and abroad and now they were publishing the findings.

I read that headline in the same year I became editor and publisher of The United Church Observer, a publication with a history stretching back to 1829 and a Methodist paper called The Christian Guardian. The National Geographic piece made me wonder: if we dove into our own archive, would we also find racism?

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The question collected dust on a back shelf in my brain for a few years while I grew into my new job and rebranded our publication to Broadview.

But then,........

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