Anti-racist communication: involving the people who live it

At Entropía, we sat down with Gabriella Nuru, cultural manager, poet, activist and co-founder of Uhuru Valencia, a collective of Black, African and Afro-descendant people working to make these communities more visible and respected in the city of València.

Our conversation led us to reflect on something that speaks directly to us as an organisation: where are we speaking from when we talk about anti-racism? Who do we involve when we build messages? Who are we really serving with our communication?

These questions do not have simple answers, but Gabriella offers us tools to start asking them with honesty.

What is anti-racist communication?

Gabriella defines anti-racist communication as communication that “takes a critical approach and actively seeks to remove prejudice from our bodies”. It starts from the awareness that the messages we build and consume are not neutral: “communication is deeply biased and there is always an idea of what we are supposedly like”.

Communication does not only transmit information. It also produces social imaginaries, hierarchies and ways of understanding the world. That is why racism is not limited to individual acts of discrimination. It also operates through historical narratives that have positioned some people as legitimate subjects of speech and others as objects of observation, analysis or intervention.

That preconceived idea, that mould into which Black people are placed before they can speak for themselves, is precisely what anti-racist communication seeks to dismantle. And to do so, it is not enough to name racism. We must also avoid homogenising discourse, assuming positions or turning Black people into a single category, with no nuance or internal diversity.

In response to that logic, an anti-racist approach proposes something apparently simple but deeply transformative: “to humanise ourselves, to give ourselves the value we have and to replace the narratives that have always accompanied us”. It is not only about avoiding offensive images or words. It is about rethinking, from the root, who builds the narrative, with what intention and from what position.

Although forms of discrimination change over time, symbolic structures persist. They continue to define who appears as the protagonist of history, who is perceived as fully belonging to society and who continues to be represented through otherness. We cannot forget that many contemporary representations of Black people are still shaped by imaginaries inherited from colonialism.

The most common mistake: speaking without involving those affected

If there is one mistake that Gabriella points out clearly and forcefully, it is absence, assumption. Building narratives about Black people without giving them a seat at the table is one of the most frequent and most profound errors.

Gabriella says it clearly: “The most common mistake in communication is not involving us, assuming what happens to us, what affects us and, above all, relying on very stereotyped examples. Racism changes shape. If you want to create an advertising campaign denouncing these situations, you have to speak with and mainly involve the people who experience them. It does not seem normal to me to want to talk about anti-racism without having people who are affected by it sitting there.”

She adds something that should be a basic principle for any communication project that aims to be responsible: “One of the biggest mistakes in communication is assuming that all Black people live the same things, think the same things and feel the same things. When you interview a Black person, you are interviewing ONE Black person, who does not necessarily have to have lived, felt or thought the same as another. The biggest mistake in communication is assuming that we are a homogeneous group, that we do not differ from one another at all and that, therefore, we have no diverse characteristics.”

Her critique points directly to homogenisation as a form of dehumanisation: reducing people to a category, erasing their individualities and assuming that one voice can speak for everyone. That is why representation cannot remain merely aesthetic. It has to become a matter of justice. It is not enough to appear. People must be able to participate in defining the narratives and in distributing the power that makes those narratives possible.

The challenge for organisations, then, is to move from a logic of symbolic inclusion to a logic of institutional transformation. Involving Black, Afro-descendant and racialised people should not be a one-off gesture to validate a campaign, but a sustained practice that runs through teams, processes, decisions and ways of producing knowledge.

From this perspective, anti-racism is not only a communication tool, a cross-cutting element to consider, or a discursive trend. It is a political practice aimed at democratising who gets to produce meaning, challenging historical inequalities and expanding who has the right to narrate reality from their own experience.

How do we know if an anti-racist campaign has been done well?

Gabriella’s answer is clear: we have to look at the process, not only the result. “A fundamental sign that an anti-racist campaign has been worked on responsibly is that the Black person feels represented in a dignified and respectful way.” But that dignity and respect do not suddenly appear at the moment of publication. They are the result of decisions made much earlier.

“It can only be achieved when the Black perspective and gaze have always been included throughout the campaign,” she explains. The Afro perspective, she insists, must be at the centre of the creative process. Not as a stamp of approval sought at the end to legitimise work that has already been done, but as an active, constant and determining presence from the very beginning. “For me, that is essential: that a consultancy works with us.”

An anti-racist campaign is developed responsibly when it does not reproduce a logic of extractive representation; that is, when it does not use racialised people as a narrative resource, but recognises their agency in the construction of the message. This means moving from a logic of “speaking about” to a logic of co-producing discourse, where the voices involved are not decorative or merely testimonial, but structural.

This has very concrete practical implications: who is on the creative team? Who makes the decisions? Who reviews the content? Who is consulted when doubts arise? Who has been listened to and who has been paid for their work, experience and knowledge? If a campaign speaks about anti-racism but internally reproduces the same hierarchies as always, there is an important contradiction.

It also matters how racialised communities receive these campaigns. There does not need to be unanimity, because that does not exist, but it is important to ask whether people feel recognised, whether they see themselves reflected with respect or whether they detect stereotypes and simplifications that make them uncomfortable.

An invitation to review our own ways of working

This conversation with Gabriella reminds us that responsible communication means asking who is in the room when decisions are made, who has a voice in the creative process and who we are asking to see themselves reflected in what we produce.

At Entropía, this conversation is not a point of arrival, but an invitation to keep reviewing our own ways of working: the assumptions we start from, the voices we include and those we may still be leaving out without realising it.

Listening to Gabriella is also a reminder that anti-racism is not a static position declared once, but a practice that requires constant review, humility and commitment.