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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 21, 2024)
Page 6 The Skanner Portland & Seattle August 21, 2024 By DEEPTI HAJELA Associated Press I t started a couple of years ago when Juli- ana Pache was doing a crossword puzzle and got stuck. She was unfamiliar with the reference that the clue made. It made her think about what a crossword puzzle would look like if the clues and answers included more of some subjects that she WAS familiar with, thanks to her own iden- tity and interests — Black history and Black popu- lar culture. When she couldn’t find such a thing, Pache de- cided to do it herself. In January 2023, she creat- ed blackcrossword.com, a site that offers a free mini-crossword puzzle every day. And Tuesday marked the release of her first book, “Black Cross- word: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora.” It’s a good moment for it, nearly 111 years after the first crossword ap- peared in a New York newspaper. Recent years have seen an increasing amount of conversation around representation in crossword puzzles, from who’s constructing them to what words can be used for answers and how the clues are framed. “I had never made a crossword puzzle be- fore,” Pache, 32, said with a laugh. “But I was like, I can figure it out.” And she did. Made ‘with Black people in mind’ Each puzzle on Pache’s site includes at least a few clues and answers connecting to Black cul- ture. The tagline on the site: “If you know, you know.” The book is brimming with the kinds of puzzles that she estimates about 2,200 people play daily on her site — squares made up of five lines, each with five spaces. She aims for at least three of the clues to be references to aspects of Black cul- tures from around the world. Pache, a native of the New York City borough of Queens with family ties to Cuba and the Do- minican Republic, had a couple of goals in mind when she started. I’m “making it with Black people in mind,” she said. “And then if anyone else enjoys it, they learn things from it, that’s a bonus but it’s not my focus.” She’s also trying to show the diversity in Black communities and cultures with the clues and words she uses, and to encourage people from different parts of the African diaspora to learn about each other. “I also want to make it challenging, not just for people who might be interested in Black cul- ture, but people within Black culture who might be interested in other re- gions,” she said. “Part of my mission with this is to highlight Black people from all over, Black cul- ture from all over. And I think ... that keeps us learning about each oth- er.” What, really, is ‘general knowlege’? While on the surface if might just seem like a game, the knowledge base required for cross- words does say some- thing about what kind of knowledge is considered “general” and “univer- sal” and what isn’t, said Michelle Pera-McGhee, a data journalist at The Pudding, a site that fo- cuses on data-driven sto- ries. In 2020, Pera-McGhee undertook a data proj- ect analyzing crossword puzzles through the de- cades from a handful of the most well-known media outlets. The proj- ect assessed clues and answers that used the names of real people to determine a breakdown along gender and race categories. Unsurprisingly, the data indicated that for the most part, men were AP PHOTO/PAMELA SMITH News She Didn’t See Her Black Heritage In Crossword Puzzles. So She Started Publishing Her Own Juliana Pache poses for a photo in Washington Square Park in New York, Tuesday, July 16, 2024. disproportionately more likely than women to be featured, as well as white people compared to ra- cial and ethnic minori- ties. It’s “interesting be- cause it’s supposed to be easy,” Pera-McGhee said. “You want ... ide- ally to reference things that people, everybody knows about because everyone learns about them in school or what- ever. ... What are the things that we decide we all should know?” There are efforts to make crosswords more accessible and represen- tative, including the re- cently started fellowship for puzzle constructors from underrepresented groups at The New York Times, among the most high-profile crossword puzzles around. Puzzle creators have made puz- zles aimed at LGBTQ+ communities, at women, using a wider array of references as Pache is doing. Bottom line, “it is really cool to see our culture re- flected in this medium,” Pache said. And, Pera-McGhee said, it can be cool to learn new things. “It’s kind of enriching to have things in the puz- zle that you don’t know about,” she said. “It’s not that the experience of not knowing is bad. It’s just that it should maybe be spread out along with the experience of know- ing. Both are kind of good in the crossword-solving experience.”
