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.”