September 16, 2014

When we issued our initial statement on September 15, we were maintaining journalistic integrity. We needed to respond to our readers, followers, donors, and supporters. And we did. However, in efforts not to legitimize attacks against our organization and colleagues that we knew were baseless, we made several mistakes:

• We did not publicly support and stand by our colleague, Aura Bogado.

• We did not clarify that multiple people at this organization were involved in writing the blog post.

• We did not reiterate the very real, fair critical question that we initially raised in our blog post— that it’s inexcusable to make money off of the death of black people.

In short, we ignored our humanity, and for that, we are sorry.

We are proud of the work we do at Colorlines and Race Forward every day, and we will continue to identify, discuss, and address racial inequities. Facing legitimate criticism, and taking responsibility, is part of that work. Sometimes we will disagree. Sometimes we will get it wrong. When we do, we are grateful to our community of supporters for criticism and feedback. We accept that this is one of those times you provided it, and we thank you.

Rinku Sen
Executive Director, Race Forward
Publisher, Colorlines