Former Guardian columnist Gary Younge reflects on the pressures faced by minority journalists to focus on certain types of stories, and how they can break free of ‘the pigeonhole'

“We have people who can write about this,” the journalist Gary Younge remembers an editor once telling him about a column he had written on Bosnia. “Can you add an ethnic sensibility to this?”

For Younge, being one of the few black columnists in the British press has not been easy; rather, it has been a constant struggle, he explains, to avoid being pigeonholed as a journalist only ever interested in race. A struggle, he tells Helen Pidd, that would have been easier if he hadn’t also been very interested in race as well.